TV and Crime
An East Baltimore citizen suggests a freaky explanation for recent violence in the city.
An East Baltimore citizen suggests a freaky explanation for recent violence in the city.
East St. Louis, faced with budget shortfalls, will lay off 30% of its police force (19 of its 62 officers) after negotiations with the union failed. City residents and police officers worry the move will lead to a significant increase in crime.
Thieves are less likely to target brightly colored cars.
Unredacted, the National Security Archive’s blog, has posted Lee Harvey Oswald’s request to the Soviet Union for citizenship. “I want citizenship,” Oswald wrote, “because I am a communist and a worker; I have lived in a decadent capitalist society where the workers are slaves.”
Despite the recession, the Associated Press reports, U.S. crime rates continue to fall in 2009 compared to last year. Sociologists and crime experts are citing the economic stimulus, people staying home from lack of work, and even an aging population as possible causes of the drop.
The F.B.I. released its 2008 data on hate crimes in the U.S. The figures suggest that American hatred is on the rise, but not my much: only about 2 percent. The highest upticks occurred for hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation (up 11 percent) and religion (up 9 percent).
Tim Donaghy’s 2007 arrest for betting on N.B.A. games, including games that he refereed, shocked basketball fans. Despite his astounding betting success rate (70 to 80 percent), Donaghy claimed that he never fixed N.B.A. games but rather used insider information, a claim that the N.B.A., the F.B.I., and the U.S. Attorney’s office were unable to disprove.
A group of civic activists in Los Angeles plans to start giving “Gang Tours” — taking busloads of tourists through some of the most dangerous parts of the city — in hopes of “sensitizing people, connecting them to the reality of what’s on the ground.”
Gautam Naik provides an interesting and cleverly written piece on the search for a biological basis of violent behavior.
There’s at least one unexpected benefit of rising unemployment. More people are staying home during working hours, and going out less often at night. That means there’s less chance they’ll be burglarized.
GOOD produced this sharp info-graphic on murder rates worldwide. One interesting trend it doesn’t show: countries with lower murder rates tend to have higher rates of suicide. Take Japan, which has one of the lowest murder rates in the world — just 0.5 per 100,000 people. It also has a very high rate of suicide, 23.7 per 100,000. Jamaica, on the other hand, has an unusually high murder rate — 49 per 100,000 — and the unusually low suicide rate of 0.35 per 100,000.
Dallas’s police department changed the way it lines up its suspects for identification. Instead of the common “six pack” method where the victim looks at six photos at once, detectives (blind to who the suspect is) started showing the photos one at a time.
Of all the reasons anyone has ever had for getting breast implants, I’m guessing that no one ever thought of this one.
According to the FBI’s recently released second quarter Bank Crime statistics, bank robbers are most likely to rob a bank between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Friday; more robbers stated their demands verbally than by passing a note, and only 4 percent of incidents involved violence. The FBI also noted that, despite the recession, there were fewer bank robberies than last year.
I am writing this at 4:25 a.m. on Friday and I’m a bit woozy. On Wednesday afternoon, my body seriously crashed. On very short notice, my beloved spouse got me in to see to see a physician, who told me I definitely had a bad flu and the only one going around was the swine flu.
The good news is that I’ve been recovering just as quickly as I crashed. By Thursday morning, my 101.3 fever had broken, and while I still have a cough, the aches and chills are now largely gone. My body just feels extraordinarily tired. I tried going to sleep Thursday night without any cold medications.
You probably know already that 44 people were arrested yesterday, mostly in New Jersey, for corruption and money-laundering. They included mayors, rabbis, and assemblymen (oh my!).
The story is simultaneously vast and banal, seeming to illustrate every cliché of politicians and the people who seek to grease their palms. There are many, many angles to be discussed. A few thoughts that sprung to mind include:
Tokyo’s police force has developed a new method of fighting crime in the city’s Kitashikahama Park, popular with teenagers late at night. A machine emits a high-pitched frequency, which most adults can’t hear, from 11:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. every night.
When the crime statistics for 2006 were released, the news media had no trouble declaring that the next big crime wave had hit (even though violent crime had just ticked up 2 percent; property crime fell by the same amount). So what’s happened since?
I wish I had more details, and/or I wish I knew how true this story may be. But the point is that, like cheating schoolteachers or colluding sumo wrestlers, the people who steal money from banks sometimes leave telltale patterns — whether it’s a lack of vacation or a string of Thursdays — that point the finger right at them.
Violent crime in New York has decreased steadily even as the recession has deepened, further disproving the conventional notion that crime increases in recessions.
Winner became a lifetime criminal; Loser a detective in the NYPD. The story of these two brothers matched the findings of my academic research with Roland Fryer, which found no impact of a child’s name on her life.
Photo: Lorri37 My friend Tim Groseclose passed along this interesting passage from the book Scratch Beginnings by Adam Shepard. The premise of the book is that the author, having just graduated from college, sets out to see if — starting with the clothes on his back, a sleeping bag, and $25 — he can build that into a furnished apartment, . . .
| For 16 years, police in Germany hunted a female serial killer whose DNA was identified at 40 crime scenes, including six murders. Exasperated, investigators dubbed her “the phantom of Heilbronn,” after the town in which she allegedly killed a policewoman. A state prosecutor on her trail said he “just couldn’t believe that the same woman could be capable” of . . .
| Say your evil twin successfully completes a multimillion-dollar jewel heist but leaves a DNA-tainted glove at the crime scene. The police have your DNA on file, because you and your twin have both been arrested before. Lucky for you, your twin’s genetic markers are so similar to your own that no test can tell them apart. Since the DNA . . .