New York City celebrates day without violent crime

[Bad_Doggie]

For the first time in living memory, New York has spent a day entirely without violent crime.

The city police department's chief spokesman said that Monday was the most bloodshed-free 24-hour period in recent history.

Not a single murder, shooting, stabbing or other incident of violent crime was reported for a whole day.

Despite a July spike in homicides, the city's murder rate is on target to hit its lowest point since 1960

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20536201

Are NYC gun and policing policies the right way to go?

Woof!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

What do you think?

 

[Bad_Doggie]

I think it's quite exceptional.

What do you think?

Woof!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

What do you mean by that?

 

[Bad_Doggie]

I mean this is the kinda thing that happens when you answer a question with a question.

To make it clearer, do you think that NYC gun laws and stop and search policing policies are having a positive effect and would they work in other US cities?

Oh that sounds very similar to the original question. What do you think?

Woof!

 

[Wat_Tyler]

I live in a city which is a former top-10 "murder capitol". We had a murder spike in September but have had a much lower murder rate for the last several years.


Firearms are every bit as plentiful, so I'd credit policing, and maybe that the bangers have killed off most of each other.


Of course, these could also just be downturns in the cycle, too.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I mean this is the kinda thing that happens when you answer a question with a question.

To make it clearer, do you think that NYC gun laws and stop and search policing policies are having a positive effect and would they work in other US cities?

Oh that sounds very similar to the original question. What do you think?

Woof!

They are racial profiling. Those are racist policies.

"...critics argue that it has led to hundreds of thousands of young blacks and Latinos being stopped without cause."

We went to war with Arizona over the same thing. I guess it is just who is in charge of the policy...

Remember, the Cambridge Cops acted "stupidly."

We have already steeled that issue, we do not want minorities stopped and searched. We want grumpy old white men, grandma and white babies strip-searched. They are all potential domestic terrorists. The worst thing that minorities can do to us is the occasional workplace incident. Your problem is that you cannot see the problem correctly from so far away.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I live in a city which is a former top-10 "murder capitol". We had a murder spike in September but have had a much lower murder rate for the last several years.


Firearms are every bit as plentiful, so I'd credit policing, and maybe that the bangers have killed off most of each other.


Of course, these could also just be downturns in the cycle, too.

There is also the possibility of simple economics; they might just move to places where they can afford to operate.

Perhaps too, NYC's solution is perhaps bane to areas around NYC.

 

[Wat_Tyler]

There is also the possibility of simple economics; they might just move to places where they can afford to operate.

Perhaps too, NYC's solution is perhaps bane to areas around NYC.

There's a Freakonomics explanation lurking in there, too.


We still seem to have no shortage of junkies and crackheads, though.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

This is meth country and the stupid one usually blow themselves up or asphyxiate from the fumes...


Most of them do not have guns because they sell everything they own to get the ingredients.

 

[Wat_Tyler]

When I worked in the 'hood more, I could sometimes figure out the drug houses, and usually the drug corners. There was one in particular which operated six blocks for a police precinct.


Then again, there was a crack-ho who operated at the busstop across the street from the same police building.


My Inner Cynic figures that the war on drugs is a colossal waste of time, energy, and resources. Legalize all that shit, tax it, fund a few rehab centers . . . and the price will drop like a rock.


Kinda like when whiskey was re-legalized in '33.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I agree with that.

 

[Wat_Tyler]

You would.


Which, of course, means you probably need a battery of psychological tests to determine if you're remotely sane.


We should do coffee when next I'm thata way. I bet we'd laugh a lot.

 

[Bad_Doggie]

I live in a city which is a former top-10 "murder capitol". We had a murder spike in September but have had a much lower murder rate for the last several years.


Firearms are every bit as plentiful, so I'd credit policing, and maybe that the bangers have killed off most of each other.


Of course, these could also just be downturns in the cycle, too.

From the stats I’ve seen in general in the western world the violent crime rates are slowly dropping, be that in places that have gun control policies or not. I not sure if there is a conclusive reason why that is.

So you would support such policies?

Woof!

 

[Bad_Doggie]

They are racial profiling. Those are racist policies.

"...critics argue that it has led to hundreds of thousands of young blacks and Latinos being stopped without cause."

We went to war with Arizona over the same thing. I guess it is just who is in charge of the policy...

Remember, the Cambridge Cops acted "stupidly."

Yes I saw that they are racially profiling I am uncomfortable about that. If you remember our “conversation” about the Tottenham riots earlier this year you will remember (probably not). me mentioning that those policing policies were directly link to those riots and previous riots.

Not only are those policies unpalatable, but they lead to resentment and victimization with-in those communities which, in the UK, has eventually led to explosions of violence such as in Tottenham.

However, the “end game” has to be to remove guns from the hands of criminals (yes I know that guns aren’t the only way to kill people and the report mentions that) and at least for a short period stop and search plus gun control can facilitate that.

Are stop and search policies a valid method of reducing violent crime? Has NYC gun control had an effect? Are either or both these policies having an effect? A better method perhaps?

Your problem is that you cannot see the problem correctly from so far away.

Perhaps that’s why I was asking for opinions, see how that works?

And yet you knew everything about Tottenham and wouldn’t listen to those on the ground, and probably still won’t. How does that work?

Woof!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Maybe it was longer jail terms.



I do not think that even in England (or Chicago) that you have managed to disarm the bad guys.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

You would.


Which, of course, means you probably need a battery of psychological tests to determine if you're remotely sane.


We should do coffee when next I'm thata way. I bet we'd laugh a lot.

KANSANS do not laugh a lot. We just go, yep...

 

[Wat_Tyler]

From the stats I’ve seen in general in the western world the violent crime rates are slowly dropping, be that in places that have gun control policies or not. I not sure if there is a conclusive reason why that is.

So you would support such policies?

Woof!

I don't, haven't, and won't support victim disarmament.

 

[Bad_Doggie]

When I worked in the 'hood more, I could sometimes figure out the drug houses, and usually the drug corners. There was one in particular which operated six blocks for a police precinct.


Then again, there was a crack-ho who operated at the busstop across the street from the same police building.


My Inner Cynic figures that the war on drugs is a colossal waste of time, energy, and resources. Legalize all that shit, tax it, fund a few rehab centers . . . and the price will drop like a rock.


Kinda like when whiskey was re-legalized in '33.

I'd go along with that.

Woof!

 

[Wat_Tyler]

KANSANS do not laugh a lot. We just go, yep...

In Maine, it's "ay-uh".


'Round these parts, maybe can drawl a third syllable into "yeah".

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

http://www.economist.com/news/brita...a?zid=317&ah=8a47fc455a44945580198768fad0fa41

You might also want to check on "(Mayor) Guiliani AND Broken Windows."

There may be a movement back to cities for the welfare structure.

"Ominously, there are some hints that crime rates are about to start rising again. Since 2010 the number of burglaries has increased slightly, while in several London boroughs the number of street robberies is climbing. Police numbers are falling rapidly thanks to government cuts, and youth unemployment remains high. Inner-city estates like Angell Town seem to have built in some resilience. But perhaps next time the suburbs will bear the brunt of the crime wave."

 

[Bad_Doggie]

I don't, haven't, and won't support victim disarmament.

Ok so stop and search, racial profiling then?

Woof!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

But hold on a minute. Up in Boston, they also had tremendous success in cutting murder rates in the 1990s. But they didn't focus on the broken-windows strategy, stop-and-frisk, or going after petty offenders. Instead they launched a project called "Operation Ceasefire" to cut gang violence. That project, as David Kennedy, a criminology professor at John Jay College who was instrumental in developing the programme, explained last year on "Fresh Air", had two basic prongs. First, it used community diplomacy to enlist respected neighbourhood figures to make it clear to gang members that it was their own relatives and neighbours, not the police, who needed them to stop the shooting. Second, it employed an innovative policing idea in which the most violent gang at any given time would be relentlessly targeted by police until it was effectively neutralised, followed by whichever gang then rose to the top of the list. This creates competition among gangs to refrain from lethal violence; it's also one of the key proposals in Mark Kleiman's book on how to reduce America's prison population, "When Brute Force Fails".

But hold on another minute! What's that you say, Eric Tucker of the Associated Press? Washington, DC is likely to see its first year in decades with less than 100 murders? Wow! In the late 1980s and early 1990s Washington had over 500 murders per year. Why the decline? No single factor, says Mr Tucker. A little of this, a little of that, a little of something else you probably never even thought of. Gentrification means the city has fewer dangerous neighbourhoods. Police have better technology and shorter response times. Community policing is better. And "better medical care, honed through lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, means patients who were once stabilized at the scene are more likely to be taken directly to the hospital, where they have access to improved blood transfusion processes." Also, the mayor is no longer a guy who smokes crack.

Anyway, this is a long-term nationwide trend. Murders are up in some cities, like Chicago, but in most cities America's urban violent crime rates are down radically since the early 1990s and still falling. And while falling violent crime is associated with a variety of different policies in different places, there's no one prescription you could point to. In fact, it's not clear how much of the decline is due to consciously pursued anti-crime policies at all. Nobody planned to cut the murder rate in New York, Boston or Washington by pushing real-estate prices up to the point where the socioeconomic groups more likely to commit murders could no longer afford to live there. Convincing arguments have been made that falling crime rates were caused by the legalisation of abortion and resulting decline in unwanted children. Others argue that reduced quantities of lead in the atmosphere due to the banning of leaded gasoline have played a major role, since lead stunts the parts of the brain responsible for judgment and impulse inhibition; studies have found the association between environmental lead and crime to be strong and statistically significant.

Basically, we don't entirely know why America's urban murder rate has fallen. As Philip Cohen points out, it doesn't seem to have much to do with rates of single motherhood. Beyond that, it could be several or all of dozens of different factors. What's the takeaway message? I'd say there are two of them. First of all, beware of takeaway messages! Lots of things in life, maybe most things, often the most important things, don't have explanations that can be packaged as a simple, coherent thesis. Second, given our inability to explain definitively why the crime rate is falling, we may need some scepticism about the recent push to demand scientifically valid evidence for the effectiveness of social betterment programmes. Random controlled trials might very well have found that the broken-windows strategy doesn't prevent crime, "Project Ceasefire" doesn't prevent crime, reducing rates of single motherhood doesn't prevent crime, family planning doesn't prevent crime, banning lead doesn't prevent crime, and so on and so forth; there might have been no statistically significant difference one could isolate for any of these things. And yet it seems extremely likely to me that most or all of these were good things to do! The drop in violent crime probably has to do with all of them. So we probably need to be a bit circumspect about demanding results from our cost-benefit analyses, and go ahead and do things that seem like they probably work. We ought to follow Bill and Ted's advice to be excellent to one another, even while recognising that when excellence happens, we won't necessarily know exactly why.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/demo...e?zid=317&ah=8a47fc455a44945580198768fad0fa41

 

[Wat_Tyler]

I'd go along with that.

Woof!

I think the parallels are eerie.

 

[Wat_Tyler]

Ok so stop and search, racial profiling then?

Woof!

I don't even support roadblocks to "sniff" out drunk drivers. Driving is not probable cause.