Isn’t she cute?
Amy Coney Bryant: Butter Wouldn’t Melt ...
Or maybe we should say: It Takes a Village to Get Away With Raping a Child.
This is Hillary Clinton in 1975. She was on her way to becoming a “feminist icon,” so of course she stepped up to defend a 41-year old man who admitted to raping a child — a twelve-year old child. There were two witnesses to the crime — another man and a teen boy who were in the car with the rape victim. The offender plied the child with alcohol and then raped her. ...
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:
From sources like that, you get contradictory numbers like this, in the Chicago Sun-Times: ...
With something approaching fifty years of economic and crime statistics consistently disproving any correlation between recessions and crime, not to mention the last 12 months of terrible economic news coupled with still-dropping crime rates, you’d think journalists might finally start questioning their knee-jerk pronouncements about “lack of opportunity” being the primary motivation for unlawful behavior.
But they won’t. Journalists simply can’t, I think, let go of the idea that young people (males, mostly) commit crime primarily because they are being unjustly deprived of economic opportunity. To let that idea go would result in nothing less than the catastrophic collapse of a myth on which rests perhaps a fifth or more of the emotional underpinnings of the fourth estate. It would require shifting culpability for criminal behavior from society at large, where journalists and policymakers are comfortable placing it, onto individuals who commit crimes (and in many cases their families and immediate communities, but no farther). ...
Remember this?
Well, according to the data that we have, there are some neighborhoods where the data don’t go along with what has actually transpired in their community. We’ve had reductions [in crime] in a lot of those neighborhoods. And then, some of the neighborhoods that we’ve had an increase in burglary and property crimes, those neighborhoods haven’t had a large outcry. . . I think they just respond to what they hear. And a lot of times, perception to them is reality. ...
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. ...
In Chicago, 225 people were shot in July, and 42 of them died from their wounds. In one night alone, a dozen people were shot; on another night, six men were murdered.
In Baltimore, last Sunday, 18 people were shot in five different incidents. In the Baltimore Sun, Peter Hermann and Arthur Hirsch profiled an emergency room nurse on duty throughout the carnage: ...
Chicago:
In Chicago, something interesting is happening as “twittering” and blogging and e-mail bring in first-hand reports that deviate from official versions. It is hard to whitewash incidents of violence and rioting when people are reporting them in real time and police are going back over their incident reports to compare notes later. ...
A subscription is required to read the study I talked about on Friday. It is titled “Murder and Medicine, The Lethality of Criminal Assault, 1960 – 1999.” Here is the abstract:
Despite the proliferation of increasingly dangerous weaponsand the very large increase in rates of serious criminal assault,since 1960, the lethality of such assault in the United Stateshas dropped dramatically. This paradox has barely been studiedand needs to be examined using national time-series data. Startingfrom the basic view that homicides are aggravated assaults withthe outcome of the victim’s death, we assembled evidencefrom national data sources to show that the principal explanationof the downward trend in lethality involves parallel developmentsin medical technology and related medical support services thathave suppressed the homicide rate compared to what it wouldbe had such progress not been made. We argue that research intothe causes and deterability of homicide would benefit from a“lethality perspective” that focuses on serious assaults, onlya small proportion of which end in death. ...
Summer is here, and as blogger Second City Cop observed, Chicago is already experiencing blood shortages due to violent crimes:
Doctors [at Chicago’s Stroger Hospital] say the facility’s supply of O-negative blood is dwindling. . . ...
Back in the 1990’s, Georgia Lt. Governor Mark Taylor made it a priority to build the state’s DNA crime database. He did this long before other states got on board, and for many years Georgia was rightly viewed as a leader in using DNA to solve violent crimes. Taylor was driven by his strong commitment to victims of rape and child molestation who had been denied justice. He did not heed the civil rights and convict rights lobbies who tried to stir up hysteria over using DNA to solve crimes (ironically, these same activists are howling over the Supreme Court’s utterly reasonable decision last week not to enshrine post-conviction DNA as a blanket, federal right, when 46 states already guarantee it, as even Barry Scheck admits: don’t believe virtually anything you read about this case on the editorial pages).
Taylor’s leadership on DNA databasing yielded an extraordinary number of database “hits” long before other states got their databases up and running. In 1998, only convicted and incarcerated sex offenders were required to submit DNA samples in Georgia, yet 13 repeat-offender rapists were immediately linked to other sexual assaults, and scores of “unidentified offender” profiles were readied to be used if those offenders were finally caught and tested. ...
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? ...
At the Investigative Reporters and Editors’ Conference, Ted Gest from Crime and Justice News had some interesting things to say about crime under-reporting. Murder statistics are usually considered the gold standard, statistically, since it’s hard to misplace a body. But maybe not so hard, since Detroit managed to “lose” 100 of them last year:
Contrary to FBI statistics, more than 100 Detroit homicides were left off the books last year, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy told the Detroit Free Press. Worthy said the Detroit Police Department underreported that 306 people were killed in 2008. She said the homicide number is actually 423. ...
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. ...
Why not spend the money actually trying the cases instead? Why bother having a justice system at all?
I found this quote on the website for the Larimer County, Colorado District Attorney’s office. It is a neat sentiment: well-intentioned, not overly ambitious. It is, in other words, a fitting description of the aims of victims’ rights laws.
It is also utterly untrue. ...
There’s no such thing as a crime problem. It’s just a perception problem, you silly hysterics. From the Houston Chronicle, which wants you to know that daring to be worried about crime is the only crime problem that matters:
In the words of a statistician, the decrease in criminality appears to have an inverse relationship, at least for now, with political rhetoric on crime, which has ramped up in recent months. ...
Atlanta is not the only city where recidivists with long records of serious crime are being permitted to avoid jail sentences because they are also drug addicts. From the Ithaca Journal, Ithaca, New York:
In a plea deal with prosecutors, a Groton woman charged with taking part in burglaries in three counties has been sentenced to time served, five years probation and ordered to attend drug court for local crimes. ...
With a hat tip to Chris, from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Fulton Inmates to be Released Before Trial,” by Steve Visser. It’s worth quoting extensively, to grasp precisely what is being done:
Fulton County court officials say they can save taxpayers $5.5 million a year by releasing suspected criminals from jail — inmates whom judges have balked at freeing because of the likelihood they would commit another crime before their trials. ...
In merely the latest of an endless series of proclamations that we must do something to get our prison population in line with other countries’, Republican Senator Arlen Specter and Democratic Senator Jim Webb have teamed up to create a blue-ribbon panel to rehash the usual themes: reducing levels of drug criminalization, freeing the mentally ill from jails, exploring alternatives to sentencing, and enhancing prisoner re-entry services. Their goal is to reduce the prevalence of prosecutions so that our incarceration statistics come to resemble statistics in European nations. Of course, crime, especially violent crime, is vastly more prevalent here; thus, higher rates of incarceration. But that subject is verboten. Efforts to avoid acknowledging crime in a discussion about responses to crime lead to convoluted statements like the following:
We are doing something drastically wrong,” said Webb, whose plan also aims to improve the US response to armed gangs, especially drug-related groups, as it seeks to bring the prison population down from about 2.4 million people. ...
Under the guise of news, the nation’s “Paper of Record,” The New York Times, is reporting on controversial efforts to release more offenders early or to not imprison them at all — as if there is no controversy and everybody simply agrees that letting recidivists loose early will save money, not cost money and endanger the public.
In an article titled, “To Cut Costs, States Relax Prison Policies,” the Times uncritically quotes both the Pew Center for the States and the Center for Effective Public Policy — and nobody else. But these organizations fail to count in their analyses the added costs of crimes committed by offenders who would otherwise be incarcerated at the time they re-offend. ...
On Tuesday, I wrote about the debate that’s raging over incarcerating convicts or releasing them to “community sentencing” programs of one type or another. Proponents of community or alternative sentencing argue that we save tax dollars when people convicted of crimes get to stay at home for therapeutic or rehabilitative interventions instead of being removed from the community and sentenced to prison terms. ...
From The Tennessean:
A college student is kidnapped, brutalized and murdered. A mother looks up from changing her baby’s diaper to find a gun pointing in her face. A 62-year-old man is bludgeoned with a baseball bat in a mall parking lot. ...
WHAT a difference a month makes. Or does it?
A few short weeks ago, Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington and Mayor Shirley Franklin were working overtime to insist that residents’ concerns over crime were overblown. “The city is safer now than it has been in decades,” the Mayor callously announced when the brutal murder of bartender John Henderson mobilized residents to demand more police on the streets. ...
(I will get to “Recommendations for the Courts” later in the week.)
Events are moving quickly for activists in Atlanta, a place where a weird confluence of crime, organizing against crime, and Internet connections have torn away the media curtain that ordinarily hangs between the public and public individuals’ experiences of crime and the courts — revealing the abject failure of those courts and our top elected officials to act on public safety. ...