Saturday, January 12, 2013

Response To A Video About Crime Stats

Choose Your Own Crime Stats

I would say that the speaker leans toward a particular political position, although his statistics appear apolitical. How he uses them is slightly biased.

He does not address thoroughly how significant it is that the murder rate is so much lower in the UK/Wales, despite their violent crime rate being 3x higher. One could easily note the absence of guns for that.

And we do not know what the violent crimes are. Soccer hooligans or stabbings? It would help to know what we are dealing with, because violent crime is too broad of a statistical category. It is a convenient political category, not a sociological/criminological one. We learn nothing from it. Politicians simply use it.

That said, I do not disagree with him fully until he directs his comments against specific people, which makes him appear to have an agenda. He didn't need to do so. Keep us all listening...

His focus on urban crime, spot on in many ways, has been used as the justification for inaction before. I like his comment about improving conditions of poverty and jobs there, and hope that he means that, because the response to urban crime statistics in USA is usually white flight and suburban apathy. Those facts mean that the concentration of property tax wealth has shifted away from the urban center and taken the political will with it.

I live in the inner city of the second most segregated city in USA on purpose. I am committed to see the plight of the urban poor up close. The characterization of the urban poor (usually considered minorities) has been far from the reality. The urban poor I know want to work, they want an education for themselves and their kids, and they want to be safe. But they face massive obstacles to the same.

A recent WI study shows that the urban poor are working harder, for less money, and our urban MPS school system has been sapped of hundreds of millions in support. It's no surprise that the schools are not safe, lack resources, and that less than 4 of 10 black males graduate high school in this city. These kids no longer have working class jobs to fall back on, so they end up casualties, literally and figuratively. Causality is complicated, and they own some of their own failure, but one cannot be as dismissive as has been the political rhetoric about their plight. They're less to blame than policies are in my opinion.

Violent crime in 'da hood tends to be less random than one might think. In Milwaukee, improved policing has recognized that, and our crime rate has dropped. I am safer here in the 'hood than I am in the 'burbs in some ways. Still, we have underfunded our police force for years. We had 3x as many cops on our streets in the 1980s, and that coincided with a period of urban boon. A black male in Milwaukee made the highest wage per capita in USA at that point. That meant the quality of life in Milwaukee was high for the working class.

It is worth noting that this was during the period that we had a long tradition of Sewer Socialists who led the city. The government was notably free from corruption, and focused on municipal services. We were the place where the municipal sewer, the 8-hour work day, and many other current normalities were born.

The urban minority wants the same things, with the same resources available as the suburbs. But they don't get it. They get inadequate policing and impoverished schools. They get neglected and costly public transit, and often live in food deserts. They have to succeed without so many things that the rest of us have. In Milwaukee our poor ride a bus system which is fraught with violence, and pay the highest fare in the lower 48 states. Yet, 90% of riders have no other option.

Are we surprised when the urban poor fail? I could say more about the reality of the urban milieu, but I should simply say that I doubt that there are political leaders who will be honest about what it will take to "fix" the urban crime problem. We tend to believe myths about the urban poor, because it girds our sense of bystander syndrome. Entire political policy trends have been based on myths, like the "lessons learned" from Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, for example.

That all said, the issue of gun control on the table now is specific to the mass assassination incidents. Those aren't perpetuated by urban minorities.

It isn't disingenuous to discuss the issue if assault weapons or multi-shot magazines in light of what is a measurable increase in the same.

Police want this discussed. They're facing criminals with more fatal weapons, and the response of police to these events cannot easily match the speed of the violence they enable. Police departments are less staffed nowadays, with slower response times to reported crimes. Couple that with semi automatic weapons and massive magazines and it is a problem.

I would like to see increased funding to police departments, and beat patrols again in metro areas. That has worked in areas of deployment in Brewtown.

I would also like to see a ban in assault weapons and multi-shot magazines. Anything military-grade should be illegal to possess. There is no justification in my mind for any citizen owning anything capable of mass murder.

I am not opposed to handguns or conceal and carry, but I would like a strict and universal licensure-training program. I want someone to be able to carry across state lines with common restrictions.

But I do not support the straw sales or gun show sales of guns. The circumventing of the waiting period is problematic, particularly since we now know more about the profile of these assassins.

I also support people owning hunting rifles. 'Nuff said.

So I agree that we need to help the urban poor. I agree that people should be able to keep most guns. I agree that our crime rate has dropped. But I also agree with some others that want to consider whether citizens should own weapons that are capable of enabling mass assassination events of this nature.

Even with an assailant that has multiple small capacity firearms, they'd have to reload or switch guns. It'd be harder to pull that off, and it would give time to the heroes among us to step up instead of being shot dead.

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