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Crime Is ‘Down’
In the mid-’90s, I was assigned to a beat in SE Albuquerque with a large attractive nuisance. This was a huge park with rolling hills only a couple of blocks from Interstate 25. Because of its location and geography, the park was a magnet for all sorts of disorderly and illegal activity. I made it my personal project to aggressively patrol the area on the nights that I worked.
Unfortunately, my efforts resulted in failure. Crime skyrocketed in the park when I worked. Almost every night there were one or more offenses recorded in and around the park: DWIs, criminal damage, drug and liquor offenses, public indecency, outstanding warrants, park rules violations. Meanwhile, on the days I didn’t work only a small handful of crimes such as auto burglaries and thefts, aggravated batteries and homicides took place.
Now, y’all may have heard the good news that most Crime is Down! True, homicides are up, but property crimes are way down. Yay! The government is doing something right!
All of this is nonsense, of course. Crime in my park did not skyrocket, recorded crime did. The offenses listed above were documented because I patrolled the park and made an arrest or issued a citation for every violation that I observed. If I had not been there, the crimes would have still occurred. The drunk doing donuts on the grass at two in the morning would have driven away unhindered. A parks-and-rec employee may have noticed the damage days or weeks later, but probably would not have reported it to the police. A gathering of boisterous inebriates might be called in by a neighbor, but that’s a pretty low priority. By the time an officer was dispatched, they’d probably be gone. Unless things got really out of hand and someone reached for a knife or a gun.
In fact, crime probably decreased as a result of my efforts. I’d bet that just the fact that I was driving around, walking through the park or riding my bike in the area kept the riff-raff subdued. In the six months that I was assigned to that beat, not a single felony occurred in the park on a day I worked. On the days I didn’t, there were several, including at least one homicide.
The lamestream media has been trumpeting the “decline” in total crime, but, again, it is just a decline in reported crime. Let’s look at the nearest city run by Demoncrats near me: Austin, TX. The boobs in the city council took money away from the police department. Academy classes were canceled while officers were resigning and retiring in droves, resulting in manpower shortages. Specialized units, including traffic and crime-interdiction squads, were disbanded to “put more officers on the streets.” The result was predictable: Austin has recorded a record-high number of homicides already, with almost two months left to go in the year. Also, there has been a record number of traffic fatalities, having nothing to do with the elimination of the traffic enforcement units.
But the silver lining in all of this is that total Crime is Down! Why, even the chief of police is saying it:
Austin officials say crime is on the decline throughout the city
Meanwhile, in the real world, here is what is really happening:
Austin business owner repeatedly burglarized — here’s why she’s not reporting it anymore
It turns out that the police department doesn’t send out officers to investigate “minor” crimes anymore. Even when there are suspects, the department is telling people to do their own investigations:
If you read the story, the owner found a suspect after posting a video of the crime on social media. He turned that information over to the police and. . .so far, nothing has happened. How many times does this happen before crime victims get the message that reporting crime is not worth the effort?
So holding your fingers in your ears and saying “Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah, I can’t hear you,” to people reporting crime works. Crime is Down!
California, literally the bleeding edge of innovation, has another way of reducing crime. Prosecutors have stopped going after “minor” crimes and, coincidentally, thefts under $1,000 are now “minor” crimes. This has resulted in criminal gangs looting retail stores. For some reason, many large retail chains have started closing some of their locations in California. You can’t steal from a store that doesn’t exist, so Crime is Down!
Imagine that you’re an officer who has the time and inclination to aggressively patrol problem areas in his beat the way I did with the park in Albuquerque. He’ll be called in and raked over the coals because of the increase in crime while he’s working.
Even if what we are being fed is true and the decrease in nonviolent crime is real, the whole narrative is still repulsive. Our betters are saying “Sure, there’s a good chance you’ll be murdered (or die in a crash) due to our policies, but it’s a lot less likely that someone will break into your shed and steal a lawnmower.”
I’m sure the lawnmower will provide a comfort to your grieving family.
Published in Policing
I was just thinking … if snatching something out of a store and running isn’t a crime anymore, what is the status of snatching something out of someone else’s hands? One could just loiter around the exit, wait for someone to come running by, and help oneself.
This is the news behind the news. No cops, no crimes. We need more like you, Jose.
Well, you’d probably be arrested and prosecuted for “hate-crime” if the thief that you stole from is a “person of color.”
Cops aren’t going to show up. They’ve been defunded.
You know what else is a hate crime? Closing stores.
When the Nixon administration passed out a lot of money thru the LEAA to computerize crime data, recipients and elected officials complained that crime rates appeared to increase.
Retail targets closed, mugging targets staying home.. the pandemic was likely bad for crime.
Nope. Closed and boarded-up stores and restaurants were looted time and time again. Many of those businesses closed permanently. Downtown Seattle has numerous empty storefronts.
If a business doesnt file a police report for burglary – does insurance pay?
Depends. if you snatch something form a White Oppressor it’s just Social Justice and Reparations. A Trans Bipoc and it’s a Hate Crime and punishable by death by firing squad.
I seem to recall this was one of the issues in New York city in the 1970 s . Official crime statistics didn’t look too bad because people just didn’t report crimes, Since nothing would be done.
Criminals will take advantage of the lack of a police presence, and the lack of prosecution for committing a crime. Businesses that are subject to repetitive shoplifting as their losses increase will start laying off employees to cover their losses. Payroll, to include matching Social Security taxes is expensive. They will increase prices, or at some point close their doors when the losses are so great that there is no hope of making any profit. Their business insurance will increase, or they will no longer be able to obtain insurance.
Shoplifters will become more aggressive and will use force to prevent their looting, any force or expressed intent to use force becomes a robbery, but the Woke Soros prosecutors will not seek bail, or prosecute those crimes. Eventually those prosecutors will prosecute police officers if they use force to stop a shoplift that became violent, to include resisting arrest.
I wonder how they report that. Is an hour’s looting by multiple thieves a single crime? If there is nothing left to steal but they break in repeatedly is that listed as separate break-ins? The geek in me would like to know. A very long time ago, I had a summer job crunching crime data as a contractor working on a consulting contract with New Jersey. How (and whether) jurisdictions report crime is was rather subjective in those days.
When I was looking for side effects of the pandemic and of the policies to deal with it I looked at crime stats nationally and at home. Property crime did not spike as I thought it would –it has still been declining in general since the 1990s–but violent crime and murders in 2020 and this year are way up. I assumed that economic disruption would prompt a big surge in burglaries etc but apparently not.
Here in Maryland, Baltimore’s murders are keeping us well above national state averages. I think Charm City has moved ahead of arch-rival Detroit in per capita kills but still needs some promising young thugs to get with it if B’more is going to take the #1 spot from St. Louis. I am confident that lots of criminals are working to create the right conditions.
Because I can, I will quote from the great Theodore Dalrymple.
Ignoring crime serves a purpose, what purposes might be sought and does the policy work? The long term effect is destructive of both parties, so assuming some interest is served, what is it?
It weakens civil society so you have to rely on the government. It also weakens private property so you need to rely on the state.
Yes indeed. And note how the same people who ignore crime and protect criminals will zealously punish innocents who defend themselves.
This is also how you get vigilantism; there is an ancient covenant with the ‘state’ that it will defend its people and their property from the deprivations of others.
‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property’ is but one way to express this.
Citizens will have justice one way or another. It will be much less messy if the tax-eaters remember what they are being paid for.
I agree, but who drives it? I’m assuming ordinary Democrats just don’t know the effect, ordinary bureaucrats may or may not know, but don’t drive policy, they just go along. All our, and China’s, giant companies are mostly digital so enjoy falling costs, so winners become monopolies. Is this centralization, globalization just mindlessly driven by falling costs, or is it understood and exploited? Are we already run by this narrow gang of senior bureaucrats and the digital giants? Whether understood or not by those who run it, it cannot end well
You really don’t need to go that deep. A lot of this can be explained by simple laziness and incompetence.
Which is easier: Doing something or doing nothing? Dispatching an officer to investigate a crime, follow up on leads, write a report, and maybe arrest someone, or not bothering with any of that? Better yet, you can have the victim do all the work, and when they get tired of doing that and stop calling you, you can say “Crime is Down!”
John Derbyshire calls this the Easier for Them Association.
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And if hospitals stopped admitting sick people, “Hospital Deaths are Down!”
I’ve said for a long time that the societal purpose of education is not for teachers/administrators/etc to feel like they had a rewarding career and a comfortable retirement; and the societal purpose of marriage is not for any two (or more) people (or barnyard animals) of any combination of real or imagined “genders,” to be “happy.”