Law Enforcement

Crime in the United States was pretty much out of control by the 1970’s.

There were a variety of reasons for that, but I think the biggest factor is that a new strategy of enforcing the law came in to vogue. The public was encouraged to view criminals not as bad people who need to be punished for their misdeeds, but as lonely forgotten souls who were driven to crime due to bad experiences during their formative years.

Perps were sick, you see, and they needed healing and compassion more than hatred and marginalization.

This attitude eventually got turned around, but it took awhile. It took even longer for the damage caused by this touchy-feely crap to get cleaned up, but it finally happened. This is due to the fact that the number of convictions started to climb, and the number of convictions that resulted in jail time also started to increase. This resulted in a larger prison population, but the results are hard to ignore.

Crimes against property started to fall by 1980, but it wasn’t until 1993 that we saw a reduction of violent crimes.

Still, once the ball started to roll it just kept on hurtling downhill. Today the people in the United States enjoy an aggregate crime rate that is less than half of what it was during the dark and lawless days.

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I was working the night shift at police HQ back in 1991 when they brought in a Japanese national to be fingerprinted.

He had entered the country a few days before in Hawaii and immediately boarded a plane for Los Angeles. Once there he rented a car and made a marathon drive across the continental United States to my home town in Columbus, Ohio. Besides a hundred pounds of illegal drugs there were two suitcases full of cash in the trunk. The money was startup capitol earmarked to recruit a Columbus gang or two, the drugs merely a sample of the product that the locals would be expected to sell every month if they went international and joined the organization.

Anybody out there watch Japanese detective movies? Then you know the stereotype of a Yakuza gangster. This guy was all that and more. Tattoos galore and a few fingers shy of a full set. He claimed to know no English but he followed every command given while he was processed. (“Turn left. Turn right. Face front. Give me your right thumb.”) He certainly knew his Miranda rights since the only thing we got from him was a whole lot of nothing. Must have learned that from American detective shows that he watched back in Japan.

We got our own little Yak invasion in the Midwest because law enforcement had made great strides since the freewheeling Miami Vice days of untouchable drug cartels and flamboyant kingpins. Gangs had been infiltrated, smuggling routes closed off, and people had been arrested. The criminals were desperate to find a safe haven, an area where the cops were so ignorant of how the big volume drug trade worked that it would be business as usual right under their noses. The reason the criminals were getting caught no matter where they went was due to that fact that US law enforcement was smart enough to hound them mercilessly and deny them that haven.

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I noticed last year that most of the people I encountered through my self defense class wanted to ask about methods to protect their children or grandchildren from the Internet. At first I thought they were concerned about shielding underage people from adult content, and I started to carry around info that I had downloaded which explained about blocking software like Netnanny.

It turns out that wasn’t what they wanted at all. News reports had started to appear that breathlessly hyped the dangers lying in wait for children that use the Internet as a social medium. Kids that set up a Livejournal account, so the talking heads said, were waving a red flag in front of a bull. And the bull in this case are pedophiles that obsessively surfed the ‘Net in search of their prey.

Reports of this nature have gotten pretty prevalent of late, maybe even routine. Most local law enforcement agencies, always sensitive to charges of lacking positive action, have set up little task forces to try and catch adults who search online for teen victims. The conclusion that any reasonable person would reach is that a child who visits the Internet is just a few mouse clicks away from being singled out for a kidnapping.

(As an aside, most of the websites look annoyingly similar because they got started from a grant from the US Department of Justice, and I suppose they just put up a modified version of DOJ’s template. The most interesting webpage of this variety I’ve come across is the one for Idaho, which also has a great deal of useful child-friendly links at the bottom. Kudos to Idaho!)

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The headline reads “’Let Burglars Off With Caution’, Police Told”. It refers to new guidelines for the police in Great Britain that have just been handed down.

Burglars will be allowed to escape without punishment under new instructions sent to all police forces. Police have been told they can let them off the threat of a court appearance and instead allow them to go with a caution.
The same leniency will be shown to criminals responsible for more than 60 other different offences, ranging from arson through vandalism to sex with underage girls.

It’s important to note that these new rules are only iron clad when dealing with new criminals and are up to the officer’s discretion after that. A perp can walk if it is a first offense, while a repeat offender can go home only if he can sweet talk the officer who caught him. But it is also important to note that the Home Office has actually stated that a fair number of serious crimes should be dealt with in this way.

What blows my mind is that a few of the crimes that will get you a Get Out of Jail Free card are violent in nature. The author mentions threatening to kill, common assault, threatening behavior, and even crimes which result in “actual bodily harm”.

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In an update to my previous post about illegal immigration, I saw a debate televised on CNN that was about this subject. One position was taken by veteran newsman Lou Dobbs, while the other was represented by immigrant advocate Maria Elena Salinas. Keeping in mind that it has been some hours since I’ve seen the program, I’d like to share my impressions.

Dobbs was very clear about his stance. He said that he favored restricting immigration due to a wide variety of concerns. Foremost amongst these was concern for the immigrants themselves, since they are prone to exploitation by employers if they aren’t supposed to be in this country.

And Salinas’ rebuttal? She immediately attacked Dobbs and accused him of being a racist! The basis for her charge was that Dobbs only mentioned the 11 million illegals from Mexico while ignoring the estimated 200,000 illegal immigrants who are here from European countries.

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