There will be a film based on what I shot here… eventually.

First up: OH MY GOD THEY’VE IRRADIATED PAT KERNIGHAN!

Or else maybe it’s hepatitis? Hard to say. Plus, the angle of the shot makes her look like a giant, capable of crushing all of Oakland’s problems.

No, I didn’t Photoshop this or crank the yellow. I think I know what the designer was going for, but how this ever got through prepress and was actually printed and mailed I have no idea.

Next up, it’s this voting guide from COPS.

You might assume that COPS is a police group of some sort. If you’re an idiot or from another planet. No, of course COPS is a consulting firm – specifically one called Moran and Associates. What do they have to do with the Police? Nothing. They just like the name. Well, plus crime is obviously a big issue in Oakland, and people take police endorsements seriously, and they want their clients to seem like they’re popular with the police.

If I read the fine print properly, all of the candidates endorsed by COPS paid for it. Which means it’s not really an endorsement from any police organization. Of course they only use the word endorse once – they go for voter guide and recommend instead – but the implication is that police endorse these candidates. Which they don’t.

One of the candidates paying for that endorsement is Jean Quan. If you don’t live here or just don’t know, she’s one of the top candidates for Mayor, battling tooth and nail with Don Perata. Let’s look at some of her mailers, shall we?

Here to start things off, it’s Detective Jean Quan keeping our streets safe.

I’m going to guess some rookie is getting tons of grief right about now for leaving his car unattended and enabling Jean Quan to jump in front of it for a photo op. Arms crossed and looking tough! Why do all photos of her always remind me of Walter Mondale Michael Dukakis riding the tank? (If you’re not old enough to get that reference… you’re probably better off – thanks to Charlie Pine for correcting my dubious memory). She always looks out of place – like in this video where she’s cruising with her posse in her thumpin’ Prius, nodding along while her homies lay down some fresh rhymes.

Right or wrong, Quan’s idea of what makes Oakland safer doesn’t put an emphasis on police but rather after school programs. I’m all for after school programs, but they’ve yet to be proven useful tools for fighting crime and the available data about the programs in Oakland shows they haven’t had any positive impact on truancy, crime, or anything else its supporters claim it deals with. Logically I agree that it should help, but reality says no. That’s why Jean is posing in front of a police car, not a midnight basketball program.

Next, it’s the ol’ endorsement shuffle:

Fragmentary Evidence already wrote about this pretty thoroughly, and I don’t have much to add. In short, none of these papers suggested she should be your first vote, and 2 of the 3 suggested that you should vote for Rebecca Kaplan first (which I’d recommend you do, too).  The Oakland Tribune put her 3rd. But, because we’re using instant run-off voting and you choose your top 3 candidates, papers are suggesting you vote for 3 people and usually ranking them in some order.

So you could technically argue that these papers have “endorsed” her, leaving out the caveat that they didn’t say she should be your top pick. But it’s dishonest – the exact same sort of dishonestly that she’s very critical of Don Perata for engaging in.

What bothers me is not this specific instance of her shading the truth in her favor, it’s the ongoing pattern of doing this. She claimed to know Oscar Grant – by which she meant that she shopped at the store where he worked and talked to him once. By that standard he and I were best friends (we talked a few times, although I never knew his name).

She brags about organizing the Dimond to get rid of the crime magnet Hillcrest Motel, but the truth is that the community had been working to get rid  of the Hillcrest Motel for 6 years before she got involved. I don’t want to diminish her help in getting rid of the Hillcrest – she absolutely deserves credit for stepping up and helping out. But that’s very different from having brought the neighborhood together to her cause.

Jon Stewart said something about how he doesn’t hold politicians responsible for spinning the truth, but rather the media. His metaphor was that if you go to the zoo and a monkey throws its feces at you, well, it’s a monkey so what do you expect? The person you hold responsible for that is the zoo keeper (the media in his metaphor). That’s a realistic stance to take. However, I do hold politicians to a higher standard – especially ones who will receive very little media scrutiny. If you’re going to be paid by the citizens then you should be held to a higher standard of integrity.

…

And the subject of integrity brings us to Don Perata. The man has spent bazillions of dollars (and gamed the system to make that legal) and it seems like I get a new mailer from him every day. I won’t even bother scanning them. He’s got a very professional graphics team working for him so they lack the engaging oddness of the above mailers. And they say absolutely nothing. He’s got the name recognition, all he’s trying to do is not blow it.

If only he weren’t a terrifying backwards machine politician… If only he weren’t using a cancer charity as a front. If only he weren’t the odds-on favorite. I’m obviously not big on the idea of Quan being mayor, but I prefer her to Don Perata. However, even Don is going to be better than our current mayor.

Let’s be honest: Oakland is a mess on so many fronts. Crime is so bad it’s synonymous with Oakland. Our streets are obstacle courses of pits and ripples. There’s a pension bomb coming in the next few years that will wipe out our budget for decades to come. The economy is in the tank and floating face down. Getting a permit to do anything is Kafkaesque on a good day. It seems like anything you might reasonably expect your government to do, Oakland finds a way to do badly, if at all.

I often hear politicians talking about Oakland’s potential. In my 15 years living in this city I have come to resent that word like no other. I am tired of hearing about our city’s vaunted “potential” while waiting behind locked doors for it to show up. I’m tired of hearing how great it almost is. I’m tired of meeting people who moved here because they loved the potential but moved away because they were worn down by the reality.

Until that potential turns into something, it’s meaningless. I’m done with it. No more promises of a “model city”, no more utopian ditherings. It’s time for a city government that focuses on fulfilling its basic responsibilities, a city capable of delivering on those responsibilities. All of the other stuff is great, and I’d love to see our city council end the conflict in the Middle East as much as the next guy, but first I’d like to be able to drive down my street without having to dodge a pothole that’s so deep it’s halfway to the Chilean miners.

Like a website designed by your grandmother, the way our city government goes about its business is so fundamentally archaic and backwards that it defies logic. I’m not saying our elected officials are bad people – they’re nice and well-meaning. Just like your grandmother. For the most part, they are involved in the government because they love this city – I do not doubt their sincerity at all. I doubt their efficacy. Ideological grandstanding from decades past, misplaced idealism trumping pragmatism, fiscal irresponsibility under the auspices of fairness (often at the expense of those who actually need the city’s help), and an entrenched way of doing things that sees no possible room for improvement: These are but some of the reasons our city government never seems to get anything done. These are the core problems that need addressing.

While they certainly bear some responsibility, the city council can’t be held solely responsible for this – the way our city’s government is organized puts them more in a support role. Oakland’s government takes its structure and and form from from the office of the mayor – that’s where things get started in Oakland, that’s where they get done. They mayor appoints the heads of departments in addition to the city administrator – the most powerful unelected position in our government and the head of our bureaucracy. It’s not just about having a bully pulpit, it all really does start at the top. If you don’t believe me, just look at civic embarrassment that is the last 4 years.

It’s time for smart leadership. That’s why I support Rebecca Kaplan. It’s not just that she is the best choice available in the current crop of candidates, it’s that she’s exactly the sort of person we need in city hall. She understands the issues big and small, potholes to pensions, and she has strategies to address them. What she doesn’t have plans regarding, she is smart enough to tackle shrewdly. She is that rare blend of policy wonk and solid communicator. It’s not just that she can talk for 5 minutes on the flow of paperwork at city hall, it’s that she can get a whole room of people excited about it as well.

On top of that that, she likes it when things work! Efficiency doesn’t scare her! She doesn’t want to shut down all the bars and restaurants, she wants more of them! She understands that we need to keep a police force on the streets! As strange as it sounds, this is new thinking around city hall. I’d like to encourage it.

While she hasn’t been on the city council for very long, she’s managed to do an awful lot. From regional transportation to developing Uptown to streamlining zoning permits to taxing pot, she’s been working hard to get things moving.

I’ll be voting for Rebecca Kaplan to be Oakland’s next mayor. I hope you’ll join me in that. But don’t just take my word for it, go find out for yourself. Visit her website and read up. Go to an open house (or throw your own). Go to an event. Listen to what she has to say on the issues and ask her tough questions about what matters to you.

It remind me of this gem from the mural on Oakland High:

Yeah, the Youths had better get on that.

I love Oakland. Yes, okay, technically his shop is in Berkeley, but it’s the most Oakland part of Berkeley, and I claim him for our side.

For those interested, he has a website, which displays the graphic flare shown above. I particularly love this:

He also sells t-shirts (down at the bottom of the page).

I’ve got to find a way to work this into a client project soon. Wouldn’t your product’s name look great spelled out in emeralds on one of these sets?

Since I just got a slick new camera (Canon 5D mII), where better to take it for a test run?

BORDERLINE GEEK TALK FOLLOWS (scroll down if allergic): I decided to shoot everything as jpeg on the auto setting, with minimal editing outside of the camera (I did one batch process with some sharpening before scaling the image down, and cropped about 5 of them). I did this not just because I’m lazy, but because I wanted to make a direct comparison to snapshots taken with other cameras I own. Obviously the advantage goes to the SLR with the giant CMOS and high quality lens, but I wanted to see the relative difference.

I quite like the results, as evidenced by the 161 pictures below (in no particular order):

Pictures from an exhibitionist.

Much anger ensued, and the conversation about something very important got derailed into a discussion of how I can’t do math. I wanted to move the less important part of that conversation over here, to separate it from the important discussion.

Now, V is much smarter than I am and extremely sharp when it comes to analyzing policy issues. I’m not kidding – if you want to understand Oakland politics she is a vital source of information. But trying to rank cities based on the ratio of crimes to population isn’t a particularly good method. As the FBI notes on the page from which V got these numbers:

Individuals using these tabulations are cautioned against drawing conclusions by making direct comparisons between cities. Comparisons lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents.

I should let it go at that. But I do think it’s important to understand why a simple ratio isn’t a good tool for comparing cities with significantly different populations. I’m not sure I can explain it simply and concisely (I failed over on abetteroakland), but I want to try. Please keep in mind that there are whole books written on this specific issue. It’s hard to summarize without leaving big holes. Worse yet, I’m not a statistician, so I’m not the best person to be summarizing this stuff. I’m merely dumb enough to try.

Let’s dig in:

What’s your problem with simple ratios?

I love simple ratios. They just don’t tell you much because they’re simple.

Currently, NYC and Boise, Idaho have the same crime rate as expressed in the violent crimes committed, per 10k citizens stat (7.8 – nice job NYC and Boise). You can say fairly that in a simple ratio, the same number of people out of 10k are victims of violent crime in both of these cities. No argument there. The problem comes when you start using this stat to make a qualitative judgment like “good” or “bad”. Is crime in Boise is “as bad” as in NYC? Maybe, but that’s not borne out by the statistics.

Just having the same ratio of things is very different from equivalency. While both NYC and Boise have the same ratio of violent crime to population, there is more crime in NYC, and it has a different impact on society. Or, to put it another way, 4 out of 5 dentists agreeing that you should chew Trident is a lot different than 4,000,000 out of 5,000,000 dentists agreeing that you should chew Trident. One sample is significantly broader, and likely more representational of the opinion of dentists generally. The sample size matters. A lot.

If, for the sake of argument, there were 5 murders in Boise this year, their murder rate relative to their population would grow substantially (from 3 to 8 – the highest murder rate in the last 100 years). While the number in that ratio would have gone up dramatically, that doesn’t mean you can then say crime in Boise is worse than in NYC. There’s still more crime in NYC. Going further, the way crime affects one city is very different from another. The impact of crime isn’t quantifiable by the crime stat.

The smaller the sample size, the more dramatic the impact of a single murder. And just as significantly, the smaller the sample size, the more erratic the data. If there were 10 more murders in Boise this year and 5 fewer the next, it wouldn’t make sense to say there was a crime wave that was solved and the situation was improved based on those numbers. The sample is just too small to compare to a much larger sample.

So why not just take out the lowest population cities so they stop skewing the numbers?

Because the high number skews things as well. It takes a lot of murders for a city as large as NYC to have that ratio move, in the same way that it takes very few in Boise. Any time you use a ratio instead of a mean to make a comparison between 2 data sets, outliers will have an amplified affect. Similarly, the outside points in your sample will by definition skew the ratio disproportionately.

Why not take out both the highs and lows?

This is a better way to represent relative crime more accurately, and the narrower the band you’re looking at the more accurate the relative crime data is going to be. Even better if you weight the outside points on your sample to compensate for the amount that they will skew the data (for instance, having the ratio be stated in units of 8k at the bottom end of the sample and 12k at the top, with a bell curve in between). But I’m still not convinced that it says anything about how “good” or “bad” crime is when comparing 2 different cities. It would probably be more statistically accurate, but it still wouldn’t be qualitative.

All of this ignores a whole host of other issues that make the UCR a bad tool for ranking cities against each other. It’s based on self-reported crime stats from police, which can be manipulated for political purposes and aren’t subject to the determinations of coroners or further adjudication. It doesn’t account for the ratio of police to citizens, or the tactics utilized by the city for preventing crime. It doesn’t factor in a whole host of important demographic factors, like relative wealth and education of the citizenry, or population density. It also doesn’t provide any useful means of accounting for the way crime localizes inconsistently in a given city.

Doesn’t representing that figure per 10k of population offset the different sizes of the sample?

No. 10k is an easily expressible unit of measurement, but it’s only expressing the same simple ratio. Oakland’s violent crime rate per 10k is 98.68, but you can express the same ratio in terms of 100k of population (986.8), 1k of population (9.868), etc. All that means is that you’re moving the decimal point, not that you’re factoring in the size of the sample.

This is the standard way of expressing this data. What’s your alternative?

If you want to make the point that crime in Oakland is bad, post the stats for Oakland. Comparing the UCR numbers for Oakland over the last decade would be an extremely useful exercise, and for that usage the UCR numbers are great. And it would more effectively make the point that V was trying to make: that Oakland has a serious crime problem.

As far as ways to compare crime in cities regardless of the size of the population to determine “good” and “bad”, I don’t have one. I don’t think there is one. How do you compare anything about 2 cities that are entirely dissimilar?

Okay, why does this even matter? This seems like a minor point compared to the one we’re all trying to get outraged about.

Because when you post a list of cities and say, “crime in Oakland is worse than all of those other cities on this list”, you’re making a qualitative judgment which the stats don’t support. In the same way that people were pointing out 2 weeks ago that Oakland’s murder rate was down 60%, it’s a sensationalistic use of statistics that doesn’t actually mean much. And it’s not like you need to use misleading stats to establish that crime in Oakland is bad. It is.

It’s similar to the way people point to the Dow-Jones and say that the economy is tanking. Yes, the numbers for the Dow and the data on the general economic state of our country show that both are tanking. But one doesn’t represent the other. The Dow shows what people are willing to pay for stocks in 30 of the largest companies in the country. While that number bears some relation to the state of the economy, it doesn’t express the state of the economy. It doesn’t even express the fortunes of the 30 individual companies it represents. It’s a very crude aggregate, which is useful for some things, but shouldn’t be given too much weight on economic issues.

So. I hope I’ve made the case that UCR stats are not a good metric for comparing cities. That’s not what they’re designed to do, and not what they should be used for. But if I haven’t convinced you, I hope the American Society of Criminology will. This is the wording of a resolution they passed on this very subject:

Be it resolved, that the Executive Board of the American Society of Criminology opposes the use of Uniform Crime Reports data to rank American cities as ‘dangerous’ or ‘safe’ without proper consideration of the limitations of these data.  Such rankings are invalid, damaging, and irresponsible.  They fail to account for the many conditions affecting crime rates, the mismeasurement of crime, large community differences in crime within cities, and the factors affecting individuals’ crime risk. City crime rankings make no one safer, but they can harm the cities they tarnish and divert attention from the individual and community characteristics that elevate crime in all cities. The American Society of Criminology urges media outlets to subject city crime rankings to scientifically sound evaluation and will make crime experts available to assist in this vital public responsibility.