February 2016 | Open Philanthropy                    @import url("https://web.archive.org./web/20201104152206cs_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/modules/system/system.base.css?qgstca"); @import url("https://web.archive.org./web/20201104152206cs_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/modules/system/system.menus.css?qgstca"); @import url("https://web.archive.org./web/20201104152206cs_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/modules/system/system.messages.css?qgstca"); @import url("https://web.archive.org./web/20201104152206cs_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/modules/system/system.theme.css?qgstca");   @import url("https://web.archive.org./web/20201104152206cs_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/sites/all/modules/contrib/jquery_update/replace/ui/themes/base/minified/jquery.ui.core.min.css?qgstca"); @import url("https://web.archive.org./web/20201104152206cs_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/sites/all/modules/contrib/jquery_update/replace/ui/themes/base/minified/jquery.ui.theme.min.css?qgstca"); @import url("https://web.archive.org./web/20201104152206cs_/https://www.openphilanthropy.org/sites/all/modules/contrib/jquery_update/replace/ui/themes/base/minified/jquery.ui.accordion.min.css?qgstca"); 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Past examples are here.

 This year, the annual review and plan will be delayed significantly, because we feel that the plan we’re considering calls for a fair amount of investigation and consideration. We expect to publish our annual review and plan in April or May. [node:read-more:link]

      Open Philanthropy Project Updates       Holden Karnofsky's blog Add new comment          Supporting the Launch of the Alliance for Safety and Justice   by Helen Toner Published February 10, 2016       The Open Philanthropy Project has recommended a grant of $1.75 million (plus a personal gift from Cari Tuna of $250,000) to launch the Alliance for Safety and Justice (ASJ), a multi-state policy reform organization. This will be one of our first large grant recommendations within criminal justice reform since Chloe Cockburn joined us to lead our work in that area. [node:read-more:link]

      Criminal Justice Reform       Helen Toner's blog Add new comment          Our Grantmaking So Far: Approach and Process   by Helen Toner Published February 09, 2016       We’ve written previously about our approach to choosing focus areas for the Open Philanthropy Project, and we’ve described the advantages that working within causes (as opposed to being open to making grants in any area at any time) has for grantmaking. To date, however, we haven’t said much about our grantmaking process itself. 

 As part of my role at Open Philanthropy, I manage the logistics and overall process of how we make grants. In this post, I’ll describe the approach we use to grantmaking within our focus areas, and outline our current process for deciding whether or not to make a particular grant. [node:read-more:link]

      Open Philanthropy Project Updates       Helen Toner's blog 2 comments Add new comment          America’s Recently Heralded Urban “Crime Wave” May Already Have Peaked   by David Roodman Published February 02, 2016       Writing in the Wall Street Journal last May, the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald blackly heralded a “new nationwide crime wave.” She blamed the “Ferguson effect”: a pull-back by police in the face of public hostility over alleged abuses. Ferguson, of course, is the city in St. Louis county where in August 2014, a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, leading to days of rioting.

 Toward the end of last summer, two reporters at the New York Times chimed in on the existence of an uptick, at least in homicide: “Murder Rates Rising Sharply in Many U.S. Cities.”

 These suggestions of an incipient crime wave caught Open Phil’s attention because we are entering the field of criminal justice reform. Might attempts to curb the “tough-on-crime” approach that has made the United States the world’s greatest prison state backfire in the form of higher crime? Or if not, might fear of such obstruct reform?

 As the crime wave meme spread, it provoked counterreactions: Joseph Margulies on “The Dangerous Notion of a Nationwide Crime Wave”; Richard Rosenfeld of St. Louis University questioning whether even St. Louis felt the Ferguson effect; FiveThirtyEight’s Carl Bialik on how “Scare Headlines Exaggerated The U.S. Crime Wave”; a Brennan Center report and a New York Times editorial it inspired; and end-of-year updates by Radley Balko for the Washington Post and Thomas Abt for the Marshall Project.

 Here, I present my attempt, with the help of GiveWell’s Jake Marcus, to sort out the controversy of whether America is experiencing a crime wave. Our results are all graphical. Our analysis is distinctive in starting from daily data rather than monthly or yearly totals, which I find a bit coarse when examining trends over just the last year or so.

 But, as with the other articles and posts, our numbers are not definitive. We obtained high-frequency data—lists of individual crimes—for 19 major municipalities. The statistics pertain only to territories within city limits, not to broader metropolitan areas. Even if they did, the sampled cities may not be representative of all cities, let alone the entire United States.

 Nevertheless, the results look reasonable and interesting. In our sample, the murder rate does rise starting around January 2014. But this fluctuation so far looks small compared to the big, overall slide since 2001, and is commensurate with past, temporary reversals. And it may have peaked a few months ago. (You heard it here first.) Meanwhile, totals for the broader category of violent crime, in which the rare offense of homicide hardly figures, rose only slightly, even as property crime kept dropping. These splits across crime types are the opposite of what I would expect from a Ferguson effect. Seemingly, more than with crimes of passion, theft and burglary begin with rational consideration of risk factors such as whether the police are around. But they kept falling.

 Zeroing in on the conceptual boundary within violent crime between homicide and everything else, we find that the crime subtype most resembling murder—armed assault—also appears to have ticked upward, especially if we restrict to assault with a firearm. It may be then the recent crime wave is best seen as a gun crime wave. We are not certain, in part because data limitations force us to base that finding on just nine cities. And, in an even smaller sample, non-gun homicides have recently climbed faster than gun homicides.

 As the FBI gathers comprehensive statistics this year, the reality of last year will become clearer. [node:read-more:link]

      Criminal Justice Reform       David Roodman's blog 1 comment Add new comment                 Stay Updated   Email me new blog posts

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