The Wrong Kind of Fireworks

Celebrating our freedom while 41 people are shot in one night in NYC.

The headline from the Daily News: "41 shot overnight in NYC with at least 4 dead in citywide explosion of gun violence." Then I noticed this headline: "16 Dead, at Least 67 Wounded in Chicago Shootings This Weekend."

Maybe the headlines should include the phrase: "Bullets: The other Pandemic." Epidemic shootings are terrorizing numerous city residents and this is absolutely unacceptable. Do our politicians not care or is the problem that they are pretending that there are no solutions?

There is a cycle of violence in many cities that begins with financially struggling families who are forced to send their kids to shitty schools. Then the cycle moves to 1.3M students who drop out each year. Stir in the lack of comprehensive and free birth control so that people can plan when they want to have families.

Unplanned pregnancy and childbearing are also implicated in the failure of many young women to finish their college education. Research shows that 61 percent of women who have children in community college don’t finish their degree, and less than two percent of teen mothers who have a baby before age 18 get a college degree by age 30.
Then comes street violence and deaths and then to prisons, where we've decided that the best thing we can think of doing is to park people in prison for 10 or 20 years each, before we dump them onto the streets, insisting that they can fend for themselves even though many employers want nothing to do with people with criminal records, especially violent criminal records.  Our politicians claim that it would cost too much money to improve things, even though the prison-industrial complex is extraordinarily expensive:  $33K per year per prisoner on average. 

I cannot think of a better formula for hurting adults and children than the above formula.

There doesn't seem to be any political will to fund new creative types of interventions into any of these steps. It's especially frustrating that we won't fund (and in fact, we've been cutting) interventions at the early childhood step even though that is the best place to invest. That, in fact, was one of the first posts I wrote for Dangerous Intersection. Still true today and still being ignored today. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

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The Two Starkly Different Meanings of “Black Lives Matter,” and Political Ideas That Must Never Be Criticized

"Black Lives Matter" is a simple looking phrase, but it functions as a Trojan Horse. Many people don't understand that there is a big difference between A) stating the obvious fact that Black lives do, indeed, matter and B) embracing the controversial political agenda of the Black Lives Matter organizations. Just because one believes A doesn't necessarily mean that one believes B, but this conflation flies under the radars of many people who embrace both A and B even though the only part that they have carefully considered is A.

Consider this excerpt from a recent news article about Nick Buckley, a man who has spent many years of his life helping desperate others through a charity he founded in 2011, Mancunian Way, based in Manchester, England. The problem started when Nick dared to write an article:

In the article the 52-year-old started by saying: “Of course black lives matter. Let’s get this obvious point over and done with at the beginning”, but went on to criticise the political agenda of the organisation BLM which sought to repudiate the values expressed by Martin Luther King.

I am sympathetic to Nick Buckley's clearly stated concerns. Like Buckley, I am concerned that some of the political ends of BLM sharply conflict with the wisdom of Martin Luther King. The fact that Nick Buckley dared to speak up about this critical issue cost him his job and that is a tragedy.

In some circles, the phrase "Black Lives Matter" has taken on the status of an unassailable fundamentalist religion, which is extremely unfortunate. Whenever this phrase is uttered, we should be asking whether the speaker is asserting A, B or both A and B.  Whereas A is self-evident truth to me, B is a complex set of ideas, many of them ill-defined and/or problematic.

Every idea, especially every political idea, should be open to vigorous criticism and discussion. There should be no exceptions, for the reasons carefully stated by John Stuart Mill in his work, On Liberty. To every claim I respond: "Let's test it." To the extent that any ideas are declared to be sacrosanct, off-limits to discussion and criticism based on science, statistical analyses and the diverse wisdom collected by thinking people from the beginning of time, our democracies are dead.

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Undeniable Research: Cities Are Safer With More Police Officers

What is the relationship between the numbers of police on the street and rate of violent crime? In a recent Vox article, "The End of Policing left me convinced we still need policing," Matthew Yglesias offers some real numbers to counter rampant speculation we are hearing from the many people who are understandably upset with police misconduct. His conclusion: "One of the most robust, most uncomfortable findings in criminology is that putting more officers on the street leads to less violent crime.” Therefore, if you want to increase violent crime in rich and poor neighborhoods alike, simply remove police officers. Here are some specific cases summarized by Yglesias:

"Klick, John MacDonald, and Ben Grunwald looked at an episode when the University of Pennsylvania had its campus police increase patrols within its defined zone of Philadelphia, and used a regression discontinuity design to discover that crime fell about 60 percent (this time with a larger decline for violent crime) where the extra officers went.

Stephen Mello looked at a huge surge in federal funding for local police staffing associated with the 2009 stimulus bill. Exploiting quasi-random variation in which cities got grants, Mello showed that compared to cities that missed out, those that made the cut ended up with police staffing levels that were 3.2 percent higher and crime levels that were 3.5 percent lower — again with a larger drop in violent crime.

John MacDonald, Jeffrey Fagan, and Amanda Geller looked at a program in New York called Operation Impact that would surge additional officers into high-crime neighborhoods and found that a wide range of crime — assaults, robberies, burglaries, violent felonies, violent property crimes, and misdemeanor offenses — fell in response to the surge.

Richard Rosenfeld’s field experiments show that “hot spot” policing, where extra officers go to specific high-crime locations, not only reduces crime in the hot spots but reduces crime (in this case, specifically gun assaults) citywide.

Patrick Sharkey, a Princeton sociologist who is clearly sympathetic to the goals of the defunding movement, writes in a Washington Post piece arguing for a greater role for local leaders and communities in containing violence that “those who argue that the police have no role in maintaining safe streets are arguing against lots of strong evidence."

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Crime of the Millennium in Progress?

We seem to be part of an enormous psychology experiment. Will the citizens or any of their "Leaders" do ANYTHING now that they know that their government is defiantly and abjectly unaccountable and that a crime many levels of magnitude beyond the capability of the human imagination seems to be in progress?

https://twitter.com/Public_Citizen/status/1271099152706011137

Allow me to illustrate: $500,000,000,000 is $1M dollars per day for 1,370 years.

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A Utopian World Without Police?

This unhinged and dangerous hyperbole would drive out ALL investment and leave us with smoldering carcasses where there used to be imperfect but livable cities. Without police, who would you call when you are carjacked? Carjackings happen in my city neighborhood every couple months. Who is your female friend going to call when someone rapes her? Who will protect the firefighters when your house is on fire? Next time someone puts a gun to your head (which happens periodically in my neighborhood), is the solution to talk nicely with that hoodlum and reason with him? Why aren't we hearing uniform battle cries to reform police departments and demilitarize police departments rather than these disturbingly common demands to kill cops and abolish police departments? I thought that only Trump was capable of such nonsensical blather.

These messages seem to be the far left version of the Libertarian wet dream where all we need to do is abolish government and everything will automatically be great.

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