In a remarkable article called “A Guide for Reading and Writing About Crime,” my fellow Substack writer Alec Karakatsanis makes the following excellent points:
“Property crime data reported by the police excludes most property crime, including wage theft by employers (which costs low-wage workers about $50 billion per year, more than 3 times more than all police-reported property crime that makes its way into “crime rates”), and tax evasion, which steals about $1 trillion every year (which is about 20 times more than all wage theft and about 63 times more than all police-reported property crime combined).”
“Violent crime data reported by police excludes nearly all of the violent crimes committed by police and jail guards, which experts estimate to include several million physical and sexual assaults each year. Given their magnitude, including the crimes by government employees in crime statistics could entirely change the direction of crime trends reported by police at any given time.”
“The vast majority of sexual assault and gender-based violence is not reported to police and never makes it into official “crime rates” reported in the media because most survivors of such violence determine that police, prosecutor, and prison bureaucracies are not a viable or effective way to address that harm.”
“The vast majority of all other types of crime—such as air and water pollution crimes, police perjury, prosecutor obstruction of justice, government corruption, insider stock trading, foreign bribery, etc.—are never reported to police and never purused by prosecutors, and therefore they never show up in police-reported crime rates. Crime rates tend to capture a small subset of police-reported crimes committed by the poor, and to exclude crimes committed by the wealthy.”
There’s a lot more in his article, which I urge you to read. It provides some context for the political debates over crime that periodically take over our public square.
The fear of crime has long been an effective tool for manipulating public opinion in elections. Many bad decisions result.
That, after all, is basically what got us Nixon as president. And we know how that one turned out.
TODAY’s LINKS: (6/23/22 — 32 stories from 20 sources)
Biden will call for 3-month suspension of gas tax, though officials acknowledge it 'alone won't fix the problem' (CNN)
Senate votes to advance bipartisan gun deal, breaking 30-year logjam (WP)
Senators hail ‘bipartisan breakthrough’ on gun safety legislation (The Hill)
Jan. 6 panel revises hearing schedule, citing new evidence (Politico)
Panel Ties Trump to Fake Elector Plan, Mapping His Attack on Democracy (NYT)
‘The system held, but barely’: Jan. 6 hearings highlight a handful of close calls (Politico)
Frustrated with January 6 hearings, Trump turns ire toward his allies (CNN)
The time to put Trump on trial is drawing near (Financial Times)
Russian forces pounded Ukraine's second largest city Kharkiv and surrounding countryside with rockets, killing at least 15 people, in what Kyiv called a bid to force it to pull resources from the main battlefield to protect civilians from attack. (Reuters)
Ukrainian photojournalist ‘executed in cold blood’ by Russians, group says (WP)
Russian Oil Flows to Europe Have Quietly Started Creeping Up (Bloomberg)
Ukraine expects EU-wide support for candidacy to join bloc (AP)
How Russia has outflanked Ukraine in Africa (BBC)
Biden Bans Most Antipersonnel Land Mine Use, Reversing Trump-Era Policy (NYT)
Juul e-cigarettes to be ordered off U.S. shelves (WSJ)
More than 200 abortion clinics — just over a quarter of all abortion facilities in the country — will have to immediately close if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. Meanwhile, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a rare anti-abortion Democrat, signed two pieces of legislation, one targeting abortion-inducing pills. [HuffPost]
Farewell to Hong Kong and Its Big Lie (Atlantic)
Canada is banning single-use plastics to fight pollution and climate change. — Plastic grocery bags, cutlery and straws. It will eliminate 22,000 metric tons of pollution over 10 years, officials said. (WP)
Somalia: ‘The worst humanitarian crisis we’ve ever seen’ (Guardian)
Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Says Economy Faces ‘Complete Collapse’ (WSJ)
Authorities in Bangladesh intensified efforts to deliver food and drinking water to millions of people struggling after heavy rain unleashed catastrophic flooding across a quarter of the country. (Reuters)
Climate change a factor in ‘unprecedented’ South Asia floods (AP)
VIDEO: China’s Surveillance State Is Growing. These Documents Reveal How. (NYT)
Massive quake kills more than 1,000, injures 1,600 in Afghanistan ((WP)
‘Stealth Omicron’ was just overtaken in the U.S. by a new subvariant that evades immunity (Fortune)
6 things we've learned about how the pandemic disrupted learning (NPR)
Bizarre spiral object found swirling around Milky Way's center (LiveScience)
Is this the end of summer as we’ve known it? (Cal Today)
The human sensory experience is limited. Journey into the world that animals know (NPR)
Man Sleeps Through His Stop On Elevator (The Onion)
TODAY’s LYRICS:
“ Open Season”
Song by High Highs
Songwriters: Claridge-chang Oliver / Milas Jackson Mico
Get on your knees in the fire
You can leave it
All in your mind, it is
All in your mind, it is
Calling the backseat a friend
It is really
All in your mind, it is
All in your mind
You look so tired of living
Like a kite, kite, kite, kite
Look at all the trees in a line
They are growing
All in your mind, it is
All in your mind, it is
Look at all the leaves in the fire
They are burning
All in your mind, it is
All in your mind
You look so tired of living
Like a kite, kite, kite, kite
Get on your knees in the fire
You can leave it
All in your mind, it is
All in your mind, it is
No comments:
Post a Comment