Pretty awesome news for Massachusetts, and clear evidence that increasing taxes on the wealthy doesn’t simply result in them leaving.

During the 1970s, an arson wave ravaged poor communities across the US. Some lost 80% of their housing. Residents were blamed. In reality, landlords—paid by insurers and enabled by the state—drove this arson-for-profit epidemic. 

I reviewed @benchansfield.bsky.social's revelatory BORN IN FLAMES:

You can through homeless people out, you can arrest them, you can send them to camps, but they’ll still exist, and still be people. The president’s budget includes a massive cut to programs to reduce homelessness. (Also: They couldn’t even bother to get out of their cars to take these pictures.)

ironically the education for its own sake, Enlightenment-coded, Great Books-ass liberal arts degree is one of the better employment bets you can make. learn how to read, write, think critically, develop curiosity so you can pick up new skills quickly, etc etc

Imagine how amazing it would be to be a car. Hey! Wherever you need to be, anywhere in the city, just go, as fast as you can. Do you need a place to hang out for a day or two, or most nights? We’ve got millions of spots that only you can use. We love you SO much. We literally paved the way for you.

just saw bigfoot walking kinda quickly through a field; he shrugged at me and said "eh, it's a living!" No idea how he profits from this.

The official 2024 crime data came out today and all categories of crime are down. If you're 55 or younger, violent crime has not been this low in your lifetime.

Dallas, Seattle, and lots of other cities are defunding their social services to make room for larger police budgets. My latest piece for Metropolitics: metropolitics.org/Defunding-So...

Alternate Headline: "Even the $5 billion NYC Spends on the NYPD Couldn't Prevent the Midtown Shooting. NYC has the highest per capita level of policing in the US. But Monday’s mass shooting showed policing's limits, security experts said." Why not go with that headline? Why not? WHY. NOT?

Travel Mug Regales Other Mugs With Stories From Road

The City keeps doing excellent investigative journalism. If you're interested in NYC news, it's the best source. They also have a great podcast, FAQ NYC.

This sentence, in an NYT op-ed about local gov't responses to federal cuts, is wrong. Cities don't make across-the-board cuts, they cut social services more deeply than police. Source (if you'll forgive the self promotion): onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

American's confidence in the police dipped this year.

@robmickey.bsky.social & @dziblatt.bsky.social let me post the working paper Why doesn't police reform work? Because police depts can't credibly commit to their end of the bargain (doing more/better/riskier work in exchange for more $) www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/35o94...

Legal Plunder: The Predatory Dimensions of Criminal Justice, my book w/ @joesoss.bsky.social, is now available. 30% off through @uchicagopress.bsky.social (see below). Look out for info about book-related events beginning in late-August.

This very good NYTimes article about how few crimes the police solve includes two competing visions of who commits violence. Is it "bad guys" or "regular guys"?  www.nytimes.com/2025/07/06/u...

Nearly Half of America’s Murderers Get Away With It Compared with its peers, America does an unusually poor job of solving killings. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/06/u...

#Baltimore Mayor #BrandonScott invested in 42 summer youth camps, 29 literacy programs, extended the rec center hours to 11 p.m, planned block parties, opened the pools for safe fun, & opened several schools up for summer classes. Crime is down 62%. 🔥🔥 www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/202...

Great article for understanding how the new Trump legislation will affect local law enforcement.

Total spending on prisons across all fifty states? That system that holds 1.4 million ppl per year? The (until recently) largest incarceration rate in the world? $60 billion. ICE alone will get 2/3 of that.

in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, there is a museum called the Museum of Illusions, and it has come to my attention that this is the URL of their website

Come work with me! My dept is hiring three assistant professors. jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/254...

1/ Can a Google search hurt your chances of getting a job more than a background check? A new study with Sarah Lageson on criminal records, race, and willingness to hire has surprising answers. 🧵

You can see how the Census Bureau is scrubbing any mention of race or ethnicity from its webpages in the alert that notifies me about new datasets.

A new study finds that when welfare benefits are cut, recipients *and* their neighbors commit more crime. More evidence that social services address the root causes of crime in communities. www.nber.org/papers/w33926

NEW: John Chell, the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed official, used someone else’s identity in a bid to avoid paying income taxes on money he made while moonlighting as a basketball referee for 6 years, newly-released police disciplinary records reveal. www.thecity.nyc/2025/06/12/j...

Big tax cut bills typically don't leave the poor worse off. Bills cutting the safety net don't normally include benefits for the rich. The GOP reconciliation bill is something we haven't really seen before. w/ @aliciaparlap.bsky.social + @sangerkatz.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

It's publication day for Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing, available in paper & free .epub! It traces a century of struggle over Los Angeles' periphery, culminating in the use of policing to expel and repress Black tenants. Here's a look at its chapters:

Murder rates continue to fall fast. Jeff Asher has some smart preliminary answers as to why.

Policy changes often take years to show results. And then there is congestion pricing in New York. Here are all of the ways we could find it having an immediate effect: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Eight Weddings and Two Funerals

Just thinking about all of the fantastic, brilliant, wonderful non-US-citizen colleagues in my PhD cohort and all that I would have lost had I not been able to study with them. What a disgrace that this is the US right now.

I can't wait to read this book.

$1 Trillion of Wealth Was Created for the 19 Richest U.S. Households Last Year www.wsj.com/economy/1-tr...

Congrats to TurboTax, which has worked for two decades to stop Americans from being able to file taxes for free. www.propublica.org/article/insi...

In a new study published in the Journal of Criminal Justice today, we find that solitary confinement is associated with increased risk of return to prison. Long periods of solitary confinement are associated with a 15 to 25% increase in re-imprisonment rates. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Too cute to eat.

Interesting new dataset. Could be used to test whether public transit reduces road rage shootings.

I need to learn more about how municipal bond markets influence local policy. Does anyone know of good research on this, especially about bond mkts' effects on criminal justice policy? I know of Gilmore (2007), but that's it.

The Trump admin reversing course bc of bond markets recalled this Carville quote: "I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody."

Not a single time in this article glorifying the need for sprawl to address the US's affordable housing crisis is there a mention of the vast transportation costs of sprawling living patterns. Nor is there mention of the fact that sprawl is directly linked to disinvestment in urban cores.

Good news in NYC. Already among the safest big US cities, in the first 3 months of 2025 we had only 63 murders, the 2nd fewest ever recorded. And 140 shootings, the fewest since NYPD stats started in 1994. On the subway system crime fell 18% and nobody was killed for the first time since 2018.

Why are minerals so central to geopolitics? How green are electric cars? Why is anti-mining protest increasing? Can the inequalities of the global economy be transformed? I tackle these topics in my book EXTRACTION: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism 👀 September 2025 @wwnorton.bsky.social

I understand we've agreed to call it "deregulation," but it's really "reregulation." The Trump admin isn't cutting regulation, it is shifting regulation from government to business. Someone is going to decide the amount of our credit card fees. If it's not the CFPB, it's the credit card companies!

new paper: common approaches to modeling racism in policy processes (i.e. foster care entry) try to decompose racism into a 'bias' component and a 'risk' component. this relies on a flawed theory of racism and ignores causal identification problems onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Right as it felt like things couldn’t get any worse my 13-year-old son asked me to order this for him.

In Australia they call it ornorvirus

According to @washingtonpost.com, 1173 people were fatally shot by on-duty police officers in 2024 - the highest annual total since they began tracking in 2015.

And because higher ed never urbanized as much as other industries, this will disproportionately hurt rural areas.

I'm teaching a new graduate seminar on "Race, Crime, and Justice." I uploaded the syllabus here. Let me know if I missed any important texts! brendenbeck.net/teaching/