Stick 'em Up!

One way to show how a new administration is restoring law and order is to falsify the statistics. Leading up to the Atlanta Olympics, city officials made the city safer, on paper at least, by falsifying crime reports.

This is nothing new. The "broken window" policing which suggests if you crack down on small crimes big crimes will be reduced. So if you clean up graffitti and fix broken windows, there will be less murder and rape. Pause a moment, and reflect on that premise. James Q. Wilson, one of the regimes most influential intellectuals, was behind this. It gets better: Wilson's expertise is in studying ants. We pay trillions for this junk, directly and indirectly.

Rudy Guiliani made this broken window nonsense famous as a tough law and order republican mayor of New York City. He cracked down on taggers and the murder rate dropped. Except it did not. His administration simply falsified crime reports. With republicans you do not get better security, you merely get more wars, too.

This comes to mind because I was in Los Angeles last week, and the city is sharing its crime statistics with the citizens in a neat new interactive online website. Problem is, victims fail to see their crimes showing up, to a very large degree. Here again, the success is ersatz. The LA Times is being nice in this report, stating crime goes 40% unreported. Properly stated, it should be phrased the crime rate is 67% higher than reported. (40% underreporting means of 100 points, 60 get reported, and 40 do not. 40 is 2/3rds of 60, so the crime rate is 67% higher than reported).

If we are told crime rates are low, and something bad happens to you, it is just bad luck. If crime rates are high, and something bad happens to you, then the government is to blame for not doing its job.

Personally I am not into guns, but I grew up around them and I think every adult male in my neighborhood had ready access to arms. There simply was not the irrational fear of guns back then we have today. To be much safer, we do not have to have all citizens armed, only a few will do the trick. There are always be a few among us who are naturally adept at arms, competent to use them. These few, if allowed, indeed encouraged to carry, would make us all safer. Right now most protection is provided by private individuals. If we want more safety, we need more armed private individuals. WAshington state is a "shall issue" concealed permit state, which means the state must issue anyone to carry a concealed weapon permit unless there is due process. California is a "may issue" state, meaning it is up to the sheriff in the county if he wants to. Perhaps this is why things are not so safe in California.

There is a business here, the star of the Billy Jack movies is pursuing one angle.

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