A new suicide prevention coalition has been impaneled, called together under the auspices of Lincoln Public Schools, although not an LPS committee per se. I was asked to serve, and readily agreed. The group of about 40 people convened for two hours last night at our first meeting, and I artfully avoided a leadership role by agreeing instead to assemble some data in advance of our second meeting.
I've blogged about suicide a few times before. I read all the suicide reports, and a fair share of the attempted suicides as well, particularly those reports that come in between midnight and 5:00 AM. I have access to lots of data, but I should really wait until the end of 2014 to do any serious work, so I'll be able to include the full year of 2014. Couldn't help myself, though. I was already digging in this morning.
Here's just a few tidbits of information. Over the past 20 years (sans the next two weeks) there have been 525 suicides in Lincoln, and 5,863 attempted suicides that came to the attention of the police. Of the completed suicides, 212 were with firearms, 40.4% of the total. The next most common method was hanging, followed by overdose and asphyxia. Cutting instruments and jumping from structures were 10 and 11, respectively.
After the first of the year, I'll be compiling some age and gender breakouts, creating some trend lines, and calculating some rates normalized by population. I will also be producing some maps, charts and graphs. Hopefully the members of the coalition will be better informed after looking at these products. I'll keep readers informed from time to time.
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Liquor licenses proliferate
Officer Conan Schafer has recently taken over responsibility for overseeing liquor license investigation and enforcement at the Lincoln Police Department, and liaison with licensees and the City Council on such matters. He has been working on the police department's liquor license database, bringing everything up to date. I asked him to straighten up the addresses a little bit during this process, to try to get them into a consistent format so they will geocode more easily.
A few times a year, I need a geographic layer of liquor licenses for one reason or another--most recently to provide this information to HunchLab for their predictive algorithm. I usually have to spend some significant time cleaning up the addresses before geocoding, but this time it was a snap. Here's a map of the 481 liquor licenses in Lincoln right now:
I found a slide in a PowerPoint I did for a 2005 conference presentation, which pegged the number of liquor licenses at 373. We appear to have 108 more licenses in 2014 than in 2005, a 29% increase in the past decade. My vague recollection is that the entire City had less than 100 liquor licenses when I pinned on the badge in the summer of 1974.
There's a lot of research about the correlation of alcohol outlets with crime and disorder, particularly associating the density of outlets with these phenomenon. We certainly have some areas in Lincoln with a dense concentration of licenses, but I'm of the opinion that the relationship of alcohol outlets to crime and disorder is quite different based on the type of outlets and their business practices. Don't let the customers get drunk, and problems are considerably reduced, both inside the establishment and in the general neighborhood.
A few times a year, I need a geographic layer of liquor licenses for one reason or another--most recently to provide this information to HunchLab for their predictive algorithm. I usually have to spend some significant time cleaning up the addresses before geocoding, but this time it was a snap. Here's a map of the 481 liquor licenses in Lincoln right now:
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| Click image for larger version |
I found a slide in a PowerPoint I did for a 2005 conference presentation, which pegged the number of liquor licenses at 373. We appear to have 108 more licenses in 2014 than in 2005, a 29% increase in the past decade. My vague recollection is that the entire City had less than 100 liquor licenses when I pinned on the badge in the summer of 1974.
There's a lot of research about the correlation of alcohol outlets with crime and disorder, particularly associating the density of outlets with these phenomenon. We certainly have some areas in Lincoln with a dense concentration of licenses, but I'm of the opinion that the relationship of alcohol outlets to crime and disorder is quite different based on the type of outlets and their business practices. Don't let the customers get drunk, and problems are considerably reduced, both inside the establishment and in the general neighborhood.
Friday, December 5, 2014
Vindicated
Last week, my lovely wife was hinting around about putting up some outdoor Christmas decorations. Our unadorned home is, well, standing out on the block somewhat. My position has been that those decorations you put up on a beautiful fall weekend, you'll have to take down on a bitter Saturday in January, so I have always resisted. Occasionally, especially when the kids were still at home, I would relent with a minimalist scheme intended to reduce my labor to the bare minimum needed in order to maintain domestic tranquility.
There is, however, another justification for my curmudgeonly refusal to participate in the garish commercialization of Christmas. Just as those pumpkins on the porch are nothing more than ammunition for vandals, those Christmas decorations are tempting targets for thieves. This morning in my inbox was this Crime Alert from crimemapping.com:
There you have it, boatloads of expensive décor swiped from lawns right in my own neighborhood. Yet another case-in-point I can pull out to explain to Tonja why I'm watching football tomorrow instead of stringing lights and inflating snowmen. I am vindicated.
Everyone in Lincoln should subscribe to Crime Alerts from crimemapping.com. For that matter, everyone in any jurisdiction that provides its data to the Omega Group for crimemapping.com should do so. Here in Nebraska, that's Lincoln Police, Omaha Police, Lancaster County Sheriff, and Grand Island Police. I'm signed up for my daughter's address in Omaha, my son's in Lincoln, and my own. It's free, easy and lets me know in a day when a crime I'm interested in has been reported nearby.
There is, however, another justification for my curmudgeonly refusal to participate in the garish commercialization of Christmas. Just as those pumpkins on the porch are nothing more than ammunition for vandals, those Christmas decorations are tempting targets for thieves. This morning in my inbox was this Crime Alert from crimemapping.com:
There you have it, boatloads of expensive décor swiped from lawns right in my own neighborhood. Yet another case-in-point I can pull out to explain to Tonja why I'm watching football tomorrow instead of stringing lights and inflating snowmen. I am vindicated.
Everyone in Lincoln should subscribe to Crime Alerts from crimemapping.com. For that matter, everyone in any jurisdiction that provides its data to the Omega Group for crimemapping.com should do so. Here in Nebraska, that's Lincoln Police, Omaha Police, Lancaster County Sheriff, and Grand Island Police. I'm signed up for my daughter's address in Omaha, my son's in Lincoln, and my own. It's free, easy and lets me know in a day when a crime I'm interested in has been reported nearby.
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
More not necessarily better
Back in 1994 when I was first appointed police chief in Lincoln, one of my priorities was to rewrite the department's policy manual, composed of a few hundred General Orders, covering everything from traffic direction to death notifications. The loose-leaf manual issued to every employee was bulging, bloated, and hopelessly inconsistent in style, individual General Orders having been authored by dozens of people over a couple decades, often in stilted, legalistic prose that sometimes seems to infect police work like a bad virus.
In 1995, I finally set to the task, and we rewrote the entire set. The result was a vastly more concise manual, slimmed down to about an inch. For the next 16 years, my operating rule was simple: if a new word went in, another word had to come out elsewhere. I did not want the manual to return to its former corpulence, because I have a strong belief that familiarity and compliance with a policy manual is inversely correlated with its length. It simply isn't reasonable to expect employees to ingest and remember a collection of policies that resembles the unabridged dictionary.
In the past few years, however, both the Lincoln Police Department and Lincoln Fire &Rescue have converted entirely to online policy manuals. While in most ways this is a good thing, one of the unintended side effects is that the swelling is less noticeable. The imperative to keep the manual svelte has to some extent evaporated. No one is sweating over every paragraph quite so much, trying to figure out how more succinct language could prevent page two from spilling over to a third page.
I acquired a great example of the problem several years ago, from another midwest capital city police department that shall remain nameless. It was a seven-page policy entitled "Escape of Zoo Animals." The seven pages included drawings showing the best shot placement, should it become necessary to deal with various large mammals. I can just imagine a police officer, confronted with a rampaging rhinoceros, reaching for the manual and thumbing to page 543 for instruction.
Of course, with an online manual you could just pull over to the curb and enter rhinoceros in the search box--that is, if you can spell rhinoceros. Some discipline will be necessary to keep the policies trim, and ensure that our employees really can be familiar with the most important guidelines they need to know, and to find the relevant content easily when in doubt.
In 1995, I finally set to the task, and we rewrote the entire set. The result was a vastly more concise manual, slimmed down to about an inch. For the next 16 years, my operating rule was simple: if a new word went in, another word had to come out elsewhere. I did not want the manual to return to its former corpulence, because I have a strong belief that familiarity and compliance with a policy manual is inversely correlated with its length. It simply isn't reasonable to expect employees to ingest and remember a collection of policies that resembles the unabridged dictionary.
In the past few years, however, both the Lincoln Police Department and Lincoln Fire &Rescue have converted entirely to online policy manuals. While in most ways this is a good thing, one of the unintended side effects is that the swelling is less noticeable. The imperative to keep the manual svelte has to some extent evaporated. No one is sweating over every paragraph quite so much, trying to figure out how more succinct language could prevent page two from spilling over to a third page.
I acquired a great example of the problem several years ago, from another midwest capital city police department that shall remain nameless. It was a seven-page policy entitled "Escape of Zoo Animals." The seven pages included drawings showing the best shot placement, should it become necessary to deal with various large mammals. I can just imagine a police officer, confronted with a rampaging rhinoceros, reaching for the manual and thumbing to page 543 for instruction.
Of course, with an online manual you could just pull over to the curb and enter rhinoceros in the search box--that is, if you can spell rhinoceros. Some discipline will be necessary to keep the policies trim, and ensure that our employees really can be familiar with the most important guidelines they need to know, and to find the relevant content easily when in doubt.
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