August 13

 Good morning all on a hazy day which may remain int the 80s. The humidity though still make that moderately uncomfortable. We finally did get the promised rain/thunderstorm but I don't think it will really do much. I will have to water flowers tomorrow. The longer term (next 10 days) show little or no rain. 

So our would be dictator has decided to "nationalize" the DC police department to "combat crime" which he claims is running rampant. Some of the comments are mildly amusing, when they aren't totally irritating. The most critical not that the crime statistics don't show a crime wave. In fact the numbers show that crime has actually been going down. The supportive side dismiss the numbers and lean on the anecdotal evidence: people who have experienced crime themselves, or personally know people who have experienced crime, or people who have simply heard the reports and FEEL unsafe.

However, I am going to complicate that a bit. I remember a study from thirty or forty years ago which noted that the fear of crime went up when the news media concentrated on crime. Many of the subjects of the study hadn't been victimized by criminals and didn't know anyone who had been but were frightened by the news coverage which followed the old publishing adage: if it bleeds, it leads. And it leads for days on end. Under these conditions it doesn't matter what the statistics reveal. The fear is real and is constantly fed.

But the problem may also lie with the statistics. Stats can conceal as much as the reveal. I have often noted that if you add my income to any billionaire's income and average them I am an ef-ing billionaire. NOT!! But that is what the numbers say. Some crimes are reported straight: so many murders, so many assaults, so many mass shooting incidents. But many other stats are reported in numbers per units of population: 10 per 1000, 100 per 100K etc. If the population increases but the numbers remain the same the crime RATE GOES DOWN. If the population falls but the numbers remain the same the RATE goes up. The number of crimes hasn't actually changed. I don't know how many times the news shows from Chicago ballyhooed a drop in the crime rate but people interviewed on the street called BS because they either experienced crimes, saw crimes, knew people affected by crimes. It didn't FEEL like anything had improved.

I won't even go into the problem governments have had with funding for the police and for any other service. DC has an additional problem because the city's money is controlled by Congress and the Administration recently cut over $1BILLION from their money.

To shift into something similar on a different topic: Trump is proposing a Heritage Society "economist" to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics. His nominee has floated the notion of "suspending" the employment statistics "for a few months." I put those last two terms because I wouldn't be surprised it the "suspension" last for the rest of Trump's term. This is another statistic I have often questioned because of what they leave out: the long term unemployed among others. However, at my level of the economic pyramid (which is getting narrower and sharper at the top) experience has often veered sharply from the picture the statistics supposedly showed. It doesn't matter a bit if the unemployment statistics are going down when you don't have a job, have a part time job when you really want and need a full time job, or if you are stuck in a job you don't want but can't find another.