First, do no harm.
Unless, according to this nose-ringed Emory Professor of Medicine, you’re shooting a cop. ...
Of course this was in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. They titled it: A City’s Haunting Rejection of a Child. They’re literally jealous of big cities like NYC and Chicago and Los Angeles and Cincinnati (does the L.A. Times even still exist?) for one-upping them on rising crime numbers — and — celebrating government enforced criminality. So they resort to the lamest and most dishonest screed the’ve published in a while about our Haunting Rejection of a Child. Except the child is a 15ish (their term) violent carjacker who put his victim in the hospital as he beat her and stole her car.
She is the most selfless of humans: a nurse. ...
Isn’t she cute?
Amy Coney Bryant: Butter Wouldn’t Melt ...
As Georgia prepares to follow in Florida’s footsteps in privatizing child protection services, there has been a lot of politicking but little talk about the real issues that lead to failures to protect children “in the system.” Privatization in Florida has been a very mixed bag, with some counties improving their performance and other counties mired in scandals involving the private non-profit agencies hired to protect children. It’s reasonable to expect that Georgia will fare a little better, but don’t expect the failure rate to drop — or rise — significantly. ...
. . . lying to Congress about rape that way.
Fluke testified that she knew a fellow Georgetown student who opted to not report a rape because she was worried that her insurance wouldn’t cover the rape examination: ...
Is crime really dropping in Chicago? Not long ago, the public would have been forced to rely on some pretty unreliable sources for an answer:
- academicians who worship at the ‘the public’s crime fears are overblown‘ altar
- mainstream reporters who worship at the “academicians who worship at the ‘the public’s crime fears are overblown’ altar” altar
- Chicago politicians
From sources like that, you get contradictory numbers like this, in the Chicago Sun-Times: ...
It’s hard to find anything to say about this story that the New York Times has not trumped simply by writing it:
A Safety Valve for Inmates, the Arts, Fades in California ...
This is Marilyn Buck, cop-killer, friend of cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal, also friend (rather, indicted co-conspirator) of un-indicted co-conspirators Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, who are personal friends of President Obama, who paroled Buck from prison despite the fact that she had decades more to serve for multiple shootings and bombings, including the 1981 Brinks Robbery that left two innocent police and a security guard dead.
It’s a small world after all. ...
All sorts of uninformed people, like governors and editorial writers, complain that we put people away for far too long. Judges whine that their hands are tied because of the horrors of minimum mandatory sentencing. Even conservative anti-government types, often egged on by the statistical fibs and confabulations of the pro-pot-libertatian-wing of their movement, see the prison system as a bloated bureaucracy ripe for slashing.
They don’t know what they’re talking about. They have no idea what it takes to end up in state prison, and what types of animals will be released by their careless demands for “reform.” Chatter about emptying the prisons and creating even more (yes, we have plenty already) “alternatives to incarceration” leave the defense bar giggling into their thinning ponytails in anticipation of all the serial sex offenders and vicious adolescent gunmen, and murderers they’re going to be getting off in the next few years. ...
Now that fugitive child rapist “Poppa Love” Speights has been tracked down by the police (for the second time — after a Tampa judge actually cut him loose on bail despite his flight from the law on child-rape charges in 2008), maybe more of his victims will come forward.
Then again, that’s what was said the last time, too. ...
Benjamin LaGuer, who became a cause celeb among the media and academic demigods of Boston until it turned out his DNA matched the crime scene(after faking his first DNA test by substituting another prisoner’s DNA), wants out of prison again (see here and here for earlier posts).
He has fewer supporters this time, but Noam Chomsky and John Silber are still ponying up. Most of his fan club went into hiding or mourning when it turned out that LaGuer’s DNA was indeed in the rape kit — rather than grope towards ethical consistency by apologizing to a rape victim they had viciously dragged through the mud. ...
Barack Obama is arguably the most offender-friendly, victim-loathing president the country has ever seen. His judicial and political philosophies are reflexively anti-incarceration. His political career suggests a particularly disturbing pattern of disrespect for victims of sex crime.
In the Illinois state senate, Obama was the only senator who refused to support a bill allowing victims of sexual assault to have certain court records sealed. The bill was intended to protect victims from having their sex lives and other extremely personal information (medical and gynecological records) splayed out in the public record for all to see after a trial had ended. The legislation was written to protect the dignity of women who had been victimized by rapists, and then re-victimized in the courtroom at the hands of sleazy defense attorneys. ...
Rogue’s Gallery:
...
Stop the presses! It’s journalistic ethics week, and so perhaps it’s fitting that this first story plopped down in a big steaming mess on the pages of every newspaper that carries the AP.
Anthony Sowell, who was recently found knee-deep in the decaying bodies of his victims, doesn’t deserve to be labeled a rapist, according to the AP. ...
Jonathan Redding, suspect in the murder of Grant Park bartender John Henderson, suspected of firing a gun in an earlier armed robbery outside the Standard (Why isn’t it attempted murder when you fire a gun during a robbery? Are we rewarding lack of aim?), suspect in a “home invasion gun battle” in which Redding shot at people, and was shot himself (Two more attempted murders, at least, if sanity existed in the prosecutor’s office), suspected member of the “30-Deep Gang,” one of those pathetic, illiterate, quasi-street gangs composed of children imitating their older relatives, middle-schoolers waving wads of cash and firearms on YouTube: Jonathan Redding is 17.
How many chances did the justice system have to stop Johnathan Redding before he murdered an innocent man? How many chances did they squander? ...
From the Denver Post. Not exactly Girl and Boy Scouts, these “best of show offenders” chosen as the first early releases in Denver. Ironically, these records make precisely the opposite point than the one the Justice Department is making, which is that we are too harsh on offenders and “too vindictive” on sentencing.
Expect more of the same as Eric Holder gears up to throw massive amounts of money at anti-incarceration initiatives and activist groups like the Vera Institute, who do “studies” that all end up showing that we need to empty the prisons to save money. ...
It’s criminal apologist week, and no criminal apologist week would be complete without a deep bow to Jack Levin, the Northwestern* criminologist who has made an art form of claiming that some brutal, senseless murders are serious ethical and social problems motivated by “hate” — while others are just acting-out caused by “ouchiness,” teenage angst, and our cruel lack of interest in understanding where brutal killers are “coming from.”
You can see where this is going: when someone uses certain slur words (not all of them — not the ones about women) while victimizing somebody, it’s suddenly a much more important crime, which means other crimes are less important, in every sense. Convincing the public that they must accept this inequality is a job for experts, and Levin is the go-to expert for insidiously psychologizing away certain offenders’ actions while demanding allegiance to the urgency of crimes he deems hate. ...
The comments thread in response to this article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution contain a lot more insight than the article itself, which morphed from the purported subject of policing into another attack on the public for caring about crime.* No surprise there. While the criminologists try to minimize crime using formulas measuring relative cultural pathology and other number dances, the public hones in on the courts:
It is time that we stop protecting the young criminals – Start publishing names, parents names and city – Might just be that some parents will be so embarrassed that they will take control of these young people – Start publishing names of judges that continually grant bail bonds or m notes for “REPEAT” offenders. — “D.L.” ...
What’s the matter with the Atlanta Journal Constitution?
In the last year, the residents of Atlanta stood up and declared that they do not want their city to be a place known for crime, where murders and muggings are taken in stride. They declared that one murder, one home invasion, is one too many. They partnered with the police — ignoring the headline-grabbing anti-cop types who perennially try to sow divisiveness. ...
The Walter Ellis case is still unfolding, but there are already lessons to be learned.
One of those lessons is that police agencies around the country are on the verge of connecting serial rapists and killers to many unsolved crimes, thanks to DNA and re-opening cold cases. The picture that is emerging of these men will change what we know about serial offenders. ...
Is the crime rate up or down in Atlanta? The Atlanta Journal Constitution, echoing City Hall, continues to vote “down.” Their editorial board is sticking to the argument that crime is a perception problem, though they have thankfully stopped mocking victims:
[S]tatistics alone don’t stir many souls toward either fear or a sense of security. What does get people going are violent shocks to their everyday world. Things like finding your home’s been ransacked, or facing a gunman on the sidewalk. . . If people don’t feel safe, a computer’s worth of data and spreadsheets likely won’t persuade them otherwise. That’s where human contact and conversation comes in, starting at the top and spreading to cops on the beat. Perception can trump reality if people’s emotions keep them from believing that crime really is on the run. ...
It is good to see politicians in Atlanta responding to (as opposed to studiously ignoring, or denying) the crime crisis. But now that we’ve gotten their attention (no small accomplishment), how does the city really move forward to make residents safe?
The Atlanta Police Department has a fascinating series of charts on their website, showing fifty years of statistics for various crimes in the city. Go to this page and click on “Part I Crime: A Fifty Year Retrospective.” Immediately, what jumps out is that crime is down since that horrible time in the early 1990’s, when crack cocaine was burning a fat fuse through certain neighborhoods — especially the housing projects. If you compare 1989 to 2009, it is easy to say, yes, crime in the city limits is not as bad now as it was then. ...
Yesterday, while writing about the Times‘ willful misrepresentation of a child sexual assault conviction, I noted:
[W]hen I see an offender with a record of one or three instances of “inappropriate touching,” I suspect that’s the tip of the iceberg. I suspect the conviction is the result of a plea bargain agreed to just to get the sick bastard away from the child and onto a registry, which is the most victims can reasonably hope for in the courts these days . . . ...
The New York Times is the most important newspaper in America, and that is unfortunate, for in their pages, ordinary criminals are frequently treated with extreme deference and sympathy, even respect. Some types of criminals are excluded from this kid-glove treatment, but that is a subject for another day. For the most part, ordinary (property, drug, violent, sexual) criminals comprise a protected class in the Times. Even when it must be acknowledged that someone has, in fact, committed a crime, the newsroom’s mission merely shifts to minimizing the culpability of the offender by other means.
There are various ways of doing this. Some have to do with selectively criticizing the justice system: for example, the Times reports criminal appeals in detail without bothering to acknowledge congruent facts that support the prosecution and conviction. They misrepresent the circumstances that lead to (sometimes, sometimes not) wrongful convictions while showing no curiosity about the exponentially higher rate of non-prosecution of crimes. ...
Only 199 homicides in Chicago by midnight, June 30. This is, according to a police spokesman, the first time the city has dipped under the magical number of 200 homicides by June 30 in “recent memory.” By one less head of hair, but they did it.
199 homicides is actually two less than the 201 dead by June 30, 2007. So, last week, the city was briefly on track to having fewer than 400 murders by year’s end, before the holiday weekend, that is. “Only” 400 murders is a celebration, these days. But then came the 4th of July, and the Taste of Chicago street festival. ...
I, for one, think newspapers are being rejuvenated by their current financial crisis. The old-fashioned, insular newsroom, with its disturbing status quo on crime reporting (defendants are victims of society; victims are society, and thereby guilty of something) is becoming a thing of the past.
Over the holiday weekend, the Atlanta Journal Constitution ran this must-read story by Bill Torpy, in which he examines the real costs of retail burglaries for small business owners: ...
The newest hot thing in crime reduction is actually an old idea that has been tried again and again, at staggering cost, with little objective evaluation of the results. It is now being re-packaged as an initiative called National Network for Safe Communities, and several large cities are already signing on. The idea is to “reach out” to the most prolific criminals, the ones who control drug dealing and gang activities, and try to engage them in dialogue to get them to stop dealing, robbing, and shooting — before threatening them with prison.
To put it another way, cities overwhelmed by crime will hand over yet another get-out-of-jail-free card to offenders who already, in reality, have fistfuls of them. Cities will reinforce the status and egos of the worst offenders by engaging them in “dialogue” (predictably, some of these offenders will simply use their new status to grow their criminal enterprise, like this M-13 gang member/executive director of Homies Unidos, a “nationally recognized anti-gang group”). Cities will create and subsidize larger numbers of expensive, redundant, slush-fund “job outreach programs” and “youth intervention initiatives” and “community summits” and “lock-downs service provision weekends” — more, that is, than even exist now. ...
I’ve been writing this week about the predictable reactions to the semi-annual release of the Uniform Crime Report statistics.
In Atlanta, much is being made of the fact that violent crime is down. However, burglaries and larcenies are up — substantially. Why might this be? ...
As I’ve mentioned several times, most crime is committed by a small number of very prolific offenders. Remove these people from the streets, impose real consequences, and crime rates will drop.
But so long as the courts continue to let people off for their first offense, whatever it may be, and then for their second and their third and their fourth offenses, with a slap on the wrist and time served or probation, then the streets will remain dangerous. ...
The release of the FBI’s semi-annual report on crime has provided Atlanta’s pathologically tone-deaf Mayor and the Chief-of-Police-In-Absentia with another opportunity to shower contempt on every citizen of the city. What else could inspire the Mayor to repeat the words, “the city is ‘safer now than it has been in decades’,” given her knowledge of public feelings on her attitude?
Apparently, according to City Hall, a slight drop in the still unacceptable high rates of some crime in some areas, a rise in crime rates in other areas, and a sharp rise in property crime rates is cause to break out the bubbly. ...