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I don’t like either the word (hike) or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains, not hike! Do you know the origin of that word, ‘saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Way back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre,’ or ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers, or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.”

John Muir

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A mind stretched by a new experience can never go back to its former dimensions

Oliver Wendell Holms

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At the Radish with my friends from the SF House

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The Phase 2b study is the largest randomized, controlled, double-blind trial of psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms. The company said it found that patients who were given the highest dose, 25 milligrams, had a significant decrease in depressive symptoms compared to those given 1 milligram, which is such a low dose it functions as a placebo.

Overall, 29.1% of patients in the highest-dose group were in remission three weeks after treatment, compared to 7.6% of those in the control group, and more than a quarter of the patients in the 25-milligram arm were still in remission three months after treatment.

The results released by the company, which have not been published in a medical journal or peer-reviewed, included side effects data showing a small number of serious adverse events. Overall, 12 patients reported treatment-emergent serious adverse events, five of whom were in the 25-milligram group and six in the 10-milligram group; these included suicidal behavior and self-injury. Just one patient in the 1-milligram group experienced a serious adverse event.

“The suicidal behaviors were reported at least one month after the administration of treatment and they occurred in patients who were essentially non-responding,” Guy Goodwin, Compass’ chief medical officer, said in an investor call Tuesday morning. In at least one case, though, suicidal ideation was reported early on in treatment, he added.

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That's the number of NYC school children who were homeless or living doubled up in the 2020-2021 school year. That's 1 in 10 students in NYC public schools.

About 101,000 students lived in unstable, or temporary, housing in the 2020-2021 school year, according to an analysis of state data released Monday by Advocates for Children. That’s a larger number of children than the entire school district of Denver.

More than 3,800 students had no shelter and lived in cars, parks or abandoned buildings, while another 200 students lived in hotels or motels, according to the Advocates for Children report. Another 28,000 lived in city shelters, while about 65,000 students lived “doubled-up” with friends or family. (Information was not available for roughly 3,900 students, the organization said.)

Though the rate was similar to prior years, the overall number of homeless students — 94% of them Black or Hispanic — appeared to have fallen by 9.5% year-over-year. That decrease could be due in part to a drop in student enrollment across the system, which lost more than 3% of its students last school year. Additionally, schools may have faced more challenges in identifying where students lived because the majority of children chose to learn remotely — an issue that advocates also flagged last year.

Homeless students were far less likely to show up for remote or in-person school last year. Between January and June 2021, attendance rates for students living in shelters were roughly 10 to 14 percentage points less than students in stable housing, according to city data analyzed by Advocates for Children.

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In liberal Portland, Ore., which is facing its most violent year on record, the mayor announced a plan on Wednesday to put 200 more police officers on the streets. His announcement came a day after voters in Atlanta and in Seattle signaled their support for mayoral candidates who promised not to roll back the police force, but to expand it. In Maryland last month, Gov. Larry Hogan announced $150 million to “Re-fund the police.”

Those who study the question say any declines in crime have to be weighed against the downsides of adding more police officers, including negative interactions with the public, police violence and further erosion of public trust.

And there is a bigger unknown: how police hiring compares with other anti-crime measures, such as providing more summer jobs or drug treatment programs, or even keeping the same number of officers but deploying them more strategically.

Alternatives

Perhaps the biggest drawback of the available evidence on policing is that it does not compare the benefit of more officers on the street with the benefit of expanding other measures that have been shown to reduce crime: drug treatment, mental health crisis responders, or summer jobs for young people.

In a recent survey of criminal justice experts, about two-thirds agreed that increasing police budgets would improve public safety. But many more of them — 85 percent — said that increasing spending on housing, health and education would do so.

Impact of adding an officer

For decades, scholars have acknowledged that local crime rates cannot be predicted by officer strength and police budgets. Sometimes a boost for policing is followed by a drop in crime; sometimes it isn’t.

History shows that homicides fell after more officers were hired 54 percent of the time, according to Aaron Chalfin, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied ways of driving down crime.

“Crime goes up and down for a million reasons that are completely independent of the police,” Dr. Chalfin said. “But we know, on average, if you look across many cities for many years, there is an effect.”

While crime rates and officers per capita vary widely from city to city, scholars have begun to try to get an overall picture by using data on federal policing grants that were established in 1994. In a forthcoming paper, Dr. Chalfin and his co-authors found that one additional officer reduced between .06 and 0.1 homicides per year — in other words, it takes 10 to 17 new officers to save a life.

The gains were not uniform. Overall, more Black lives were saved than white lives when police officers were added, but in Southern cities with larger Black populations the homicide rate did not budge, according to an early draft of the paper. And more officers made arrests for low-level offenses like alcohol-related infractions, which are not typically seen as contributing to public safety. More police officers may also mean that cities incur the cost of more police violence, more legal settlements and more protests.

Even crime statistics themselves have limitations — they are collected by the police, and the police decide what counts as a crime, said Tamara K. Nopper, a sociologist at Rhode Island College and the editor of “We Do This ’Til We Free Us,” a book on abolitionist organizing by Mariame Kaba.

The numbers that get the most attention are the so-called index crimes — murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, car theft and arson. They represent a narrow definition of public safety, and advocates of shrinking or abolishing the police have taken to pointing out that they do not include civil rights violations, violence perpetrated by the police and correction officers, or even failures by those in uniform to take precautions against spreading the coronavirus.

“In the end, crime data is always a tool of police propaganda,” Dr. Nopper said. “If crime is low, the police are doing their jobs. If crime is high, we need to give more money to the police. The police always win.”

Perhaps because crime rates are so hard to explain, they are easy to exploit. The spike in gun violence has not only prompted calls to expand police departments, it has given the police an opening to blame crime on policies they do not like, often with little evidence.

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Socialism is merely an extension of the ideal of democracy into the economic field

Eugene V. Debs