Posted on 03/26/2007 3:20:47 PM PDT by ricks_place
It is a remarkable con job.
Over the last six months, the Police Executive Research Forum, the chief executives of primarily large police departments, has gotten the media concerned that the country is threatened by a sudden upsurge in violent crime and murder.
A New York Times story on March 9th started the current round of hysteria with the headline that "Violent Crime in Cities Shows Sharp Surge."
An earlier front-page story in January in USA Today caused a similar ruckus.
One wonders whether the reporters ever thought of getting a critical comment for their story.
The Police Executive Research Forum report sounded the alarm: "The FBI statistics reflect the largest single-year percent increase in violent crime in 14 years."
It becomes a lot less scary when one realizes that the violent crime rate fell for 13 straight years, a total drop of 39 percent, before increasing in 2005 by less than 1 percent.
The Forum even referred to this minuscule one-year increase as a "trend."
Murder rates did rise from 5.5 per 100,000 people in 2004 to 5.6 in 2005, but they were a little higher a couple of years earlier — 5.7 in 2003 — and 5.6 in 2001 and 2002.
Murder rates have essentially remained unchanged since 2000 after falling from a peak of 9.8 in 1991.
With crime numbers such as these, it is strange that the Forum could get so many people talking about a surge, whether it be nationally or just in cities.
But what the Forum does with the numbers is instantly recognizable for anyone with even a little training.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
The same people call 20-year-olds with guns "children"
It becomes a lot less scary when one realizes that the violent crime rate fell for 13 straight years, a total drop of 39 percent, before increasing in 2005 by less than 1 percent.
Thanks to John Lott for putting this story into greater context.
Power of propaganda?
Anybody who subscribes to these liberal rags should know by now what they are paying for. It's not a product for which I have any need.
There's another hidden piece of info in the crime report that is also unreported because the government intentionally hides the info. More americans have been killed by illegals in the last four years than have been killed in afghanistan and Iraq combined. There's another subset of that datapoint. Most of the americans being killed by illegals are black. There's a small race war in the works.
Why don't the black media spokesmen get on this. They get their news from the same sources as everyone else.
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