Category Archives: Crime

UPDATE II: Cop Incompetence & The Cleveland Kidnapping (Community Policing)

Crime, Economy, Free Markets, Government, Law, Race

The left sees the world through the prism of faction; facts are expected to align themselves accordingly. Thus to Chris Hayes of MSNBC, the central issue in the kidnapping and accidental recovery of “Cleveland’s lost girls” is society’s endemic, institutionalized, violence against women. The state’s endemic, institutionalized, violence against and indifference to its citizens—that doesn’t feature.

True to type, CNN Erin Burnett didn’t push the bureaucrat she interviewed too hard, today, when he insisted conveniently that the perp, Ariel Castro, 52—who had kidnapped and raped Amanda Berry, 27, Gina DeJesus, 23 and Michelle Knight, 32, and imprisoned them for about a decade—ought to be the focus of ire, and not the police department.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

By the way, if Castro is on suicide watch for some strange reason, BBC News’ Tara McKelvey should be on loon watch. She is busy breaking down the amount of attention the victims got from authorities and media based on the color of their skin. (The truth: Michelle Knight, whom I believe is white—she vanished in 2002—got almost no attention.)

“Ignoring adult missing persons reports seems to have been a de facto departmental policy [in Cleveland] for many years,” reports Slate’s Justin Peters, who, like most liberals, blames budgetary cuts (no amount of taxpayer money is ever enough for these people), rather than the state’s inability to allocate resources efficiently, and with the aim of pleasing “clients,” as the private sector is forced to do.

Government outfits organize around the optimization of the political needs of union members and other sectional interests. It’s the nature of the bureaucratic beast. The needs of the communities they are supposed to serve come last.

Writes Mark Naymik, of The Plain Dealer:

…the hum of criticism on Seymour Avenue is about the subtle signs, such as the lowered shades or odd behavior of Castro and how he never entertained guests.
These are the kinds of signs that police officers who patrol a specific beat over time might notice or hear about from neighbors. But that kind of patrol disappeared when community policing ended.
On Tuesday, I talked with a couple of community activists with years of perspective on police response to the missing persons: Delores Walton and Ruth Standiford. They hound police and are frequent critics as members of the Task Force for Community Mobilization and Peace in the Hood.

UPDATED I: Michael Maier on Facebook: Yes. Community policing was the way it once was when I was a kid (you knew your local policeman). But as the communities cops must police have become more “diverse” and menacing, and less recognizable, police, understandably, prefer to stay way.

UPDATED II: On Police efforts Via PBS:

RAY SUAREZ: There was a steady drumbeat of stories coming out of that West Cleveland neighborhood talking about attempts to tell the police over the years, attempts to report Ariel Castro for various infractions.
Did the police handle that today in the press conference?
PETER KROUSE: I did not hear the entire press conference, but I believe they did say that they did everything they could.
In fact, yes, I know they did. They said that they investigated every lead that they knew of. And I know we have reported in The Plain Dealer a lot of the efforts that they went to, to try and find these girls. One of the officials said that, in hindsight, you know, they may discover that there was something that they missed, but that it would be hindsight. It was not — it wasn’t anything that they could pinpoint.
These cases — at least in the case of Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, the two who were abducted as teenagers, those cases were pretty well publicized. And the efforts by the police to find some answers were pretty well publicized, too.

UPDATED: No Amanda-Knox Accolades For Jodi Arias (The Arias Appeal)

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, Law, Reason

Fortunately for justice, the jurors sitting in judgement of Jodi Arias, a morally solipsistic and self-adoring sociopath (who sang, did tantric yoga, giggled and chanted to herself sotto voce, alone in the interrogation room), were not required to grapple with circumstantial evidence, which demands a level of abstraction in thinking that jurors in the Age of the Idiot are incapable of.

Because there was never any question about Arias’ culpability, she was found guilty of first degree murder. Hers is, moreover, a foolproof case for the death penalty.

Arias’ jurors stood out for the hundreds of wordy and worthless questions they had posed to this defendant. For a while I even worried that the woman who butchered boyfriend Travis Alexander in his home would get off lightly with second-degree murder.

Anything seemed possible after Casey Anthony.

It took 12 idiots 11 hours to decide to exonerate the (ALLEGEDLY) filicidal Casey Anthony, who was found “not guilty of first-degree murder and the other most serious charges against her in the 2008 death of her 2-year-old daughter,” Caylee Marie Anthony. (CNN)

The evidence was overwhelming, if circumstantial (as in most murder cases). The prosecution presented the more intelligent, rational sequence of events, where motive, opportunity, and evidence all stacked-up against the sociopathic Casey Anthony.

In the Age of the Idiot, the average individual seldom reads; he knows only what he sees. If he can’t picture something, he certainly cannot think about it in the abstract. We all “know, “from watching, CSI, that if a crime doesn’t happen as depicted in such series—where ample samples of DNA and incriminating footage always materialize —you must acquit.

Even though there was no YouTube of Travis Alexander torture, it was impossible not to picture what the poor man endured before expiring in agony. RIP.

UPDATE (8/5): THE ARIAS APPEAL. You know me. Unlike the misleading Mouths you watch on TV, or listen to on radio, year-in; year-out—I am brutally honest. With myself too. Amanda Knox is of low moral character. She’s a histrionic phony, and it comes across clearly in her victory interviews. I know it in every fiber of my being.

Jodi Arias, on the other hand, has the absolute ability to fool me. She is a softly spoken, highly intelligent woman, who speaks grammatically—and most certainly not in the staccato, truncated tart tones of the average American woman. (Good use of adjectives too …) Arias thinks on her feet and comes across as a refined lady.

This is scary. When I listen to the interview she gave a Fox New affiliate, I can’t help … feeling for Jodi Arias.

O’Reilly Embarrasses Our John Stossel. Yes, It Happened.

Crime, GUNS, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, libertarianism, Political Correctness, Race

It doesn’t often happen that Bill O’Reilly makes our John Stossel look, well, silly. But “Billy” did just that (April 31). I can’t find the TV clip, but when asked to explain why blacks were vastly overrepresented in violent crime statistics, Mr. Stossel, essentially, came up with the standard libertarian reply: The state made them do the crimes. As I put this reasoning in “Beware of ‘Absolut’ Libertarian Lunacy”:

“For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society, and hard-core libertarians saddle the state. ‘The State made me do it’ is how Stossel’s social determinism can be summed-up.” (June 6, 2009)

Stossel Matters Segment
What is the root cause of violence in Chicago?
Guests: John Stossel

Last year Chicago had more than 500 murders; the vast majority of both victims and killers were black males. The Factor asked John Stossel to evaluate the stats. “It’s wrong to focus on Chicago,” Stossel asserted, “because other cities are worse and it’s also wrong to focus on race. It’s much more your fault because if you weren’t supporting the drug war the drug laws would go away and most of this crime would go away.” Stossel turned to the fact that most violent crimes are committed by blacks and Hispanics. “Monica Crowley talked about the wreckage of liberalism and you talk about welfare chaos. We’ve sent the message that you’re a victim and you can’t participate in the white capitalist world. People used to lift themselves out of the ghetto but now they’re being told that they can’t.” …

I wonder if John Stossel “enfeebles his own kids with PC pieties,” rather than warn them of dangers they may face, as described in “Sacrificing Kids To PC Pietism.”

UPDATE II: Living in Police State USA And … Loving It (Economic Inefficiencies)

Constitution, Crime, Fascism, Homeland Security, Law, Military, Private Property

“Not only did the militarized domestic law enforcement complex put the City of Boston under martial law, but nobody seems to have found it out of the ordinary, much less outrageous,” writes fellow libertarian Thomas Mullen.

“Yes, a few journalists … raised a finger. But, for the most part, nobody seemed to mind that the entire city was under military siege, complete with paramilitary units in full battle gear, battlefield ordinance and tanks. Tanks!”

“How did we get here? 238 years ago to the day, the inhabitants of the very same city started a war and seceded from their union over a mere infantry brigade attempting to disarm them. Now they cheer those who violate their rights much worse than the British ever did.”

“When Lee Harvey Oswald was similarly suspected of killing a police officer after assassinating the President of the United States, Dallas was not put under martial law. No tanks rolled through the streets. Oswald was armed at the time of his arrest and attempted to shoot the arresting officer, whose thumb stopped the hammer of Oswald’s pistol from discharging the weapon at point blank range.”

“It is noteworthy that the military siege was called off several hours before Tsarnaev was captured. In the end, he was found and taken into custody by the same methods that any other criminal has been for most of U.S. history.”

“So, there was no cause and effect relationship between the state show of power and the apprehension of the suspect. …”

MORE FROM MULLEN @ The Washington Times Community Pages.

UPDATE I: ECONOMIC INEFFICIENCIES. And what about the economic inefficiencies of the public production of law, so to speak? The costs of this operation in proportion to the dangers posed?!!!! Imagine what a dozen or so private hires (SEALS in the employ of the private sector) would have accomplished by stealth, and while being held to the standards of a private company: “You do damage to innocents and property, you get sued.”

UPDATE II: Updated: As to efficiencies, in case you forgot, it took “100,000 U.S. Troops To Find Osama bin Laden.”