Posted on 06/12/2008 4:14:41 PM PDT by reaganaut1
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Falling crime rates have been one of the great American success stories of the past 15 years.
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Lately, though, a new and unexpected pattern has emerged, taking criminologists by surprise. While crime rates in large cities stayed flat, homicide rates in many midsize cities (with populations of between 500,000 and 1 million) began increasing, sometimes by as much as 20percent a year. In 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group surveying cities from coast to coast, concluded in a report called “A Gathering Storm” that this might represent “the front end … of an epidemic of violence not seen for years.” The leaders of the group, which is made up of police chiefs and sheriffs, theorized about what might be spurring the latest crime wave: the spread of gangs, the masses of offenders coming out of prison, methamphetamines. But mostly they puzzled over the bleak new landscape. According to FBI data, America’s most dangerous spots are now places where Martin Scorsese would never think of staging a shoot-out—Florence, South Carolina; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Reading, Pennsylvania; Orlando, Florida; Memphis, Tennessee.
Memphis has always been associated with some amount of violence. But why has Elvis’s hometown turned into America’s new South Bronx? Barnes thinks he knows one big part of the answer, as does the city’s chief of police. A handful of local criminologists and social scientists think they can explain it, too. But it’s a dismal answer, one that city leaders have made clear they don’t want to hear. It’s an answer that offers up racial stereotypes to fearful whites in a city trying to move beyond racial tensions. Ultimately, it reaches beyond crime and implicates one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades.
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(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
It may be that a lot of those places are significant junctions for freight transportation. Just a theory.
Illegal aliens would be my bet.
Dallas has experienced rising crime in inner ring suburbs, as the “inner city” outgrows the inner city and into the first ring of suburbs. It’s a growth of the cancer, as crime in the inner city is constant yet the criminals export themselves or the violence to juicier pickings.
She can't quite bring herself to say it, however. Nor can those administering the program admit they are responsible for an abject failure.
Instead, there is a need to spend even more money "to correct the problem" (that we have caused).
Yet, the problem is succinctly summarized here...
Truly escaping poverty seems to require a will as strong as a spy’s: you have to disappear to a strange land, forget where you came from, and ignore the suspicions of everyone around you. Otherwise, you can easily find yourself right back where you started.
Yes. It is a question of will. You have to want to escape poverty. You want to leave all the government programs that enable poverty behind.
Providing "services" and "assistance" to those in poverty will never lift them out of their condition. Offering incentives and opportunities is what it will take. Along with a recognition that many will actually prefer poverty.
But that strategy would leave a lot of liberals out of a job. And without a cause. The poor are absolutely essential to the liberal's self-esteem.
See post #6. Illegal aliens do NOT explain the problems in Detroit, St. Louis, etc.
Much research has been done on the spread of gangs into the suburbs. Jeff Rojek, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina, issued a report in 2006 showing that serious gang activity had spread to eight suburban counties around the state, including Florence County, home to the city of Florence, which was ranked the most violent place in America the year after Memphis was. In his fieldwork, he said, the police complained of “migrant gangs” from the housing projects, and many departments seemed wholly unprepared to respond.
I lived for a number of years in the Inland Empire, in Riverside County. As new cities were formed, LA Urbanites would move into these new suburbs. These were not necessarily problem people, but they had Problem Relatives, who would send their nephews to live outside of Gangland, and into the suburbs with Auntie or Uncle.
They would bring their Gangland connections with them.
Graffiti and crime based on LA gangs invaded the Inland Empire.
“You’ve already marginalized people and told them they have to move out,” he told me irritably, just as he’s told Betts. “Now you’re saying they moved somewhere else and created all these problems? That’s a really, really unfair assessment. You’re putting a big burden on people who have been too burdened already, and to me that’s, quote-unquote, criminal.”
So now reality must be assessed by a "fairness" test? Were I mayor of Memphis, I would have fired this jacka$$ immediately, on the grounds of egregious stupidity. There are few sins worse than deliberate blindness to reality, especially when in a leadership position. He is worse than a criminal, plain and simple, whose actions have caused more suffering than a whole project full of muggers.
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