Posted on 09/25/2012 1:54:47 AM PDT by sdcraigo
...Let’s look at guns.
After a recent spate of violent crime in downtown Baltimore, much of it caught on video, a crime reporter lamented at the over reaction, saying “crime statistics are down” but people just don’t know it.
To quote the poet: Something is happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones.
The “something” here is crime. There’s a lot more of it happening than reporters know or write about.
Occasionally this information escapes through the politically correct veil: The New York Times is just one of several large papers in the country to write a story about how police are refusing to take reports on some violent crimes.
A recent federal report says more than half of violent crimes are not reported — 20 percent of which are because people do not believe the police will do anything about it...
(Excerpt) Read more at thecoastnews.com ...
Crime WAS down. The past 6 months have seen a rapid increase.
The statistics say crime is down over the last decade and that this trend has continued during the presence recession.
The author claims this is not true because many violent crimes go unreported.
His claim is not true unless we assume, with no evidence, that the rate of reporting used to be higher and has recently dropped.
This article consists basically of an assertion that anecdotal evidence should be believed instead of statistics. A "feeling" is more representative of the truth than actual numbers.
Now I'm entirely open to the possibility that the books have been cooked. The pols and media are certainly not above doing so. But to make that argument you have to present something actually resembling evidence that the cooking has occurred.
Not just a claim that the evidence should be ignored because it conflicts with your feeeeelings.
Reference please.
When is 'National Cancel Your Newspaper Subscription' day? It's in the Spring, right?
I agree with you but I think the Oakland gunfire information is pretty damning. It’s impossible to know what the reporting rate of any crime is but that Oakland info is empirical evidence that the reports are a fraction of the actual crime rate. Of course it could be the case that reporting has always been that low. We just don’t know.
If the news reported on every armed robbery, stabbing, and shooting that happened daily in any medium or large city, it would fill the first three pages of the local rag.
I have worked plenty of the above that never made the news.
Politicians and police administrators, (alas, I repeat myself) are afraid to tell the truth for fear of their jobs or the citizens taking or demanding drastic measures. They also don’t want to get on TV because the media will edit what they say to fit their own agenda.
The media will cherry pick stories they want to work, easy ones, like the 5 killed in the last 48 hours in East St. Louis.
ESL is less than 30k in population.
here’s the study from the DOJ about unreported crime.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/2012/ojppr080912.pdf
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