Keeping warped minutes: on Popular Crime by Bill James

While this review will be unwieldy — I'm not sure I've ever reviewed something about which I had so many conflicted things to say — and parts of it will be negative, my basic attitude towards Bill James’s 2011 book Popular Crime is enthusiasm. It is fascinating, insightful, and fun. I recommend it highly.

It is not an easy book to summarize, and later I will take my time helping you through its odd structure. But to start with samples of its topics, my favorite sections include the ones where Bill James, who made Time Magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential Thinkers in 2006, argues

* that Lizzy Borden was innocent (she never took an ax and gave her father forty whacks);
* that John F. Kennedy was accidentally killed by a Secret Service agent who was flustered by Oswald’s shots;
* that Sam Sheppard, the kindly doctor-on-the-run who inspired the TV series the Fugitive, in fact hired and collaborated with the killer of his wife;
* and that JonBenet Ramsey’s parents were definitely innocent of her killing, and likely framed by an intruder deliberately trying to ruin the dad’s life.

That would seem an immodest project already, perhaps. More ambitiously, and to varying degrees of success, James

* argues that criminal investigations and trials should be made more rigorously systematic and mathematical, offering brief, tentative examples of how to do so;
* discusses the steady buildup from 1880 to around 1915 towards an averted second U.S. civil war, this one to be along economic class lines;
* argues that the Warren Court’s overreach in favor of the rights of the accused caused the massive crime wave of the sixties/ seventies/ eighties and the downfall of worthwhile liberal ideals;
* and — my single favorite part of the book — outlines a dramatic reform of the prison system that is, in my opinion, obviously correct, and which I’ve given its own post.

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Bill James is the self-taught founder of modern sports analytics. In that sense he is to crime investigation what his sports-analysis protege Nate Silver is to political polling (noting here that Nate Silver is the one major polling analyst who argued hard and at length that Donald Trump had a serious chance to win the electoral college, for which Silver was roundly criticized). James began as an outsider at sports, too, although eventually he would win three World Series rings for his work for the Boston Red Sox: he was a literature and economics double-major, who developed his writing skills more by writing funny often-confiscated notes to his classmates than by writing proper research papers.

Does this sound unpromising? If you’ve never heard of his Baseball Abstracts, which began (1977) as mail-order stapler-and-photocopier annuals and ended up (1988) as yearly bestsellers for Ballantine, it might. From my point of view, the three people who’ve done most to shape how my mind works are (1) my mom, who raised me and gave me half my DNA; (2) my dad, who hung out with me several times a year, very enjoyably, and also gave me half my DNA; and (3) my ex-wife of 14 years / mother of my sons. Bill James, whom I’ve never met and barely interacted with, is probably #4.

The Baseball Abstracts were written because Bill James — first in school, then in the Army, and all along as a baseball fan — had become increasingly impatient with people of rank saying things that Everybody Knew were true. He was driven by the question “How do you know? How could we find out?”. Working only with library-and-bookstore reference tools and a calculator, he started framing ways to test the truth of cliches like “baseball is 90% pitching”, “a pitcher’s win total measures his skill in the clutch”, “a great pitcher pays for himself by all the extra fans who turn out to see him”, and “a player’s peak is from ages 28 to 32” — to give a few of the many examples that turned out to be false — and then to generate better answers.

He countered the arrogance of insiders with, for one thing, snark and vicious wit — which was fun to read and crucial in growing his audience, although it was sometimes painful and uncalled for, and something he soon grew to recognize as a character flaw. More importantly, he countered their arrogance with rigor; with evidence; with the ability to organize data into a coherent story with characters and good plots. I was on my high school’s Lincoln-Douglas Debate team, and I won a good share of trophies; Bill James was useful in that. But I haven’t gotten to his most important strengths yet, at all.

He also countered the arrogance of insiders with humility. Bill James has argued explicitly and repeatedly that the world is far more complicated than any human can understand: that all of us are pretenders, grasping for answers and certainty with the tools we find at hand or that we make for ourselves, but doomed to only limited success. He’s brilliant at organizing a study and building an argument for it, but so are a hundred thousand lawyers, and it’s been years since I’ve felt I could learn anything new from reading, say, Glenn Greenwald. Bill James is equally brilliant at starting from scratch: re-studying an issue he’s already looked at, using entirely different tools and assumptions, as ready to call his old conclusions into doubt as he is to re-affirm them. That’s much rarer.

It’s easy to name baseball issues where he came to lead the opposition against ideas that he himself once fathered: from his earliest work on interpreting fielding statistics, to the use of relief pitchers, to the entire formerly-radical and now-standard concept of using one summary statistic to measure a player’s overall value. In a science world where leading medical journals regularly retract or overturn studies, and the entire field of psychology is facing a “replication crisis”, Bill James stands out for his willingness to let new forms of evidence, or new ways to view it, override his own old conclusions.

So naturally, he’s also not shy about letting new evidence override anyone else’s.

Most important of all, he’s willing to say “But what if we did the entire thing differently?” In baseball terms, that’s meant proposing everything from

* completely new structures for Hall of Fame voting;
* to a collection of rule changes designed to fight natural strategic evolution and make the game more like it was in the 1970s/ 1980s (faster gameplay, less dead time, fewer home runs, fewer strikeouts, more emphasis on baserunning and fielding: I approve);
* to several different methods by which the minor leagues could be set free from their major-league-owned “farm system” status and turned back into real leagues fighting real pennant races with rosters of their own.

Outside of baseball, he’s invented rules for a couple of different brand new team sports that ought to exist (I particularly like GymMax, a post-Olympics sport for male and female gymnasts alike in which co-ed leagues would likely be a natural form). And here, in Popular Crime, it led him to propose a first-draft form of serial killer detection algorithm which — probably by zeitgeist-matching, rather than direct influence — is now an open-source project created by a fellow outsider in real life.

As well as the prison-reform scheme I wrote about here.

The point is not that everything he steps back and reinvents is brilliant: that’s not the case, although I’ve highlighted ones I’m impressed by. It’s that Bill James is remarkable for his willingness to call anything into question: that it’s so rare for anyone to innovate even 1/10 or 1/50 as much as does. In baseball, because teams have hundreds of millions of dollars at stake based on measurable successes or failures, his innovations have slowly but massively transformed the game. In criminology, where success or failure are murkier and it took James two decades to write a single book, I don’t expect him to have the same impact.

He’s some guy who’s read hundreds of True Crime books, watched hundreds of True Crime movies, and done internet research, just like any of us could have: he’s back to his personal 1977 in terms of being just some outsider, asking impertinent questions because he doesn’t know he’s not supposed to. But the thrill of reading him try is the same.

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I mentioned Popular Crime’s odd structure, one which I know my mom found off-putting even as she enjoyed individual essays. The structure is most comfortable, I think, for readers of his old annual Baseball Abstracts. They were arranged as a collection of introductory essays; followed by one essay for each team inspired by their preceding season; followed by the Player Rankings section, in which regular players at each position were ranked from best to worst and Bill James appended comments. Since James would not always be equally inspired by each topic, the result could be a somewhat surreal experience.

A few brief statistical notes about (say) some team’s hitting with runners on base could be followed by a half-joking rant about why the Houston Astros bore him in the same way jazz music does. This might be followed by a study of whether you can predict a team’s next season any better by how their best minor league team performed; which might be followed by a long, moving, and profound discussion of the cocaine scandals of the late 1970s/ early 1980s, the way different managers approached them, and the way that we all tend to age into self-caricatures, dangerously confident that the truths we’ve learned are the only truths worth learning.

Followed by an essay about middle relievers or something, and a gag investigative news report, funny in context and impenetrable now, about a Seattle Mariners ploy to con umpires by recruiting dozens of fake ballplayers all named Henderson. The result are books which I can’t recommend to casual readers now, although I highly recommend the best-of collection This Time Let’s Not Eat the Bones. (The other baseball books of his I’d recommend today are the Politics of Glory — later retitled Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame? — and the New Historical Baseball Abstract).

Popular Crime is organized, in one sense, much more straightforwardly. It starts briefly in the Roman Empire, moves to North America for a 1753 incident, and covers popular U.S. crimes — i.e., cases that caught the public imagination, at least for a time — chronologically forward, case by case, into the 21st century. In practice, though, you never know when a given case will inspire him to suddenly start talking about why murder-rate statistics from a hundred years ago can’t be usefully compared to the statistics today; or what Bill James experienced of the protest movements of 1969; or how to classify popular crime stories by organizing them into categories; or how in two different very famous cases, women with essentially the same name (Elizabeth Gough, Betty Gow) played essentially identical roles. Several broad arguments do accumulate over time, but you need to be able to find the digressions worthwhile on their own merits, fun enough not to resent the unpredictability. I leave it to you to judge if you can.

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My friend Andrew Hamlin is enjoying the book at my recommendation, but mentions that some of James’s conclusions about cases disagree with those offered in a similar book Hamlin likes, the Cases That Haunt Us, by influential full-time criminologist John Douglas. James’s several brief mentions of Douglas are respectful, and while both books are outsider-y in the sense of “not cases John Douglas was personally involved in investigating”, it’s fair to ask “to what degree should one believe James’s conclusions?”

It’s fair to ask, and I probably can’t answer. Bill James was a huge influence on how I think about the world; his accounts of many of the cases are the only accounts I’ve read. The ones where he spends the most time, including for example the ones I mentioned at the start of this review, seem highly convincing, but then, *of course* they would.

I can say that in the only case he spends significant time that I had also personally studied at length — the JFK assassination — his theory (actually that of ballistics expert Howard Donahue) convinced me very quickly. I had long since concluded both that the bullet that killed JFK couldn’t have come from Oswald’s gun, and that every conspiracy theory I’d heard implicating other assassins was stupid. “A secret service agent killed him by mistake/ the killer may well not have known he’d even done it/ the cover-up, if any, was motivated only by a world-historic case of Cover Your Ass” makes perfect sense with my knowledge of both the case and human nature. But I otherwise have no outside ability to referee, and if I later read Douglas’s book, I may well come out confused and indecisive where the books overlap in hostile fashion.

In a broader sense: I’ve read a large percentage of the things Bill James has written in his life, including at his subscriber site Bill James Online. How reliable do I find him in general, on subjects where I have the knowledge to form my own opinions?

I would say this: when he puts a lot of effort into understanding something I also understand — for the most usual example, baseball analysis — I agree with him a very large percentage of the time. Not 100% of the time — to his credit, even Bill James doesn’t agree with Bill James 100% of the time — but enough to create a strong confidence in his work. He has worked hard to understand popular crime in the same way that he’s worked to understand baseball. The amount of time he’s spent on the topic is probably equivalent to the amount he’d already spent studying baseball in like 1985 or something, so his chances of being right about a controversial crime case now might be equivalent to his chances of properly evaluating a controversial baseball player in 1985. He’s overruled some of his own baseball opinions since then … but he was on-target already, a lot more than not, and enough to permanently change the game.

I will also say that when he shoots from the hip, he’s as prone to saying dumb shit as any smart person is. For an example that really annoys me, he takes several shots near the end at environmentalists, and how climate scientists knowingly exaggerate the importance and danger of global warming. I also didn’t like the follow-up line, “Some animal-rights activists are crazy people who get mad at the president for swatting a fly” (Really? Who gets mad at that? Name one), but alright, global warming: I’m an outsider, but I’ve read a wide variety of books and articles about that one.

James is dead wrong. In fact, climate scientists regularly *undersell* the threat of global warming, underplay the consequences, in the hopes of generating action rather than despair. They focus on what the world will look like “by 2050”, knowing that greenhouse gases linger in the air and create further havoc: by 2050 only a small percentage of the damage will be done. They talk about keeping global warming to a “safe” level under two degrees Celsius, knowing (1) this is probably already impossible and (2) extinctions have already happened, and rain forests have already started drying up and being subjected to uncontrollable forest fires, and coral reefs are already in critical condition, at our “safe” level. They talk about their middle-case models more than their worst-case models, even as the actual climate news — for example, almost everything in the Antarctic and Arctic— keeps being worse than the “worst-case”. They allow solar panels and wind turbines to be discussed as “zero-carbon” energy sources when they are no such thing: they’re useful, but they can’t possibly energize the entire world economy or even close, and fossil fuel is spent extracting the rare — too-rare — minerals on which they currently depend.

In their own conversations, climate scientists are more like you see them in Tim Kintisch’s book Hack the Planet: debating the risks of extreme mad-science “solutions” to global warming because maybe the risks of “let’s spray sulfates into the air” or “let’s block part of the sun with mirrors back into space” or “let’s bury atmospheric crap in the mines and oceans” aren’t actually more crazy than what we, as a collective, are doing already. (Although they probably are more crazy.)

James is dead wrong because he has a common-sense idea of how the world works — that everyone exaggerates the importance of what they’re interested in — and, in this case, was willing to slander hundreds of scientists he’s never met rather than double-check the truth of his common-sense idea. We all do things like that, hence all the stereotypical jokes about lawyers or politicians or gym teachers or dead babies or road-crossing chickens, as if it didn’t matter *which* lawyer, or which kind of truck loaded with *which* dead babies. But off-the-cuff, Bill James’s dumb shit can look like anyone’s.

Thus, in general, I’d say trust James a lot when he’s invested in a detailed argument, and just enjoy him when he isn’t. Some cases he discusses in four sentences: he knows more about most of them than I do, and he’s surely a decent and entertaining source, so he’s worthwhile on that specific level. They aren’t the core of the book’s worth.

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Bill James is also wrong about … okay, well, I suspect he’s to a small extent right about the Warren Court. There’s no question individual injustices were done by various rulings that favored the rights of the accused to a degree previously considered extreme: hey, I’ve read the Killing of Bonnie Garland (and other books aligned with it) too. There’s no question that crime-solving rates went down steadily during the ‘60s/ ‘70s/ ‘80s crime explosion; that parole became too automatic; that insanity defenses spent roughly five years (1977-82) acting way too much like a get-out-of-jail-free ticket; and that it’s a bad idea to have known criminals running loose. He’s right that “police should always have a warrant” didn’t really need to mean “the evidence in the big raid of the Manson Family's Spahn Ranch was thrown out because the warrant was for Wednesday the 13th but the raid occurred on Saturday the 16th”.

There’s also, as he says, a likely connection between Warren Court rulings about law libraries and the disappearance of small prisons (although small schools were disappearing at the same time). For the sake of argument, let’s claim the Warren Court on balance increased the crime rate more than not. But.

Here’s the thing, which was unknowable during most of the period James wrote the book, but becoming clear by 2011: there is a one simple overriding cause of the crime-wave he’s blaming the Warren Court for. It’s lead. Lead poisoning, from paint and gasoline. “That’s not obvious”, you say? I agree. Let’s explore the evidence, much of it originally compiled by Rick Nevin, in the ways James’s own writings helped teach me. Step by step: I don’t expect the first points to convince you. They are introductory.

* First, to get the “how?” out of the way: lead damages the brain by reducing impulse control, increasing quickness to anger, and damaging the decision-making functions. This doesn’t turn everyone into a criminal, of course, but on average should result in more bad decisions, and should show in a variety of ways: more violence, more nonviolent crime, more illegal drug use, more teen pregnancy, for example. That doesn’t tell us lead should be a *large* factor; without further evidence, it could be assumed to be a small one.

* The United States saw a massive rise in lead poisoning after World War II. At first this included lead paint, due to the massive construction boom, but that wasn’t a driving force as lead paint was starting to be phased out, and in the 1950s various cities and states began to outlaw it. Mostly the post-war era saw an extraordinary increase in driving, using leaded gasoline. The streetcar/ city rail industry had gone into vast decline (many scholars blame General Motors for deliberately purchasing and destroying urban mass transit systems, although this is a heavily disputed claim); the federal government was subsidizing a new highway system and cheap mortgages to allow white people to move to brand new suburbs, from which they would drive back and forth to work. Factories that had been working full-time to produce new weapons were suddenly available for other uses, so the advertising industry expanded and got hard to work convincing people to buy new cars — and the people were buying large, flashy, desperately gas-wasting cars. The cities were filthy with smog, and leaded gasoline was everywhere. As lead poisoning increased, so — on a 20-year-lag, as brain-damaged babies came of age — did crime (and teen pregnancy, and drug abuse). 20 years after leaded gasoline began to be phased out, the crime rate (and teen pregnancy rate and drug abuse rate) started to fall.

* Of course, one national-level set of correlations doesn’t prove causation! But many different correlations working across many different contexts probably do. Different countries experienced different (sometimes very different) timelines for the increase and decrease in lead poisoning: in each country, you can follow the crime rate up and down, on a 20-year delay, and in some cases (like Brazil) the crime decline’s timing was accurately predicted in advance based on Nevin’s work and the countries’ lagging lead policies. Some U.S. states banned lead gasoline before the country as a whole phased it out: those states saw crime rates decline 20 years after their own actions. Some countries (like the U.K.) reduced leaded gasoline to zero in a much shorter period of time than the U.S.’s phase-out: they saw their crime drops occur faster.

Inner cities in the U.S. had the highest concentrations of lead, both from gasoline (higher crowding of cars) and paint (more absentee landlords doing nothing to remove lead-paint threats). Inner city crime rose proportionately faster, and declined proportionately further, in the 20-year lag after lead’s rise and fall. Similarly, U.S. cities *in general* had more lead poisoning than rural areas: before and after the crime wave of the ‘60s/ ’70s/ ‘80s, cities have not been more violent than rural areas. They were more violent only during the infestation of lead. And some studies have even broken cities down on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level, tracing known lead poisoning incidence — and finding the same, lagged, neighborhood-centered effect in crime rates.

Age cohorts have continued to show effects that make sense in the lead-poisoning context: the same 20-year-olds who were abnormally crime-prone during the crime wave's peak, are still abnormally crime-prone for middle-aged folks, even as the society's crime rate drops. That doesn't make any sense with the "court rulings caused it" theory at all.

Much of the Middle East’s current wave of terrorism occurs in countries where today's young men were exposed to massive lead gasoline. Kevin Drum, working with the data for Mother Jones, has predicted drops in violence, country by country, with timing based on their own recent lead laws. We’ll see what happens, but at this point it’s logical to assume he’s right. Such widespread correlations not only imply causation, but very strong causation: strong enough to show through clearly, no matter what other random variables — like the Warren Court — do or do not appear.

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Because it takes more effort to disagree with a writer than to agree with him, this review has started to acquire a deceptively negatively feel, despite being about a wide-ranging and ambitious book that is (again) largely outstanding. I hesitate to bring up one related complaint, but it’s also relevant to the Warren Court which he rails against, so … okay, how to put this. On any conscious and intentional level, Bill James is emphatically anti-racist, which is great. He’s written sensibly about race in baseball contexts. In his subscriber-site 1/27/2017 essay “How the Democrats Can Win Kansas” (which I agree with the majority of), he tells Democrats “You have chosen the role of the advocate of minorities… There is still much work that needs to be done along this line, and I applaud your efforts to keep chopping at that… It was a great thing that you put forward an African American candidate in 2008, and it was a great thing that you put forward a woman as a candidate in 2016.   Keep doing that.   Nominate another woman in 2020, a black woman in 2024, and be the first party to nominate an openly gay candidate in 2028.   Go for a Muslim in 2032, and a transsexual in 2036.” I applaud his applause! Yet I think he has a small blind spot on race that affects his book and his arguments regardless.

A few data points. He briefly mentions “race riots” in a 1910s context in a way that strongly implies black people started them, when they were overwhelmingly started by white people. He covers the 1984 Bernhard Goetz case — in which a white New Yorker shot four black potential assailants on the subway — briefly and with sympathy, but ignores 1986’s equally prominent and NY-based Howard Beach incident, in which a white mob murdered black Michael Griffith and beat up three of his black friends simply for appearing (their car had broken down) in a white neighborhood.

He talks about how common false confessions are in murder cases, by bringing up how many crackpots knowingly confess falsely in order to draw attention to himself. But many false confessions aren't exactly voluntary. He somehow never mentions the massive headline-dominating Central Park Jogger case in his 1980s/ 90s roundup, in which five completely innocent black men — deemed “super-predators” in a popular new coinage — were given life sentences for supposedly murdering one white woman, and false confessions were elicited by simple (and what might seem surprisingly mild) psychological torture. His 1990s summary never mentions Rodney King’s beating by the L.A. Police Department, either, although it mentions a number of cases that drew, I think, far less attention at the time.

What this means, in terms of the Warren Court, is this: their rulings were based in the assumption that sometimes the police *are* the criminals. Not only that, but sometimes they're a hostile occupying force (still the case in places like Ferguson, MO and Dothan, AL and the black areas of Long Island, NY today). I conceded “for the sake of argument” above that the rulings had a mild net increase effect on crime, but: I don’t know that, because while they lasted, they probably decreased crime by (mostly white) police against (often nonwhite) victims. They also probably, by making hostile-action approaches by police more difficult, made it easier and likelier for police to get *willing* cooperation among minority communities -- which probably in turn helped solve crimes.

I don’t know how the competing factors balance, but it never occurs to Bill James that there’s a balance to be had. In True Crime books, the police are trying to solve the crime, and the police and criminals are separate classes. In True Crime books, for that matter, the guy stabbing somebody is a criminal, but the guy lobbying to keep lead in gasoline, or keep coal dumped into rivers, is not a criminal at all. The world doesn’t always work like that.

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Having said all that, though, I’m not an anarchist: I am glad there are police and jails, although how glad varies dramatically from town to town. The job of trying to catch criminals is a valid and important one, as well as a really interesting one. Popular Crime does a fascinating job of thinking though both individual cases, and the broad approaches police and jailers use. It includes fascinating, worthwhile detours into social history, and some good wordplay along the way. It’s not a perfect book, but it’s an excellent use of time.