It’s not like a lynching, or what happened to Matthew Shepard.
Well, actually it is just like lynching, and it precisely like what they did to Matthew Shepard, only three times, and using fire. ...
Is it time to have the conversation yet? The one where everyone acknowledges that crime is the number one toxin weakening economies, creating unemployment, raising the price of living and taxes, blighting education (charter or no charter school movement; Race to the Top/No Child Left Behind, neither, or both), denying property rights, and shearing the vector of life for tens of millions of Americans?
Crime wounds the educated and socially mobile, but it defines life for the lower classes. It creates winning and losing zip codes, feeds resentment, and forces working people to strain their budgets in a dozen different ways. It warps childhoods and corrodes old age. It destroys the value and even the point of owning private property. It forces us to constrain our lives — especially, women must do this. It creates and displaces populations — forget “white flight” — it never was just white, but now more than ever it’s about just getting out if you can. I recently talked to a young Puerto Rican woman who got out of St. Petersburg, Florida because of the violence (after getting out of Puerto Rico for the same reason) and is now terrified of gang violence in her new, previous rural, inland town, where a multiple shooting left two dead and 22 wounded last year. ...
Corso is talking about the murder rate in Detroit, which rose an unbelievable 75% in the city’s East Side last year, to the sound of a collective yawn by everyone outside the city limits.
The Detroit Free Press reports that the feds are stepping in to try to suppress more street crimes like these: ...
Probation instead of prison = more murders (link broken).
Sort of gives a new meaning to the Department of Justice’s massive push to defund incarceration and subsidize Prisoner Re-Entry instead: ...
I was going to write about good kids getting killed in the crossfire when I got up this morning. Then I read the Atlanta Journal Constitution and realized there was nothing to add:
One person was in custody Thursday in connection with the early morning shooting death of a Spelman College student hit by a stray bullet on the campus of nearby Clark Atlanta University. . . The victim, Jasmine Lynn, of Kansas City, Mo., was “walking southbound on James P. Brawley when she was struck in the chest by a stray round from a group of individuals involved in a physical altercation on Mitchell Street,” Atlanta police Lt. Keith Meadows said. . . ...
I read this Charlie LeDuff column last week in the Detroit News, and I just can’t get it out of my mind. Think back to when you rode a bus to school. Did you have to worry about not getting home?
Stand at Detroit’s most notorious bus stop at the northeastern intersection of the Southfield Freeway and Warren. This is the corner where seven children waiting for a bus were shot in an after-school rampage. There was a school beef on Monday, the kids told investigators. Tuesday was the shooting. School starts in 10 days and still no one has been charged. ...
Every weekday, I receive a useful summary of crime, policing, and justice news stories called Crime and Justice News, compiled by Ted Gest at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Considering that there are so many relevant articles from which to choose, Gest and his assistants do a good job of spotting national trends.
But, sometimes, reading through the report is singularly depressing, not only because crime is depressing, but because the trends in crime prevention that crop up regularly these days seem doomed to failure. ...
Seven teens were shot last week outside a school offering summer classes in Detroit. Three were in critical condition. A week earlier, another girl was shot in the chest outside another school.
Now the police are having trouble getting anyone to cooperate with them. “The taboo against snitching is worse than the taboo against shooting,” the Detroit Free Press reported yesterday. ...