Astral Codex Ten

PPIC

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PPIC

Article

PPIC is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 13, 2022 and October 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as ""https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-political-geography/""; “year-long research program by PPIC to figure out how Prop 47 impacted crime”; “The same PPIC report that showed little effect of Prop 47 on shoplifting”. It most often appears alongside Bay Area, California, LA Times.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: October 13, 2022
  • Last seen: October 29, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley
October 13, 2022 · Original source
https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-political-geography/
Inline links: https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-political-geography/
The Case Against California Proposition 36
October 29, 2024 · Original source
…but only a little. My main source here is a recent report by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank which does the most comprehensive data collection I’ve yet seen on the impact of California’s criminal justice reform measures. This report summarizes the results of a year-long research program by PPIC to figure out how Prop 47 impacted crime. The researchers used a few different empirical strategies to isolate the impact of Prop 47. First, they created a synthetic control – a group of states with underlying demographics and trends that roughly match California, but which didn't pass a major criminal justice reform law in 2014. They also compared trends across California counties. Because different counties had different changes in things like recidivism, police clearance rates, and levels of crime, county comparisons can help identify which enforcement mechanisms are associated with particular outcomes.
Inline links: report
They found an increase in property crimes after 2015, but it was almost all car break-ins, which for some reason seemed especially elastic to the sentencing reform (we’ll come back to these later). Shoplifting may have gone up slightly, but this lasted less than a year – by 2016, rates were back down to 2010 levels. Then they continued to gradually decline until early 2020, when pandemic lockdowns made them really plummet. The current retail theft wave started in the summer of 2021, after the economy re-opened. I'm not going to weigh in on the root cause – it could be a functional police strike in response to the George Floyd protests, lockdown-induced dysfunction that never got better, the decrease in police staffing across California over the past few years, or maybe some combination of the above. But something about the pandemic era emboldened criminals or broke policing. Prop 47 is not to blame.
Inline links: started in the summer of 2021, police staffing
The same PPIC report that showed little effect of Prop 47 on shoplifting found it did have an effect on another type of crime - car break-ins, which rose substantially over the following few years. But if you've been following the debate over Prop 36, you'll have noticed that car break-ins barely feature. The Grow SF blog post in favor of the measure argues that "shoplifting became endemic after prop 47," and the text of the measure itself blames prop 47 for "an explosion in retail and cargo theft causing stores throughout California to close." Retail theft is mentioned four times; cars don't come up once.