Tag Archives: Crime

News

Murder rates rising in U.S. cities as police respond to anti-cop rhetoric / violence

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Crime rates in major cities, all Democrat-run
Crime rates in major cities, all Democrat-run

(Note: Chicago is one of the most anti-gun cities in the United States, if not the most anti-gun)

This is from the leftist New York Times, so I’ll have to separate fact from fiction.

Here’s some fact:

Cities across the nation are seeing a startling rise in murders after years of declines, and few places have witnessed a shift as precipitous as this city. With the summer not yet over, 104 people have been killed this year — after 86 homicides in all of 2014.

More than 30 other cities have also reported increases in violence from a year ago. In New Orleans, 120 people had been killed by late August, compared with 98 during the same period a year earlier. In Baltimore, homicides had hit 215, up from 138 at the same point in 2014. In Washington, the toll was 105, compared with 73 people a year ago. And in St. Louis, 136 people had been killed this year, a 60 percent rise from the 85 murders the city had by the same time last year.

Now, non-Americans might be tempted to think that America is filled with gun violence, but actually, the gun violence is relegated to the major cities, which are run by Democrats. And sometimes, like with Detroit, there has not been a Republican running things for years. Cities like Washington and Chicago have very, very anti-gun policies, so criminals understand that they can commit crimes with impunity – their victims are likely to be unarmed. The only thing standing between law-abiding citizens and crime are the police and the prisons. Unfortunately, liberals are opposed to both the police and the prison system. They want to handicap the police by crying “racism” all the time, and they want to release criminals from the prisons. Bottom line: in cities run by Democrats, there is no deterrent.

President Obama has been particularly hard on police officers, claiming that their attempts to enforce the law are motivated by racism. And Obama’s supporters are getting the message.

Warning: Strong language here.

Let’s talk a look at some rhetoric from a radio show.

Breitbart News reports:

One of the F***YoFlag organizers is called “Sunshine.” She has a radio blog show hosted from Texas called, “Sunshine’s F***ing Opinion Radio Show.”

[…]During the show, callers clearly call for “lynching” and “killing” of white people.

Callers:

They conspired that if “cops started losing people,” then “there will be a state of emergency.”

[…]Another black man spoke up saying they needed to kill “cops that are killing us. The first black male said, “That will be the best method right there.”

So there are actually police officers getting killed. Here’s one story from Reuters:

Houston-area officials on Saturday blamed the shooting death of a sheriff’s deputy on anti-police sentiment around the country over policing and race.

[…]Harris County deputy Darren Goforth, in uniform, was pumping gas into his patrol car on Friday night when the gunman approached from behind and fired several shots, sheriff’s officials said. No motive has been reported.

[…]”Our system of justice absolutely requires a law enforcement presence to protect our communities, so at any point where the rhetoric ramps up to the point where calculated cold-blooded assassination of police officers happen(s). This rhetoric has gotten out of control,” Hickman said.

[…]The suspect in video of the Goforth shooting appeared to be black. The deputy was white.

Television stations showed footage provided by police, from a gas station surveillance video that caught the ambush of Goforth, a 10-year veteran of the sheriff’s department, who left behind a wife and two young children.

Now it’s important to note that in this Houston killing, we don’t have the clear motive yet that we had in the case of the two New York police officers who were murdered. In fact, the shooter here has a history of medical illness. Still, this event will have an affect on police.

What happens to police officers in the face of these murders, and in the face of this rhetoric, and in the face of these Democrat politicians like Obama and Holder blaming police for enforcing the law? Well, the police naturally start to wonder whether it’s worth it to risk their lives so much.

In Alabama, one white police officer was so scared about being perceived as racist, that he let a black criminal take his gun and pistol whip him. The UK Daily Mail explains:

Alabama police are outraged after photos of a detective beaten bloody by a suspect who stole his gun during a traffic stop were shared by witnesses and praised on social media.

The suspect, 34-year-old Janard Cunningham, is charged with attempted murder for allegedly assaulting the six-year veteran following a traffic stop at a shopping center in Roebuck around 11am Friday.

[…]During the traffic stop, the detective pulled over Cunningham’s SUV and told him to stay in the car while he waited for backup to arrive.

Cunningham is said to have fled the scene after beating the officer until he didn’t move anymore. A second suspect was released without any charges

The suspect disobeyed that order, questioned why he had been stopped and then struck the officer in the head with his own weapon, AL.com reported.

The beating reportedly continued until the officer was no longer moving, with Cunningham then fleeing the scene.

[…]After the arrest, photos of the bloodied detective began popping up on social media, with some commenters applauding what happened.

Other Alabama officers were angered by the outpouring of support for the suspect.

Birmingham police Sgt Heath Boackle, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said: ‘He was laying there lifeless and people were standing around taking pictures.

‘If the tables were turned, and that was a suspect lying there, they would be rioting.’

So what does this all mean? Well, to me it means that I need to be very careful about where I am going to live, because I can’t count on the police to come and rescue me as much as I could before. They are seeing what is happening, and they don’t want to die for people who don’t respect them. What is interesting is that the epidemic of black on black crime is going to get worse if police withdraw. And I think they should really think twice about stopping crimes in places where they are likely to get into trouble. Eventually, people will get the message. I would also say that now would be a good time to move to states that allow you to own firearms, and allow you to use them – i.e., states dominated by Republicans. The Democrat plan to control crime is this: you can’t own guns, and the police need to be intimidated into not doing their jobs. And it doesn’t help that Democrats keep encouraging fatherlessness by paying women to have babies before they get married. Fatherless men commit more crimes.

News

Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy paper: gun control doesn’t lower murder rate

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Guns are for self-defense against criminals
Guns provide effective self-defense against violent criminals

Doug Ross linked to this study published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.

He writes:

The Harvard study attempts to answer the question of whether or not banning firearms would reduce murders and suicides. Researchers looked at crime data from several European countries and found that countries with HIGHER gun ownership often had LOWER murder rates.

Russia, for example, enforces very strict gun control on its people, but its murder rate remains quite high. In fact, the murder rate in Russia is four times higher than in the “gun-ridden” United States, cites the study. ”Homicide results suggest that where guns are scarce other weapons are substituted in killings.” In other words, the elimination of guns does not eliminate murder, and in the case of gun-controlled Russia, murder rates are quite high.

The study revealed several European countries with significant gun ownership, like Norway, Finland, Germany and France – had remarkably low murder rates. Contrast that with Luxembourg, “where handguns are totally banned and ownership of any kind of gun is minimal, had a murder rate nine times higher than Germany in 2002.

The study found no evidence to suggest that the availability of guns contributes to higher murder rates anywhere in the world. ”Of course, it may be speculated that murder rates around the world would be higher if guns were more available. But there is simply no evidence to support this.”

The authors also took a look at the effect of gun control laws in various U.S. states, gun ownership in rural and urban areas, and across racial lines. The long and short of it is that a small number of extremely active criminals with lengthy criminal records are responsible for the overwhelming super-majority of all gun crimes, and these criminals are psychopaths that ignore all laws.

The study also cited a previous report that was unable to find a single gun control law implemented in the United States that is proven to have reduced violent crime.

This is not the first time that a study in a presitigious journal has challenged the liberal gun control narrative. People who oppose guns oppose them because of feelings. Guns are scary and guns are loud, they say. That’s their reasoning. But if you actually look at the data, you’ll find that guns do reduce crime rates.

The peer-reviewed research

Whenever I get into discussions about gun control, I always mention two academic books by John R. Lott and Joyce Lee Malcolm.

Here is a paper by Dr. Malcolm that summarizes one of the key points of her book.

Excerpt:

Tracing the history of gun control in the United Kingdom since the late 19th century, this article details how the government has arrogated to itself a monopoly on the right to use force. The consequence has been a tremendous increase in violent crime, and harsh punishment for crime victims who dare to fight back. The article is based on the author’s most recent book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Harvard University Press, 2002). Joyce Malcom is professor of history at Bentley College, in Waltham, Massachusetts. She is also author of To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an AngloAmerican Right (Harvard University Press, 1994).

Upon the passage of The Firearms Act (No. 2) in 1997, British Deputy Home Secretary Alun Michael boasted: “Britain now has some of the toughest gun laws in the world.” The Act was second handgun control measure passed that year, imposed a near-complete ban on private ownership of handguns, capping nearly eighty years of increasing firearms restrictions. Driven by an intense public campaign in the wake of the shooting of schoolchildren in Dunblane, Scotland, Parliament had been so zealous to outlaw all privately owned handguns that it rejected proposals to exempt Britain’s Olympic target-shooting team and handicapped target-shooters from the ban.

And the result of the 1997 gun ban:

The result of the ban has been costly. Thousands of weapons were confiscated at great financial cost to the public. Hundreds of thousands of police hours were devoted to the task. But in the six years since the 1997 handgun ban, crimes with the very weapons banned have more than doubled, and firearm crime has increased markedly. In 2002, for the fourth consecutive year, gun crime in England and Wales rose—by 35 percent for all firearms, and by a whopping 46 percent for the banned handguns. Nearly 10,000 firearms offences were committed.

[…]According to Scotland Yard, in the four years from 1991 to 1995 crimes against the person in England‟s inner cities increased by 91 percent. In the four years from 1997 to 2001 the rate of violent crime more than doubled. The UK murder rate for 2002 was the highest for a century.

I think that peer-reviewed studies – from Harvard University, no less – should be useful to those of us who believe in the right of self-defense for law-abiding people. The book by economist John Lott, linked above,compares the crime rates of all U.S. states that have enacted concealed carry laws, and concludes that violent crime rates dropped after law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry legally-owned firearms. That’s the mirror image of Dr. Malcolm’s Harvard study, but both studies affirm the same conclusion – more legal firearm ownership means less crime.

If you still think that guns are somehow bad for reducing crime, why not check out a formal academic debate featuring 3 people on each side of the debate?

If you want to know why the Democrat parts of the United States have such high rates of violence, then you need to look at the enormously high out-of-wedlock birth rates in the Democrat parts of the United States. Democrats have no problem with having fatherless children, and they support paying people welfare in order to do it. No wonder they have a crime problem that’s caused by the fatherlessness that is caused by their own values and policies. When Democrats stop paying single mothers money to have fatherless kids, then the crime rates in the Democrat parts of the United States will go down.

News

Illegal immigrant released by Obama administration sexually assaults 14-year-old girl

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Should Keane Dean get amnesty?
Illegal immigrant Keane Dean

This story is in the radically leftist Los Angeles Times, of all places.

Excerpt:

A convicted sex offender charged last week with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Santa Clarita is in the country illegally and had recently been released on bail from immigration custody, according to federal authorities.

Keane Dean, 26, a citizen of the Philippines, was released in April on $10,000 bond so he could be free while he contested his immigration case. He had been targeted for deportation because of his criminal record.

The 14-year-old girl, who was found in Dean’s garage, told investigators that Dean befriended her at a grocery store the previous day, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Dean has been charged with two counts of child sexual abuse and is being held in lieu of $110,000 bail.

This was not his first offence:

In March 2014, Dean was caught inappropriately touching himself inside a Macy’s department store and was banned from the Glendale Galleria for three years. He was sentenced to six months in state prison for indecent exposure and 16 months for burglary, to be served concurrently, a district attorney’s spokesman said.

Dean also has a 2008 conviction for lewd conduct in public.

There are interesting quotes in the articles from people who agree with giving detainees “bond hearings” where they can be released if they post bond.

[…]Dean was released April 29 after posting $10,000 bond.

A Democrat appointed judge named Kim Wardlaw said this about the bond hearings:

“This injunction will not flood our streets with fearsome criminals seeking to escape the force of American immigration law,” Judge Kim Wardlaw of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in an April 2013 opinion affirming the need for the bond hearings.

This is Kim Wardlaw:

Justice Kim Wardlaw, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals
Justice Kim Wardlaw, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals

Before she was appointed by Bill Clinton, she volunteered to help his presidential campaign in California in 1991-1992. She later served on the Clinton-Gore presidential transition team. A few years later she was appointed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which many regard as the most liberal appeals court in the United States. She is a Democrat.

Now let’s move to a second case.

Do you remember how Obama is always talking about his DREAMers? These are children of illegal immigrants who got a blanket amnesty from Obama.

Breitbart News reports on another case. This time, a 10-year-old boy was tortured and murdered by an illegal immigrant.

Excerpt:

At a Tuesday Senate hearing dedicated to the families who lost loved ones thanks to illegal aliens, Laura Wilkerson gave testimony on her youngest son Joshua’s horrific death while some in the silent audience wept.

[…]“This was our family’s 9/11 terrorist attack by a foreign invader,” she said at the most pivotal point in her testimony. “It is going to take another life lost by a Senator, a Congressman, the President, even another of today’s heroes, someone from Hollywood before someone in a position moves on this.”

“My son’s name was Joshua Wilkerson,” she began. “On November 16, 2010, he was beaten, strangled, tortured until he died. He was tied up, thrown in a field, and set on fire. His killer, Hermilo Moralez, was brought here illegally by his illegal parents when he was ten years old, so he fit the ‘DREAM’ kid description. He was sentenced to life in prison, which means it will be 30 years before he’s up for parole. He’ll be a 49-year-old man, who I don’t expect to be deported. And I just hope he doesn’t come to live in your city.”

[…]Wilkerson read aloud portions of the gut-wrenching autopsy: “‘This body is received in a grey body bag. There’s a tag on his toe that bears the name, Joshua Wilkerson. This is a white male weighing a hundred pounds. He is tied up with braided rope — 13 loops around his neck in a slipknot. It goes behind his back through his back belt loop. It goes to his hands and his feet, behind his body. He has multiple fractures in his face and nasal cavity. His throat and his voicebox are crushed.’”

Wilkerson took a deep breath and continued, looking at the senators before her with a steady gaze. “He was kicked so hard in the stomach that it sent his spleen into his spine, and sliced it in two… The medical examiner said it was torture.”

She went on to attack the sanctuary cities which are supported by Democrats, and in particular, by Hillary Clinton.

I think the part in bold is interesting – about how nothing will change until someone famous and powerful is a victim of an illegal immigrant.

One of my favorite authors, British psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple, makes the point often that the effects of “compassionate” laws made by rich leftists are never felt by the rich leftists themselves. The leftists are insulated from the effects of their own laws. They live in gated communities where they don’t have to worry about being the victims of crime. The rich leftists pass these laws to feel generous without actually having to give away anything of their own. But the people who do feel the effects of these laws are the people in the lower classes. The poor people, who have to live with the laws and policies passed by rich leftists seeking to feel superior. And so, because the rich leftists need to feel compassionate and superior, we get victims like that 14-year-old girl, and like that 10-year-old boy.

UPDATE: The Obama administration on victims of crime committed by illegal immigrants:

The White House vowed Thursday to veto a bill to punish sanctuary cities, instead calling on Congress to legalize illegal immigrants as the way to solve the problem of criminals who shouldn’t be on the streets.

The threat came just hours before the House was expected to pass a bill that would withhold money from states or localities that don’t abide by a federal law that requires them to cooperate when federal immigration authorities request help identifying illegal immigrants.

It’s no problem. As long as it’s your kids, and not their kids. Because the important thing is that they feel good, and get the votes from their special interest groups.