How elections affect police shootings

Radley Balko has an interesting column:

The Albuquerque Journal has posted an interesting analysis of five years of police shootings, between 2010 and 2014. One thing the paper found is that 39 percent of the shootings over the past five years were by officers who were hired between 2007 and 2009, a period “when APD changed its recruiting and hiring practices in an effort to bolster the ranks.”

Those policies were implemented by police chief Ray Schultz, who was hired to take over the city’s police department in 2005. Oddly, Schultz had previously left the department after a major scandal in which thousands of dollars in cash in evidence were reported missing from the APD evidence room. Schultz at the time was deputy police chief and oversaw the evidence room. Until the media got wind of the story, the only officers punished were those who came forward to report the problem…