Page 2 The Tri-City Reporter, Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Insight & Opinion Crime rates increasing in small towns
Clayburn Peeples reports: Crime doesn’t pay! We’ve known that phrase since childhood, though I’ve heard plenty of people over the years suggest that it seems to do so for some people. At any rate, regardless of whether it pays or not it sure does cost. In the case of serious crime, costs are staggering, both in direct, countable damage and intangible losses as well. This is particularly worrisome to those of us who live in small towns (under 10,000 population) because according to the FBI, it’s those towns that had the highest increase in violent crime last year, an acceleration of a trend first noticed about five years ago. What makes this
phenomenon particularly vexing is that it is counter to what is going on in the rest of the country. Overall, crime is on the decline in America. Last year, for example, violent crime fell, across the board, across the country, in every demographic area, except for small towns. Murder, the penultimate violent crime, was down 2 percent across the country, but it increased by a whopping 18-percent in small towns. (Locally, we had a record number of murder cases last year.) For the rest of the country it was the fifth straight year of declining violent crime rates, but here in small town America, violent crime is surging.
Property crimes are also decreasing across the country, and while no one knows why, theories abound. Those who work in law enforcement point to better policing and higher incarceration rates, and while there is no question that law enforcement agencies are more professional, on average, than ever before, that has not, historically, translated directly into lowered crime rates. Other factors have had much more of an influence. It is also true the record numbers of men and women are behind bars in America today, a significant percentage of them violent criminals. In Tennessee, for example, one out of five prison inmates is there
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for some sort of homicide. Another 15-percent are there for rape. Seventeen percent are there on felony drug charges. They obviously can’t prey on society at large while imprisoned. But most experts believe increased incarceration rates to be a small factor. Others point out that our population is aging, and that as people get older they tend to commit fewer crimes. There’s truth to that too. At some point young men get too old to outrun the police, and they sometimes even get smart enough to know better than to commit stupid crimes. So the “maturing” of America may be reducing our crime rate. There are a record number of immigrants in the country today, and while that makes some people nervous for all sorts of reasons, immigrant communities in America have historically had lower crime rates than the country at large, so their presence could be a factor as well. Then there is the economy. Nearly every week someone asks me if our weakened economy has caused crime rates to spike. The answer is no; crime rates tend to go down when the economy gets worse, and higher when it gets better. Take car thefts; they were down last year by 13.1-percent last year, a stunning drop until you consider the corresponding drop in new car sales. You mean they are related? Seems they are. Back during the Depression, some guy came up with the theory that you could predict the number of motor vehicles that were going to be stolen
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The Obama campaign claims the choice of Rep. Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s Vice Presidential running mate defines two very different paths for America. Well, ‘praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.’ We have choices. Hopefully, now we can focus on ‘key’ issues that aren’t necessarily related to the War on Women, class warfare, racial discrimination, Muslim accommodation, global warming, Romney Hood and how government inspires and fixes everything. Maybe we can skip the dog and pony show; balancing acts, the fake wonders, crystal balls, fortune telling, smoke and mirrors and just plain lies. Perhaps campaign dialog will shift to jobs, the economy, budgets and spending, entitlements and restoring American unity and pride. That dialog was not encouraged by Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters response. They immediately defamed Ryan’s ideas, motives, intellect and character. They labeled him a radical;
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unhinged, insensitive, cynical; charging that his motives were to reward the rich, punish the poor and destroy the middle class. They said his plan would end Medicare and Social Security as we know it. Aren’t they broken? Ryan is a seven term Congressman; a bright, respected, young family man that grew up in a middleclass community about the size of Jackson, Tennessee. At 42, he’s the youngest ever Chair of the House Budget Committee. Congressman Ryan has offered deficit reducing budgets including plans to save broken, underfunded and unsustainable entitlement programs, which fail on their own without reform. How did funding ‘The Affordable Healthcare Act’ by taking 716 billion dollars from Medicare save Granny? Ryan’s plan never changed entitlement programs for Americans currently 55 and over, including his 78 year old mother. Well, outstanding. After almost four years of no
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economy, bars and clubs have been going out of business throughout the land, and that may be a factor behind lower violent crime rates, and it probably is. Then there is the subject nobody talks about publically, the “culture” thing. If you live in one of the “better” zip codes, crime probably hasn’t affected your life much at all, at least in your neighborhood, because crime rates, in such places, are still pretty much what they were in the 1960’s. One of the reasons seldom mentioned for this is that people in those zip codes still adhere to antiquated practices such as getting married before they have babies, and men who don’t support their children are scorned. Have I ever mentioned that over the last 40 years I’ve only seen a handful, and a very small one at that, of criminals in court who have a wife and children that they live with? There are men in court every week who beg to get out of jail so they can begin to care for their families, but practically none who were doing so when they got into trouble. So does that mean that a policy of supporting, encouraging and rewarding marriage and the family would be a good way to directly reduce crime rates? Of course it does. Don’t we all know that, even in small town America where everybody shares the same, increasingly dangerous, zip code? I suspect we do. We just pretend we’re unaware.
Letters to the Editor:
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in a given year by counting the number that were sold. Everybody laughed at him until they began running the historical numbers and saw that he was correct. Then he carried his theory further and attempted to predict the number of bank robberies that would occur based on the amount of deposits in the nation’s banks. Believe it or not, in Depression America, a time of fairly frequent bank hold ups, you could. The reason for these correlations is that a huge percentage of crime is opportunistic, meaning that people see the chance to steal something, so they do. They don’t preplan to rob the store; they’re just riding around, and they see the clerk is alone, and they take a stupid chance to rob the store of $20 and end up getting 20 years instead. But what about violent crimes? Why would they be falling in most parts of the country as well? H e r e again, opportunity seems to play a part. Study after study has shown that most homicides occur at or near bars or clubs or watering holes of one type or another, and most violent crimes have a direct substance abuse factor. Such places, and substances, are said by some to be “criminogenic”, meaning that they generate crime. There is also a time factor regarding violent crime; the later the hour, the more likely things will go badly. So how does any of that relate to decreased violent crime rates across the country? Due to the
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budget, record deficits and debt and no net benefits; it’s good to know someone has a plan, a mission and is committed to more than just the next election. No plan; no direction and reckless action; has led nowhere. If anyone has seen, felt or experienced a path to recovery in the last 42 months, please let me in on it, because I missed it. If it happened, the recovery was obviously not transparent or newsworthy. There truly are two very different paths to choose from. One chooses The Constitution as the roadmap. Most of us have heard of it; it’s concise, understandable and easily obtainable in printed English versions and other translations. The other path is a maze of growing volumes of government laws, codes, mandates and regulations transcribed into legalese requiring bureaucratic interpretations to keep our incompetence from violating political correctness and government morality that dictate propriety; social birthrights and entitlements, unity through conformity, protection by subjection and security through obscurity. Should we choose a clear, well traveled path or blindly follow another course illuminated only by words and speeches; dimmed by social agendas that are forgotten after elections? This may be our last opportunity to choose a path for an American future. Choose wisely. Tom Beasley Dyer, TN
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