bullet with butterfly wings
on filling holes
Good data on policing across the United States is hard to come by. The federal government doesn’t have the mandate nor the authority to collect information on most things from the nation’s more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies and given their druthers, most police departments don’t report to the voluntary programs.
So when Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo. six years ago, editors asked reporters how often police kill citizens. While the FBI keeps data on such incidents, it’s clear fairly quickly that the data is woefully incomplete. A cursory search of the ten years of previous data revealed that over a decade in the state of Florida exactly zero killings by police had been recorded. A simple Google search showed this was quite inaccurate.
So in 2015, two news outlets, The Washington Post and The Guardian, set out to answer this question by counting the incidents themselves. The methodologies for data collection were different, but both helped news organizations and the public answer a question that the federal government could not. There are many ways to fill the holes that exist.
In the years since, more and more news organizations and others have moved further into the space in an attempt to add more to the knowledge we have on policing in America by compiling better data than the federal government.
The Open Policing Project at Stanford University has done a wonderful job compiling detailed traffic stops data across the country. Big Local News cropped up around the same time to help build on this project. In 2018, two major investigative projects compiled and analyzed data on clearances of crimes; one looked at rape clearances and the other at murder clearances.
The most ambitious project in recent years, in my mind, is a project that journalists at The New Jersey Star Ledger undertook compiling use of force reports into the “most comprehensive statewide database of police use of force in the U.S.” for their state. The sheer amount of time and effort (and definitely money) that went into this is mind-boggling.
It’s imperative that journalists continue to work to fill these holes when policing is an A1 topic and especially when it’s not.
One of my favorite places in the world is a lumber shop. I see so much possibility in the wood that I tend to walk out with more than I came in to get, with no specific project in mind for what I’ve purchased. It’s a problem for my bank account and for the limited space I have living in a one-bedroom apartment.
Some of why I do this is because no two pieces of wood are exactly the same and the differences make me excited to build something unique. But some of the things that make wood unique are what also make building functional pieces more difficult. Chief among them are the cracks and holes that occur naturally.
For a coffee table I built with and for my friend Soo Oh, she found a wonderful piece of wood for a tabletop. But it had it’s share of large holes and cracks on the surface that would have made the table uneven and less functional. There are many ways to fill the holes that exist.
For the table, I combined two approaches, one to keep the cracks and holes from expanding and another to fill them. The first step was to create butterfly joins so the cracks would stay as they were. My lumber guy (yes, I have a lumber guy) had given me some scrap ebony he had sitting around for free figuring I could find some use for it.
I did.
With a butterfly in place, it was time to fill the hole and ensure that the filling created a flat, solid surface in its place. For this, epoxy resin colored with black dye was used. Taping over the hole and edge and turning the top upside down, the epoxy was poured. This allowed for the epoxy to cure flat on the top surface, while eliminating bubbles from the mix. Air bubbles tend to rise, in this case toward the bottom surface. The result was a flat surface all the way across.
Holes and cracks aren’t always a bug. Sometimes they are a feature. It’s up to you which one you make it.
datawork
Denied Justice: When rape is reported and nothing happens — “A Star Tribune review of more than 1,000 sexual assault cases, filed around the state in a recent two-year period, reveals chronic errors and investigative failings by Minnesota’s largest law enforcement agencies, including those in Minneapolis and St. Paul. In almost a quarter of the cases, records show, police never assigned an investigator. In about one-third of them, the investigator never interviewed the victim. In half the cases, police failed to interview potential witnesses. Most of the cases — about 75 percent, including violent rapes by strangers — were never forwarded to prosecutors for criminal charges. Overall, fewer than one in 10 reported sexual assaults produced a conviction, records show.” [The Star Tribune]
TAKEN: How police departments make millions by seizing property — “The resulting investigation became TAKEN, a statewide journalism project with an exclusive database and in-depth reporting. It’s the first time a comprehensive forfeiture investigation like this has been done for an entire U.S. state, according to experts. The TAKEN team scoured more than 3,200 forfeiture cases and spoke to dozens of targeted citizens plus more than 50 experts and officials. Additionally, the team contacted every law enforcement agency in the state.” [The Greenville News and Anderson Independent Mail]
In The Dark S2 E8: The Trials of Curtis Flowers — “And then, after all of that, after three months of data entry and analysis and many months of Parker gathering all the raw materials, Will was finally ready to tell me what he'd found out about what Doug Evans and his office had been doing in jury selection in all those trials. So just the top-level finding is, from 1992 through 2017, over these 225 trials, covering a large number of crimes, there exists a very large disparity between the way that prosecutors exercise strikes against black and white jurors.” [APM Reports]
We found 85,000 cops who’ve been investigated for misconduct. Now you can read their records. — “Obtained from thousands of state agencies, prosecutors, police departments and sheriffs, the records detail at least 200,000 incidents of alleged misconduct, much of it previously unreported. The records obtained include more than 110,000 internal affairs investigations by hundreds of individual departments and more than 30,000 officers who were decertified by 44 state oversight agencies.” [USA Today]
Fired/Rehired: Police chiefs are often forced to put officers fired for misconduct back on the streets — “Since 2006, the nation’s largest police departments have fired at least 1,881 officers for misconduct that betrayed the public’s trust, from cheating on overtime to unjustified shootings. But The Washington Post has found that departments have been forced to reinstate more than 450 officers after appeals required by union contracts. Most of the officers regained their jobs when police chiefs were overruled by arbitrators, typically lawyers hired to review the process. In many cases, the underlying misconduct was undisputed, but arbitrators often concluded that the firings were unjustified because departments had been too harsh, missed deadlines, lacked sufficient evidence or failed to interview witnesses.” [The Washington Post]
woodwork
How to create a butterfly inlay [Woodworkers Guild of America]
How to fill knot holes and cracks with black epoxy [Woodworkers’ Source]
