We’ve all seen CSI, where within an hour two or three impossible cases are pieced together and there is an arrest headed for conviction. Or Law and Order, where they usually limit themselves to one case. The reality is different. Despite decades of law and orderism breaking out all over the United States, it is more possible to get away with a murder now than before.

Well it is a myth, and one which favors the right wing, because it creates the impression that modern police work is better. It’s not, the old police departments had more murders to deal with, and they had a better rate of clearing them by arrest. Now some of these clears as we find out later, was because they arrested the wrong person, but not by the proportion that we see a drop in solving crims.

Consider the following from the Department of Justice:

A Message from OVW Director, Cindy Dyer

January is stalking awareness month—an important time for us to renew our commitment to raising awareness about this serious crime. “Although often trivialized, stalking is a crime in every state and we must do more to protect the victims who suffer from this crime. During the month of January, designated as Stalking Awareness month, the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) is asking for everyone’s help to increase awareness about stalking and share resources. Working together we can make a difference in identifying, preventing and stopping this crime.”

The Office on Violence Against Women supports the National Center for Victims of Crime and the Stalking Resource Center. The on-line Stalking Resource Center provides much needed information including: assistance to victims; various types of stalking awareness materials, including downloadable posters; and available hotlines.

Statistics from the National Violence Against Women Survey tell us that approximately 1.5 million people are stalked every year in the United States and 4 out of 5 of those victims are women. Most often, female victims were stalked by an intimate partner. There is a strong correlation between intimate partner stalking and the related crimes of domestic violence and sexual assault.

It is important to educate everyone about the types of stalking behaviors. Stalking can include repeated phone calls, following, damage to property or homes, and any other action that controls or frightens someone. Increasingly, more individuals are engaged in “cyberstalking” by using the internet, chat rooms, message boards, and electronic tracking devices to harass their victims. Any form of stalking can be terrifying, no matter what the age of the victim, or whether the victim knows the stalker or not.

Education and safety planning is critical to the prevention and detection of this serious crime. OVW is committed to keeping stalking victims safe and holding stalkers accountable for their deplorable actions—-not just in January, but in every month of the year. Please display the posters, information, and websites on items that you may use during January. I thank you for partnering with OVW to advance the awareness of the impact of stalking and its tolls on victims, families, and communities.

That’s 1.2 million people stalked. Or something approaching 1% of the above childhood female population of the United States. This is the raw material of fear and murder.

Now let’s look at this crown jewel of violence: murder. At first the statistic that there is a dropping rate of murder by “an intimate” of the victim seems like cause for celebration. However, this is because the murder rate as a whole has dropped as the population has aged. It turns out that much of the drop is a drop in men murdered by someone with an intimate relationship.

Men have never been safer. However, the proportion of women who have been murdered by someone intimate has show a dramatic increase since 1995. That’s because in the 1990’s murder rates fell, while murders by intimates has not fallen by as much. While the economy clearly makes it less likely for murder to occur, it does not dent domestic and personal violence by as much.

Looking further at this, the reason men are safer? Fewer guns. Gun control disproportionately saves men. One could speculate because women are generally weaker than men, and a fire arm more likely to make it murder possible.

We’ve all seen or heard of CSI, well the reality from this is that instead, more people are being killed by we don’t know who.

What this should tell us is that “stranger murder” has started to rise since 1999. That’s to some extent the bad economy, and to some extent the echo boom. But what’s more troubling is the rise in “unknonw.” That’s the flip side of no arrest. If they had some idea of who did it, they’d have arrested the person at least.

Stranger murder is a tiny droplet from a pipette.

What this should tell us is pretty simple. The illusion that law enforcement is the more effective now in reducing crime is wrong. Crime has gone down, but arrests, that is the potential penalty has gone down. The “deterrent” effect of law enforcement is going in the other direction from the rate of murder. Since murder is the most consequential of crimes, since it is the most likely to be cleared of crimes, since it has the highest penalty of crimes, if deterrent effect is not driving the reduction in murders, it isn’t working for anything else.

That it is the availability of handguns that drives murder is pretty clear. Not only are all other forms of murder more or less flat, but handguns correspond to the spike in gun deaths that was the crack epidemic of the urban echo boom, which happened years earlier than in suburban America, because of the decay in cities, and laborers having children, on average nearly a decade younger.

So making guns harder to get to, and being older, and having less decayed urban areas, are driving most, if not all of the drop in crime. Being older isn’t liberal or conservative, but a result of the aging of the industrialized world. But better economy, fewer guns and better cities, are all liberal things.

Can any of this be attributed to the current philosophy, which can be described as lock them up and throw away the key? Or as the Department of Justice puts it:

* Based on current rates of first incarceration, an estimated 32% of black males will enter State or Federal prison during their lifetime, compared to 17% of Hispanic males and 5.9% of white males.

And what is driving this? First time offenders and the driving factor in those is:

Drug offenders, up 37%, represented the largest source of jail population growth between 1996 and 2002.

The answer is no, recidivism is up a statistically significant amount, not down:

Among nearly 300,000 prisoners released in 15 States in
1994, 67.5% were rearrested within 3 years. A study of
1983 releases estimated 62.5%.

What this should tell people is that the right wing frame of telling people that we find more criminals, and we lock them away longer, being the driving factors of safety is not correct. Instead, having fewer young people, fewer guns, better economies in cities and a slight increase in the affairs of working people, largely under Clinton, and somewhat reversed by Bush, is the real factor.

However, it is to note that we don’t have shows filled with people preventing crime, but several dozen about people cleaning up the mess afterwards.

Think Forward. Think Left. Because Republicans can’t even think straight.