Back to School: The Longer You’re Standing Still

August 31, 2009 Leave a comment

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. ... 

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Gang Outreach or Just Enforcing the Law: Chicago, LA, Atlanta

August 28, 2009 1 Comment

Will Atlanta be the next Chicago or L.A.? Those cities have been shelling out big bucks to “ex-gang members” and holding summits and negotiating with gangsters rather than prosecuting them.

Imagine the impact this must have in communities where these thugs live, where they now draw paychecks because they are/were thugs, and walk the streets empowered by their special relationships to certain politicians.  How does that not teach children the value of going bad? ... 

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Middle-Class Gangsters: Is Poverty a Good Excuse for Being a Gangster?

August 27, 2009 1 Comment

The subject of middle-class youths joining gangs was raised in both the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the New York Times last weekend, but in very different ways.

The Times, predictably, describes such youths as “swept up” by forces beyond their control, like their poor counterparts, as if they have no responsibility for choosing to commit armed robbery: ... 

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A True Friend To Crime Victims

August 26, 2009 5 Comments

Dominick Dunne died today at 83.  Dunne became a vocal critic of the justice system after his daughter’s killer was sentenced to a mere six and a half years for her murder — and served less than five.  Dunne’s daughter, Dominique, was only 22 years old when she was killed.

After burying his only daughter, Dunne lived another 26 years.  He used those years to expose the ways crime victims are denied justice in America.  In doing so, he was considered a traitor or hysteric by many in the elite circles he moved in, where killers are showered with PEN grants and praise, and victims are considered bourgeois, vengeful, and, worst of all, déclassé. ... 

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Judges Are Not Reclusive Woodland Creatures, Shy, Moss-Tripping Fauns

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When are judges who let murderers out on bond and release other violent offenders going to stop hiding from the public and start answering some questions?  From today’s (on-line only?)  AJC:

District Attorney Paul Howard . . . wants to determine why indicted murder defendants in Fulton County are being released on bond and why non-elected magistrate judges have been the ones granting bond.  Howard said 43 indicted murder defendants are out on bond. . . Fulton County magistrate Judge Karen Woodson granted [Antoine] Wimes $250,000 bond in March, even though the District Attorney’s Office and Pretrial Services officers opposed it.  Wimes was charged with murder in the July 2008 shooting death of a convenience store clerk. ... 

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What a Difference Seven Months Makes?

August 25, 2009 1 Comment

Remember this?

Well, according to the data that we have, there are some neighborhoods where the data don’t go along with what has actually transpired in their community.  We’ve had reductions [in crime] in a lot of those neighborhoods.  And then, some of the neighborhoods that we’ve had an increase in burglary and property crimes, those neighborhoods haven’t had a large outcry. . . I think they just respond to what they hear.  And a lot of times, perception to them is reality. ... 

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Empathy for Murderers, Contempt for Their Victims

August 21, 2009 Leave a comment

One day after the on-duty murder of Tampa Police Cpl. Mike Roberts, the St. Petersburg Times actually published a story bemoaning the killer’s hard life.

We learn that Humberto Delgado Jr. had insomnia, was good at fixing things, was a dad just like Roberts — well, not exactly, because he didn’t support his children and he murdered a police officer, but the Times is nothing if not relentless in its efforts to assert that offenders are as much the victims of the crimes they commit as the people they choose to victimize: ... 

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Not One More: Judge Cut Killer Loose, Then He Used Infant “as a Bat”

August 20, 2009 3 Comments

Atlanta Fox 5’s Mark Teichner is reporting that it was Fulton Magistrate Judge Karen Smith Woodson who released Antoine Wimes on bond instead of holding him in the 2008 murder of Nigerian immigrant Etus Obi Onyemaechi.  Wimes shot a young mother and either beat or “used her infant as a bat” during a home invasion Monday night.

Atlanta reader Paul Kersey has this to say: ... 

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Strategies to Disappear Crimes: Rape in New Orleans

August 18, 2009 4 Comments

Hat tip to Lou: an article that examines the New Orleans Police Department’s strategy for cutting the official number of rapes they report to the FBI: they do not investigate 60% of reported rapes:

More than half the time New Orleans police receive reports of rape or other sexual assaults against women, officers classify the matter as a noncriminal “complaint.” ... 

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Leniency Lunacy: Atlanta’s CBS News Tackles Recidivism, Judicial “Discretion,” and Fulton County Prosecutors Going Easy on Repeat Offenders

August 17, 2009 Leave a comment

Hat tip to Paul Kersey:

Atlanta CBS News Investigative Reporter Joanna Massey dissects the problems in the courts.  This is thoughtful reporting (here is part 2), and hopefully there will be follow-up on points raised by the story, such as: ... 

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Why Did Vernon Forrest Have to Die to Get Charman Sinkfield off the Streets?

August 14, 2009 5 Comments

Three men are now in custody for the murder of boxer Vernon Forrest.  Of course, two are recidivists with state records and histories of getting off easy for multiple crimes, and the third is probably just too young to have accumulated a non-juvenile record yet.  The man they killed was a world-champion athlete who founded a charity in Atlanta to help the mentally challenged.  How many times does the same sickening story have to play out?

Forrest’s mother told the Atlanta Journal Constitution she hopes the three men never leave prison again: ... 

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Everything’s OK in Here, Bob: The D.A., the Police Chief, and Atlanta Gang Story

August 13, 2009 2 Comments

I am still trying to puzzle out why District Attorney Paul Howard and Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington keep insisting that they do not need more resources to fight crime and prosecute criminals, while they also keep holding press conferences to warn the public that today’s criminals are more numerous, dangerous and better organized:

“We don’t have one person breaking into a store,” Howard said. “We now have eight people.” ... 

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Murder by Anti-Incerceration Activism

August 12, 2009 Leave a comment

From a City Journal article by Heather Mac Donald.  How the murder of 17-year old Lily Burk could have been prevented:

The recent arrest of a vicious murderer in Los Angeles vindicates—tragically, only after-the-fact—several policing and sentencing policies that anti-law-enforcement advocates have fought for years. . . ... 

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Crime Rate Up or Down? Thoughts From Around Atlanta

August 11, 2009 3 Comments

Is the crime rate up or down in Atlanta?  The Atlanta Journal Constitution, echoing City Hall, continues to vote “down.”  Their editorial board is sticking to the argument that crime is a perception problem, though they have thankfully stopped mocking victims:

[S]tatistics alone don’t stir many souls toward either fear or a sense of security.  What does get people going are violent shocks to their everyday world. Things like finding your home’s been ransacked, or facing a gunman on the sidewalk. . . If people don’t feel safe, a computer’s worth of data and spreadsheets likely won’t persuade them otherwise. That’s where human contact and conversation comes in, starting at the top and spreading to cops on the beat.  Perception can trump reality if people’s emotions keep them from believing that crime really is on the run. ... 

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District Attorney Paul Howard Should Do His Job, Leave Self-Defense Training to that Judo Guy Down the Street

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People in Atlanta deserve better.

Reeling from months (years, really) of life-altering crime in the streets, they finally drag the Mayor and Chief of Police kicking and screaming to some podium, where the two continue to deny that they are not doing the job of serving the people before storming off again. ... 

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Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe Questions the Sentencing Project’s “No Exit” Report

August 7, 2009 4 Comments

In the Boston Globe, columnist Jeff Jacoby has other criticisms of The Sentencing Project’s anti-life sentence report:

OF THE 2.3 million people in prisons and jails in the United States, roughly 140,000, or 6 percent, are serving life sentences. Of that number, about 41,000 – 1.8 percent of all inmates – were sentenced to life without parole. Both numbers are at an all-time high. ... 

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Risible Poppycock from the Criminology/Journalism Complex: The Sentencing Project and The Delaware News-Journal

August 6, 2009 1 Comment

It ought to take more than 25 seconds and two mouse clicks to find evidence that the media and The Sentencing Project are making stuff up.  It ought to, but it does not.

The Sentencing Project is a well-funded, powerful, anti-incarceration advocacy organization.  They pose as a think tank that publishes objective academic research on crime and punishment. ... 

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Is There a Tipping Point with Crime? A Tipping Point for Crime Prevention?

August 4, 2009 Leave a comment

In Chicago, 225 people were shot in July, and 42 of them died from their wounds.  In one night alone, a dozen people were shot; on another night, six men were murdered.

In Baltimore, last Sunday, 18 people were shot in five different incidents.  In the Baltimore Sun, Peter Hermann and Arthur Hirsch profiled an emergency room nurse on duty throughout the carnage: ... 

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Some Other Elected Officials Who Should Be Shown the Door

August 3, 2009 Leave a comment

Amazing, the amount of work it takes to get our leaders to the point of appearing to do their jobs.  But the job of getting elected officials to do their jobs, alas, is never done.  The mayor and chief of police have promised more police on the streets by next summer (and if this promise is not kept, they will be long gone anyway, so accountability is moot).  A weekend crime sweep netted 159 arrests, including many for outstanding warrants, which means that enough manpower was deployed to do what is supposed to be done all the time: pick up people with outstanding warrants.

In other words, in the last five days, the mayor briefly did her job by addressing the crime problem while only slightly denying it; the chief of police was spotted in the same zip code as his office, and law enforcement officers were given enough resources for all of 48 hours. ... 

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