Free Republic

The murder rate has fallen by two thirds since 2018, and crime has fallen by 75%, in El Salvador as it has imprisoned large numbers of criminals. The country has put nearly 2% of its adult population in prison. This is due to the anti-crime policies of its current president, Nayib Bukele. … Harsher penalties discourage crime. Crime in California fell significantly after California voters adopted Proposition 8, which mandated longer sentences for repeat offenders who kill, rape, and rob others. A study found those longer sentences deterred many crimes from being committed. Similarly, a 2008 Santa Clara University study...

An Aurora police officer, Daniel Bertelson, sent a department-wide email this month as he announced his retirement, offering some barbs and harsh assessments of the current climate for law enforcement. “I am leaving Colorado for palm trees and less communism,” wrote Bertelson, who spent 16 years with the Aurora Police Department. “Try to ignore the politicians and media,” he wrote to his colleagues. “They know nothing of this profession or honor; they’re self-serving con artists, well-dressed pimps and prostitutes at best.” The number of officers leaving APD has been increasing in recent years, jumping more than 60% from 2019 to...

When public policies have produced disastrous results, and when alternative policies have resulted in immediate, seemingly miraculous improvement, why would anyone want to go back to the earlier policies? Is there any reason to suppose that this time will be different? Not that I can see. The earlier policies -- a pullback from active policing and certain punishment, an open-handed welfare system providing income for single mothers -- were put in place in the 1960s, within living memory of some of us. The intentions were good. It was a time of high hopefulness that America's shameful history of racial discrimination...

The past year has definitely been tough on mail carriers in some areas. It’s bad enough that they have to visit so many homes every day, wondering if they’re going to contract the plague. But in some of the nation’s larger cities, they are also contending with mounting crime rates and assaults on postal workers. In the Edison Park neighborhood of Chicago, it appears that all of this pressure has finally become too much. CBS News in Chicago is reporting that some residents of that part of town haven’t gotten any mail delivered in up to two weeks. And when...

Over the last decade, California has led the nation in reducing its prison population. The state has shortened sentences and diverted some offenders to the counties for incarceration and supervision, transforming California’s criminal justice system into what supporters hope will become a humane model around the country. But amid the changes, crime has increased in recent years, sparking debate about the causes and giving ammunition to those leading a new effort to roll back some of the reforms. An analysis by the Marshall Project and the Los Angeles Times found that California’s crime rates remain near historic lows, but overall...

During the weekend of Aug. 4-5 (and the preceding Friday night), 12 Chicagoans were shot dead, and 62 others were shot and wounded, the Chicago Tribune reported. Before last week's mayhem, 1,718 Chicagoans had been shot since the beginning of the year, and 306 had been murdered. Adding to this tragedy is the fact that Chicago's clearance rate is less than 15 percent. That means that in more than 85 percent of Chicago's homicides, no suspect is charged. Chicago is by no means unique in this lawlessness. Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis and some other major cities share high rates...

In HBO’s The Wire (truly a transcendental television experience), there is a story line about an upcoming mayoral election and the concerted effort to manipulate the crime stats before the election to make the existing administration look better. Whether or not this was art imitating life, it replicates how things got started in Broward County, Florida, leading directly to the murder of 17 innocent souls in Parkland. It seems that every day more revelations come out about the collapse of the system in Parkland that failed to stop the murderer from roaming the halls of a high school with a...

Fifty years ago this weekend, a deadly urban riot began in Detroit. It started around 3:30 a.m., when police arrested 85 patrons of a blind pig -- an illegal after-hours bar -- in the midst of an all-black neighborhood that had been all-white 15 or 20 years before. The statistics are horrifying. Rioting went on for six nights, with some 2,500 stores looted and burnt, some 400 families displaced and property damage was estimated around $300 million in 2017 dollars. Forty-three people, many of them innocent bystanders, were killed. More than 1,000 people were wounded. The reality was even more...

The next time someone complains about the “epidemic” of gun violence, point out this awkward fact: The 10,945 firearm homicides in 2014 represented a 40-percent drop from the peak hit in 1993, when there were 18,253 firearm homicides in the country, according to CDC data. Far from being an epidemic, lethal gun violence is far below its peak almost a quarter of a century ago. This data comes from a report written by Terrence Jeffrey at CNSNews:

Image courtesy of The Color of Crime When I was doing research on homicide rates and attempting to determine what the primary factors were that resulted in varying homicide rates between states and nations, I came across the 2005 version of The Color of Crime.  The study looks at crime and tests hypotheses about crime and arrest rates in the United States that have been forbidden from general discourse in the media.  The topic is beset by unproven assumptions and political correctness.  The Color of Crime has been updated to use the latest data available as of early 2016,...

Across Switzerland, there was a surge in people applying for gun permits in 2015. Was crime a driver? Switzerland is becoming safer. Police recently flagged up that crime rates fell by 7% in 2015, reaching a seven-year low. In 2014, homicide was actually at its lowest level in 30 years. Most homicides are carried out with sharp instruments like knives. Between 2012 and 2014 homicides and homicide attempts by guns decreased from a high of 51. But in 2015, the number doubled - from 18 to 36. The number of serious injuries with a gun has remained the same since...

Thanks to the Washington Post, we have new entry in what is surely the fastest-growing industry in academia: bogus studies that purport to show there is no difference between black and white rates of crime. The only difference comes from the big bad racist police, prosecutors, parole officers, judges, juries, reporters, editors and others who are also in on The Big Fix and relentlessly pick on black people, For No Reason What So Ever. Even in black cities with black mayors, black police chiefs and black prosecutors -- like Washington. This latest headline from the Post tells a shocking story:...

Here at The Watch, we’ve praised Dallas Police Chief David Brown and his staff for the department’s community-oriented approach to policing, openness and transparency about excessive force, its rejection of law enforcement as a revenue generator, and its First Amendment-friendly approach to protest. Now, there’s some evidence of a payoff. Dallas’ 2014 murder rate was its lowest since 1930 — the year Bonnie and Clyde met at a West Dallas house party. And the Dallas Police Department’s preliminary count of 116 murders last year — there is one unexplained death awaiting a ruling — would be the lowest yearly murder...

Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy is still a cause célèbre for the right-wing, drawing praise from Tea Party activists, Republican politicians, and conservative media outlets. Kevin Williamson of National Review called him a “dissident” like Mohandas Gandhi or Henry David Thoreau, Nevada Sen. Dean Heller hailed him as a “patriot,” and Sean Hannity has praised him as somebody that’s “willing to fight.” This was bad enough as an instance of conservative recklessness when Bundy was just a lawless rancher backed by armed militamen. It’s even worse now that we know that Bundy is full of racist bones. Here he is, as...

When Jamie Fox gleefully spoke about getting to “kill all the White people” in his latest film, it was ignored by the Leftist media the way parents ignore the babble of an angry three year old. To Liberals, Blacks are tall children incapable of committing any wrongful act because their great, great grandparents were slaves. This paternalistic attitude may have been necessary and defendable for actual slaves set free after the Civil War, but by the dawn of the 20th century the grandchildren of Black slaves were moving into the middle class in some parts of the country. Woodrow Wilson...

Remember Clint Eastwood’s insulting Super Bowl commercial about Detroit’s comeback? Using the voice we have come to recognize as a source of “truth justice and the American way” he tried to fool us into believing Detroit was “too tough to die” and all that Democrat wishful thinking. Clearly Dirty Harry didn’t do his homework because Detroit is sinking faster than the Titanic and Democrat fantasies can’t change that reality. The Democrat infected Motor City is more on course to become “Greece” than a new “grease monkey’s” paradise. All of the make believe about Detroit’s recovery will come to a crashing...

SNIPPET: "Hard hit by budget cuts the NYPD has decided to fight spiking crime rates by reassigning anti-terror cops to street patrols in tough neighborhoods. But not everyone thinks shifting patrols is a good idea. Outside the Empire State Building, one of the top terror targets in the city, some New Yorkers were outraged by the shift and had some strong words for Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "He's cutting down? Hmm … why is that a bad thing?" said Francisco Santos of East New York. "Because we might get bombed again? Yeah, definitely consider it a bad thing."" SNIPPET: "The anti-terror...

The financial meltdown has produced a vast patchwork of foreclosed and abandoned single-family homes across America, accelerating the decades-long migration of our nation's poor from cities to the suburban fringe. In 2005, as rising property values reduced affordable-housing stock in inner-city neighborhoods, suburban poverty, in raw numbers, topped urban poverty for the first time. The trend will continue. By 2025, predicts planning expert Arthur C. Nelson, America will face a market surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (a sixth of an acre or more), attracting millions of low-income residents deeper into suburbia where decay and social and geographic isolation will...

Fjordman has pointed out that reported rape rates in Oslo are 6 times the level they are in New York. Comparing crime rates across borders is notoriously difficult, primarily because of the different definitions of different categories of crimes (e.g. is a suicide a murder or not ?), but also because of different approaches to policing: rape reporting to the police varies from country to country and it seems the way the police treat victims has a large impact on the likelihood of reporting. I was curious about the true situation, but unsure what to believe of the official MSM...

A man has appeared before a sitting of the Special Criminal Court in connection with the discovery of a bomb in a car at the Westlink toll bridge in Dublin. Martin O'Rourke, 22, of Sheepmore Grove, Blanchardstown has been remanded in custody. Another 56-year-old man who was arrested in connection with the bomb find is still being detained at Clondalkin garda station. The bomb was discovered in a car on the M50 in Dublin on Thursday night. It is believed it was primed for use. Detectives are working on the possibility that the find may be linked to a vigilante...