A recent survey of retired police commanders in New York City has been causing a stir in the news media and the blogsphere this week, including this article in the New York Times:

More than a hundred retired New York Police Department captains and higher-ranking officers said in a survey that the intense pressure to produce annual crime reductions led some supervisors and precinct commanders to manipulate crime statistics, according to two criminologists studying the department.

The retired members of the force reported that they were aware over the years of instances of “ethically inappropriate” changes to complaints of crimes in the seven categories measured by the department’s signature CompStat program, according to a summary of the results of the survey and interviews with the researchers who conducted it.

Further…

In interviews with the criminologists, other retired senior officers cited examples of what the researchers believe was a periodic practice among some precinct commanders and supervisors: checking eBay, other Web sites, catalogs or other sources to find prices for items that had been reported stolen that were lower than the value provided by the crime victim. They would then use the lower values to reduce reported grand larcenies — felony thefts valued at more than $1,000, which are recorded as index crimes under CompStat — to misdemeanors, which are not, the researchers said.

Others also said that precinct commanders or aides they dispatched sometimes went to crime scenes to persuade victims not to file complaints or to urge them to change their accounts in ways that could result in the downgrading of offenses to lesser crimes, the researchers said.

“Those people in the CompStat era felt enormous pressure to downgrade index crime, which determines the crime rate, and at the same time they felt less pressure to maintain the integrity of the crime statistics,” said John A. Eterno, one of the researchers and a retired New York City police captain.

His colleague, Eli B. Silverman, added, “As one person said, the system provides an incentive for pushing the envelope.”

The research has been criticized roundly by some, including former police commissioner William Bratton in an op-ed response yesterday:

The notion that there has been widespread downgrading of felony crime under CompStat is way off base. First, categories of crime that are nearly impossible to downgrade, notably homicide and auto theft, have declined much more than the categories that might be more readily manipulated. Auto thefts, which must be reported accurately because victims need crime reports to make insurance claims, are down 90 percent since 1993, the year before CompStat was inaugurated. In contrast, grand larceny, the category that can be most readily downgraded (by reducing the value of the property stolen), has declined only about 55 percent. Homicides, which generally report themselves when the body is discovered, are down about 76 percent, from 1,951 in 1993 to 471 in 2009.

Sociologist Jay Livingston also provides an alternative look at victimization data for burglary over the same time period in NYC that would appear to back Bratton up.

So, who to believe? Again, from the New York Times article:

The seven-page summary of the survey certainly indicates that many of the retired officers believe the system has gone significantly wrong.

Indeed, the researchers said the responses supported longstanding concerns voiced by some critics about the potential problems inherent in CompStat. The former officers indicate that it was the intense pressure brought to bear on the commanders of the city’s 76 precincts in twice-weekly CompStat meetings — where they are grilled, and sometimes humiliated, before their peers and subordinates, and where careers and promotions can be made or lost — that drove some to make “unethical” and “highly unethical” alterations to crime reports.

Given that concern over crime and crime numbers are not unique to New York, this is undoubtedly not the last we’ll hear on this topic for a long time to come.

Despite rumors and media reports at the time, new research claims that Hurricane Katrina did not spawn waves of crime in other cities. As USA Today reports:

In the current Journal of Criminal Justice study led by sociologist Sean Varano of Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I., the authors look at statistics for robbery, rape, murder, car theft and other violent crimes in Houston, San Antonio and Phoenix before and after Katrina evacuees arrived in those cities. The 2005 storm, which killed about 1,800 people and caused more than $80 billion in damages, according to the National Hurricane Center, led to the relocation of more than one million people…

The study found a slight rise in murder and robbery in Houston, when adjusted for the long-term crime patterns, but no increase in other crimes (and suggested drops in rape and aggravated assaults); no effect at all in San Antonio; and another slight statistical rise in the murder rate in Phoenix. “Any increase in murder is intolerable,” Varano says, but a lack of increase in crimes such as car theft and robbery, where economic motives most clearly would tempt so many displaced people, argues against a crime wave driven by evacuees, he says.

Meanwhile, “Many communities across the United States … also reported increases in violent crime between 2004 and 2006,” notes the study, including a 30% increase in aggravated assault in cities such as Baltimore and Detroit.

The belief that rises in crime and disorder arise from disasters like Katrina is nothing new.

A crime wave spawned by evacuees is typical of “disaster myths” seen after catastrophes, such as the mythical Superdome riots reported in the days after the hurricane, says disaster management scholar Joseph Trainor of the University of Delaware, who was not part of the study. “This is a very strong study showing long-term effects and (showing) people’s resiliency after a disaster.”

Disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti almost always spawn fears of riots or criminality, seen in some early reports from Port-Au-Prince. But on Jan. 18, U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Mike Rogers, Director of Intelligence for the Joint Staff, told a news conference, “we have seen nothing that suggests to us that we have widespread disorder; no sense of widespread panic.”

“Fifty years of social science show people are not victims of disasters, they are survivors,” Trainor says. “People are adaptive and altruistic, mass rioting and mass looting are just disaster myths for the most part.”

The take home message?

“One lesson is that after disasters we have to think about where evacuees land, and not just the disaster site itself,” Varano says. He argues that crime rate changes after displaced people arrive in a city like Houston or Phoenix tells us more about the conditions at the arrival location than about the displaced people themselves. Strong communities undoubtedly handle influxes of evacuees better than already weak ones, he says.

“Another is that public officials, and news organizations, have a responsibility to speak very carefully about the reality of disaster situations,” Varano concludes. “There’s a danger of host cities not wanting to accept people in desperate straits because of false perceptions.”

The Herald-Sun picked up on forthcoming research about the popularity of internet dating:

“We estimate that about 18 percent — almost 1 in 5 — of those who are single and have access to the Internet have used Internet dating,” said Rebecca Tippett, a doctoral student at Duke and one of the three authors of “The Social Demography of Internet Dating in the United States.”

Analyzing a national survey of 3,215 adults, the sociologists discuss what contributes to this phenomenon:

Some of those factors are demographic, she [Tippett] said, “like the rising age of first marriage, the increased divorce rate and the fact that people are geographically more mobile.”

In years past, you’d go to school, then get a permanent job and live in that same town, “and that’s where’d you find a mate,” Tippett said. “But people are moving more now, they’re not getting married at 22 and they are removed from their traditional social networks for mate selection. When those things are changing, it’s more common for the way to find a partner to change as well.”

The paper also attributed part of what it called “phenomenal growth” to social change that has made Internet dating “more acceptable [especially for women].”

Finding a partner through intermediaries, of course, isn’t new, Tippett pointed out, but “technology has made it much easier.”

“For most people, what Internet dating has done is make more information available,” she said. “You can see a picture, you can e-mail, you can instant message. You’re able to interact and pre-screen.”

But,

[The researchers] also pointed out that the growth is uneven, and that a digital divide still exists, hypothesizing that “Internet daters will be disproportionally white, possess high education and income, and live in urban/suburban areas.”

According to the Jamaica Gleaner, University of West Indies sociologist Claudette Crawford-Brown has identified a new phenomenon: Western Union children.  She said this is replacing “barrel children” in Jamaica:

Barrel children in the past were identified as those who did not have the physical presence of their parents, but were sent goodies through shipments from overseas.  The sociologist, however, said that the barrel-children phenomenon has been surpassed by parents who give their children remittances. The difference between the two is the amount of care involved.

“You don’t have the barrel children as I highlighted seven years ago, where you had parents sending children things in a barrel. We now have what you call ‘Western Union’ children, and these are children who are parented by cellphones and they are sent the money. However, when you have a barrel child, that mother goes into K-Mart or Wal-Mart and I see them and watch them and they say: ‘I wonder if this going fit Sasha’, and she takes out the shoes with the mark out on the paper and match it with the shoes, and say this will fit her, this will fit her. You know what that shows? Some amount of care,” she said.

There are consequences of these changes in long-distance care:

Crawford-Brown pointed out even with remittances and barrels, the absence of mother in a child’s life has the same impact on youths as the absence of fathers. She noted that the absence of parental guidance leaves these children vulnerable to negative influences, where many turn to violence and drugs to cope.

According to her, many of these children who receive money through remittances are not given proper guidance, thus the money they have access to can be used to purchase drugs or facilitate their participation in illicit activities.

The noted child advocate and sociologist said many behavioural problems shown among some children are as a result of the breakdown in the family and exposure to violence. Crawford-Brown also said that Jamaica needs to tackle apathy towards murder in the society, which has trickled down to children she has worked with.

Crawford-Brown’s research on “Western Union children” was also recently featured in a column in the Jamaica Observer.

This week, the Christian Century reviewed sociologist Christian Smith’s new book on religion and spirituality in “emerging adulthood”:

Souls in Transition, the impressive second installment of findings—and the first longitudinal sounding—from the massive National Study of Youth and Religion, is about [18- to 23-year-olds], the most religiously disengaged cohort in the U.S. Principal investigator Christian Smith, assisted by Patricia Snell, returned to young people originally interviewed in 2003 to see how their religious lives had changed.

Smith, a professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, is a gutsy sociologist who does not mind tipping sacred cows or poking around in areas that theologians like to claim for themselves such as religious formation. His earlier book (with Melinda Lundquist Denton), Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, reported the first wave of NSYR findings. In 2007 Mark Oestreicher, then president of Youth Specialties, called Soul Searching one of the ten most influential youth ministry books—a first for a secular book on the sociology of religion.

Some findings:

Souls in Transition is a denser and in some ways more sobering volume [than Smith’s previous book] that represents a field-shaping contribution to the growing literature on emerging adults (young people roughly between the ages of 18 and 30). As developmental tasks once associated with the teen years reach into the twenties and thirties, ministry with emerging adults shows signs of becoming the new youth ministry of 21st-century congregations. Compared to people in other age groups, emerging adults are less likely to attend religious services weekly, pray daily or affiliate strongly with a religious tradition (a fact consistent with their tendency to resist institutional affiliations generally). Yet on some measures (thinking about the afterlife, taking the Bible literally, self-identifying as liberals) they reflect the adult population as a whole.

The big story in Souls in Transition is continuity: highly devoted emerging adults almost always start out as highly devoted teenagers, and religiously disinterested youth are unlikely to become interested as they grow older. (Most teenagers in the NSYR who committed to God did so before age 14.) When religious change occurs in emerging adulthood, it tends to be in the negative direction. What makes the faith of some young people more durable than that of others seems to be the presence of formative religious influences in their lives while they are teenagers (especially religious parents, but also other faithful adults), teenagers’ personal embrace of faith, a lack of religious doubts, multiple religious experiences, and personal faith practices, especially prayer and Bible reading.

Another intriguing argument:

Smith saves his most intriguing analysis for a discussion of the implicit cultural influences of mainline Protestantism and American evangelicalism (for example, a Muslim girl describes her “personal relationship with God”). Drawing on sociologist N. Jay Demerath’s thesis that “liberal Protestantism’s core values—individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free critical inquiry, and the authority of personal experience—have come to so permeate the broader American culture” that these values no longer need liberal Protestantism to survive, Smith makes a fascinating move: he argues that young people are not more involved in American religious life because they don’t have to be. The values of America’s dominant religious outlook for the past century are now carried forward by American culture itself. Smith contends that many emerging adults have bought into an implicit “mainline-liberal Protestant” perspective on American culture and “would be quite comfortable with the kind of liberal faith described by the Yale theologian H. Richard Niebuhr in 1937 as being about ‘a God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.'”

The New York Times recently featured an op-ed by David Brooks on the role of sports in American society.  Commenting on the teachings of sociologist Eugen Rosenstock Huessy:

He used literary and other allusions when he wanted to talk about ethics, community, mysticism and emotion. But none of the students seemed to get it. Then, after a few years, he switched to sports analogies. Suddenly, everything clicked.

“The world in which the American student who comes to me at about twenty years of age really has confidence in is the world of sport,” he would write. “This world encompasses all of his virtues and experiences, affection and interests; therefore, I have built my entire sociology around the experiences an American has in athletics and games.”

Brooks summarizes Michael Allen Gillespie’s take on how American sports are organized:

Throughout Western history, Gillespie argues, there have been three major athletic traditions. First, there was the Greek tradition. Greek sports were highly individualistic. There was little interest in teamwork. Instead sports were supposed to inculcate aristocratic virtues like courage and endurance. They gave individuals a way to achieve eternal glory.

Then, there was the Roman tradition. In ancient Rome, free men did not fight in the arena. Roman sports were a spectacle organized by the government. The free Romans watched while the slaves fought and were slaughtered. The entertainment emphasized the awesome power of the state.

Finally, there was the British tradition. In the Victorian era, elite schools used sports to form a hardened ruling class. Unlike the Greeks, the British placed tremendous emphasis on team play and sportsmanship. If a soccer team committed a foul, it would withdraw its goalie to permit the other team to score. The object was to inculcate a sense of group loyalty, honor and rule-abidingness — traits that were important to a class trying to manage a far-flung empire.

Gillespie argues that the American sports ethos is a fusion of these three traditions. American sport teaches that effort leads to victory, a useful lesson in a work-oriented society. Sport also helps Americans navigate the tension between team loyalty and individual glory. We behave like the British, but think like the Greeks, A. Bartlett Giamatti, a former baseball commissioner, once observed.

Brooks also makes the case for the role of collective effervescence that college sports provide:

Several years ago, I arrived in Madison, Wis., for a conference. It was Saturday morning, and as my taxi got close to campus, I noticed people dressed in red walking in the same direction. At first it was a trickle, then thousands. It looked like the gathering of a happy Midwestern cult, though, of course, it was the procession to a football game.

In a segmented society, big-time college sports are one of the few avenues for large-scale communal participation. Mass college sports cross class lines. They induce large numbers of people in a region to stop, at the same time, and share common emotional experiences.

The crowds at big-time college sporting events do not sit passively, the way they do at a movie theater. They roar, suffer and invent chants (especially at Duke basketball games). Mass college sports are the emotional hubs at the center of vast networks of analysis, criticism and conversation. They generate loyalties that are less harmful than ethnic loyalties and emotional morality plays that are at once completely meaningless and totally consuming.

What could decorative rocks and park benches have to do with sociology? The San Francisco Chronicle suggests one possibility:

For Jeffrey Miller, landscape architecture is more than just plants, waterfalls and decorative rocks. For Miller, the founder of San Francisco’s Miller Company Landscape Architects, it’s about uniting living spaces and bringing people together.

“My impetus to be a landscape architect came out of a question – how to design social and public space so that there were better relationships between people,” he said. “It wasn’t a nature-based beginning, it came from more of a sociological perspective.”

Since forming Miller Company in 1980, the former sociology student and filmmaker has been involved with some of the more dramatically landscaped residential communities in the Bay Area.

Miller applies his sociological imagination to landscaping by envisioning public spaces as opportunities for social interaction and connection, especially in big cities.

Ultimately, Miller realizes that the outdoor space of a development is almost always larger than the interior space, and what you do with that is as important as creating comfortable living rooms and spacious kitchens.

“The largest space that we have with these projects is everything that’s outside of the buildings,” he said. “So the care and design of the world outside of buildings is tremendously important to the way we live, especially in urban places. This is kind of our public living room – what we have outside – and the more we can create sociable environments for communities coming together, the better social environment we’re going to have.”

Science Daily highlighted a longitudinal study of aging and managing illness in a Florida retirement community:

Eva Kahana, Robson Professor of Sociology and director of the Elderly Care Research Center at Case Western Reserve, reported the findings from interviews with 100 cancer survivors. These survivors are part of a longitudinal study of 1,107 elderly adults living in a retirement community.

This study calls attention to generally accepting, timid behaviors that elderly patients report about their interactions with the healthcare system while battling cancer. Nevertheless the very same older adults offer advice to other older cancer patients to take a more activist stand and become advocates in their care.

This finding of the study overturns the notion that elderly patients are disinterested and disempowered health consumers, Kahana said.

In-depth interviews about their cancer experiences revealed elderly survivors became advocates for others battling cancer, though they had taken a more passive stance – “relying on physicians and family members” – during their own struggle. So…

The researchers said the findings suggest “a transition maybe occurring from passive to a more-active or even activist orientation due to the illness experience.”

Many skinny Americans are fed up with obesity, reports the Los Angeles Times:

“Americans as a society are getting fed up with the matter of obesity. No doubt about it,” said Douglas Metz, chief of health services for American Specialty Health, a San Diego-based company that offers wellness programs to employers. “Some pockets of society are taking positive action, and unfortunately others are taking negative action. That’s what happens when a society hasn’t figured out what the fix is.”

Recent notable actions include:

* A recent and ultimately unsuccessful plan at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania sought to take the body mass index of every enrolling student and require the obese to lose weight or take a fitness class before they could graduate.
* In Mississippi, legislators tried to pass a bill to let restaurants prohibit obese people from dining.
* In an interview with the New York Times last August, Toby Cosgrove, chief executive of the Cleveland Clinic, one of the nation’s largest medical centers, provoked national outrage when he said that, if it were up to him, he would stop hiring the obese. He later apologized for his remarks.
* Last summer in Florida, animal rights activists at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) took aim at heavy women in a “Save the whales” billboard campaign that featured an overweight, bikini-clad woman. It read: “Lose the blubber. Go vegetarian.” Angry reactions caused the organization to remove the signs.

Statistics about obesity are being assessed in the current debates on how to reduce the nation’s health care costs:

A report by Emory University researchers projected last November that by 2018 the United States could expect to spend $344 billion on healthcare costs attributable to obesity. Obesity-related costs would account for 21% of healthcare spending, up from 9.1% today, said the report, sponsored in part by the United Health Foundation and the American Public Health Assn.

Providing a different take on the issue, it’s time to call in the sociologist:

“In our society, being heavy has become more of a stigma lately because we’re struggling with other issues of consumption,” says Abigail Saguy, associate professor of sociology at UCLA.

The economic climate, a recent history of people buying more than they can afford as well as environmental issues, including the depletion of our planet’s resources, are making people feel more angry about society’s overconsumption, she says. Obviously overweight people are an easy target.

“They’re almost a caricature of greed, overconsumption, overspending, over-leveraging and overusing resources,” says Saguy. “Though it’s not entirely rational, it’s an understandable reaction, especially in a country founded on the Puritan ethics of self-reliance, sacrifice and individual responsibility. If people feel they’re sacrificing, then see someone spilling over an airplane seat, they feel angry that that person is not making the same sacrifices they are.”

Research indicates that discrimination based on weight has been increasing in recent years:

Rebecca Puhl, a researcher at Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, published [two papers] last January — one in the journal Obesity, the other in the International Journal of Obesity — Puhl reported that weight discrimination in the United States increased 66% over the prior decade.

“Weight discrimination is highly prevalent in American society and increasing,” said Puhl, who cites several possible reasons. Among them are a lack of legislation to prohibit weight discrimination and an increase in media coverage of obesity (up fivefold from 1992 to 2003). Most media framed the problem of obesity as one of personal responsibility, she reported.

The News Journal recently examined the potential consequences of implementing a national sex offender registry:

The Adam Walsh Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2006, goes into effect later this year and aims in part to smooth out some of those issues by applying a uniform national classification system and implementing a national registry.

Some observers argue that while one-size-fits-all penalties and overly broad classifications may sound good politically, they’re not truly effective in preventing recidivism.

Commentary by University of Delaware sociologist Chrysanthi Leon and Ohio Northern University criminologist Keith Durkin:

“You’ve got a small group of offenders who commit lots of new offenses,” said Chrysanthi Leon, a University of Delaware assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice. “We need to do a better job of distinguishing among the bigger group of offenders, and dedicate more of our resources on this smaller group of high-risk offenders.”

Instead of looking at offense-based criteria, Leon said, the ideal classification system would involve individual assessments of each offender for factors that can increase the potential for repeat offenses.

Those factors include whether force was used, how the offender manipulated his or her victims and the age of the victims, Durkin said.

The current system, he said, leads to police and probation officers getting overwhelmed by the sheer volume of offenders to monitor.

“They’re really trying,” he said. “But they’ve got this huge caseload.”

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