I'd like to kick off the new year with some positivity. Check this out.
The rate of violent crimes in the United States has been cut in half during the past 20 years.
That’s according to statistics released in November by the FBI.
What surprises some criminologists is that the decline has persisted against the backdrop of two other trends long believed to lead to an increase in crime: The US prison population is dropping and the number of young adults, who are considered more likely to commit a crime, has risen.
But why is this happening?
Criminologists say the latest gains against violent crime appear rooted especially in improved law enforcement, rather than a drop in the number of teenagers and 20-somethings.
The “community policing” movement has brought beat cops into closer ties with the neighborhoods they serve, for one thing, and a data-driven focus on crime “hotspots” has led to successful prevention efforts in high-risk areas.
Isn't this exactly how the United States is supposed to work? I find it very interesting that this flies in the face of what I see in the mainstream media...
3 comments:
Have you swallowed a right-wing propaganda happy pill?
"Broken windows policing" is exactly what caused huge unrest across the country as people have protested the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.
Garner died because New York cops were enforcing the law against selling single cigarettes and Brown died because he was walking in the street. In both cases the cops, instructed to be hypervigilant against the slightest infractions in these neighborhoods because of the broken windows policy, wound up killing these guys.
And it's not just deaths. Cops routinely violate the civil rights of black and Hispanic youth by profiling and harassing them with "stop and frisk" policies in New York and other cities. Because "broken windows policing" focuses on certain areas, blacks and Hispanics are arrested and imprisoned at much higher rates than whites for minor drug crimes, even though drug use rates are consistent across racial lines.
That means rich white suburban stoner dudes get a pass while poor black and Hispanic kids get criminal records that ruin their lives forever.
Now understand, I have all kinds of problems with the Garner case, but as for Brown, you're a moron. Brown died because he was a thug and strong-arm thief who assaulted a cop and tried to take his weapon.
I think my biggest current problem cases are Rice and Gurley - but both of those go back to the issue of how badly cops handle their own weapons, so we certainly aren't going to talk about that here. Nosiree, because M&N believe that only police have the special training and temperaments to safely carry and use guns.
And of course neither M nor N are going to swear off the Drug War which is ground zero for broken-windows (and other overzealous approaches to) policing. Nope, can't let people decide on their own what to put into their bodies - by god, they might have fun and they might not show proper respect for authority and society.
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