Crime Data in the United States

One thing that is overwhelmingly clear in current events in the United States is that many people do not understand crime data. For example, many people believe that in metropolitan cities, Chicago for instance, violent crime is on a sharp rise, which gives the impression that we're not as safe as we once were. I've put together a collection of data which I've attempted to make easy to understand for the express purpose of helping people to understand the error in thinking this way. We as people are have a bad habit of thinking that things we hear about often are things which happen very often - like how we believe that because we hear about terror attacks so frequently we must be in constant danger of being killed in a terror attack, which just is not true. This having been said, let's take a look at some information.

There is an important point to be made about these data: violent crime is on an overall decline in the US, as it is in many many places. Over the span of only 22 years the number of total violent crimes has decreased by 442,473. Unfortunately, this number probably isn't easy to understand or picture, so let me try to explain. What this means is that over the course of about one generation we've reduced crime by about the population of Sacramento. This means that every year the number of people equivalent to the population of Sacramento is not the victim of a violent crime, whereas if the crime rate had remained constant, that number of people more would have been.

In case you're wondering if this general trend remains constant over the whole spectrum of violent crimes, yes it does. The number of Murders, Rapes, Assaults, and Robberies have all decreased in connection with one another. The rate of murder throughout the whole US was about 0.0087% in 1989. As of 2011, it's been reduced to 0.0047%. Rape has gone from 0.038% to 0.027% in the same time frame. Robbery has seen a huge reduction, going from 0.234% to only 0.114%. Remember, all of these numbers come from the World Almanac from 2014. This is not partisan, nor is it cherry-picked.

I know, seeing numbers do not make some people feel safe about the state of the world or the country, but please remember my purpose in doing this is mainly to highlight how much worse the world could have been if we hadn't acted and improved our societies and communities over time.

Demonstrations and Free Speech

On August 11th and 12th, a rally was organized in Charlottesville, Virginia to protest the removal of a Confederate war memorial. Called "Unite the Right," the movement was met with counter-protests on both days. Many rally-goers were recorded displaying extremely racially vicious slogans and slurs. Some were identifiable members of either the KKK or neo-Nazi groups. Almost immediately after a state of emergency was declared by the city and the county, a car sped into the crowd of counter-protesters, killing one and injuring at least nineteen others. The driver attempted to flee the scene, but was quickly caught and the owner arrested. James Fields Jr, a citizen of Ohio, was charged with second degree murder. The events served well to highlight intense racial tensions that continue to flare in the United States as opposing factions continue to fight in a seemingly never-ending struggle to reconcile America's promise of freedom and liberty with a long history of denying that liberty to many of its own people.

Since these rallies and the failure of the President to respond and defuse the situation, tensions have worsened. A rally in the city of Boston held August 19 (one chaotic week after Charlottesville) was met with fierce counter-protest from the locals. Many such rallies took place nationwide with similar results. 

What all of this serves to highlight is that there is growing tension between the cause of freedom of speech and the cause of racial justice. One such tension can be seen in that the neo-Nazi groups rallying in Charlottesville had a permit to meet whereas the counter-protesters did not. However, I would argue that this point is secondary. It is far less significant that the counter-protesters did not have a permit than the fact that they were actively countering a force that is so fundamentally anti-American it cannot possibly be misconstrued as a democratic ideology. 

Women in Leadership, and the AHCA

Understandably, this is a very unusual picture, coming out of Queen Mathilde of Belgium's dinner with several key NATO leaders' partners. Standing in stark contrast to the other nine people in the photograph, Gauthier Destenay is the First Gentleman of Luxembourg, wed to Prime Minister Xavier Bettel since 2015 when the country legalized homosexual marriage. 

The other members of the group are Brigitte Macron of France, Emine Gulbaran Erdogan of Turkey, Melania Trump of the US, Queen Mathilde herself, Ingrid Schulerud, partner of Secretary General of the UN Jens Stoltenberg, Desislava Radeva of Bulgaria, Amelie Derbaudrenghien, the wife of Belgium's Prime Minister, Mojca Stropnik of Slovenia, and Thora Margret Baldvinsdottir of Iceland. 

However, this is clearly a more significant image because it makes a few major messages. First, clearly it sends a good message to the world when the leader of a country has reached a level of acceptance to the point where a significant security conference of western leaders includes a homosexual couple. However, at the same time, this picture represents the same deep problem that we are faced with when examining all of the portraits of US presents - all of our leaders are men. This picture would be much more encouraging if anywhere near half of the people pictured were male. 

Further, this picture links to the issue facing the US in its work on Health Care currently. With virtually no female lawmakers or representative members able to give input in the formulation of the law, naturally the law would contain virtually no protections for women who would need health care. The AHCA seeks to make several moves against services for women. For example, it seeks to strip all funding from Planned Parenthood, even the funding necessary to provide women with mammograms (screenings important in detecting breast cancer). What's more, on the list of pre-existing conditions being cut under the AHCA many are women-specific such as birth-control, prenatal and maternal care. The bill seeks to slash funding for Medicaid by $880 billion over the course of ten years, a move that would disproportionately effect minority women, who are more likely to be insured through Medicaid. 

And continuing the note of stripping protections for women giving birth, the US is currently one of a mere eight countries in the world where the rates of women who die during childbirth is rising, other countries including Afghanistan and South Sudan. To put this in perspective, in 1987 the infant mortality rate was 7.2 per 100,000 births, however by 2011 the rate was 17.8. To be clear, there is no one clear reason for which this can be explained, as things like complications from increased rates of obesity, childbirth at an older age, and the lack of affordability of health care, and a large increase in the need to perform a cesarean section during birth. Significantly, one Dr. Michael Brodman found when researching the impact obesity has on childbirths that there is an extreme range in the US when it comes to the quality of health care provided to women undergoing prenatal and maternal care, meaning that the way a patient is treated in one state or even one county could be wildly different from the way they are treated elsewhere, even if they have the same condition, and that's a major problem.

"In the United States," Brodman said, "there's thinking such as, no one tells me to wear a helmet when I'm riding my motorcycle. I am allowed to do what I want,' that kind of mentality. Well, doctors have that, too, and in reality, it doesn't work in health care." 

Sanctuary Cities

Part of the method of President Trump's attempts at cracking down on illegal immigration is through executive order. Aside from the two attempts at creating a ban on immigration from several Muslim-majority countries in the middle-east, one of the targets of these orders has been the idea of what are called Sanctuary Cities. Now, we tend to think of these Sanctuary Cities either as safe havens for immigrants seeking refuge where they can be free from persecution, or as lawless places where anarchy rules and American values are destroyed. In reality, neither case is true.

First, when an arrest is made - for an unrelated incident, for example speeding - the local law enforcement will undergo a process that is standard regardless of where they are. The police will fingerprint the person(s) arrested, and then run those prints by an FBI database, which is then shared with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) database. It is significant to note that this is mandatory. No local or state official can simply refuse to do this, regardless of whether or not they consider themselves a Sanctuary. Next, if it comes up that an individual is currently of undocumented or illegal status in the US, ICE will send a request (called a detainer request) to the local law enforcement to keep that person for a bit longer - another 48 hours past their normal release time - so that ICE officials can then come to the location in order to handle that person themselves (ie deport them). It's important to recognize that that's a key area where the difference is made. ICE will send a request to officers, which they are not required to comply with, and so local and state lawmakers may choose to endorse not complying with the request, so that the person will simply be handled as though they had simply committed whatever irrelevant transgression they were jailed for in the first place. 

The fact that the States are not required to comply with this order is accounted for in the Tenth Amendment, from which we've drawn the conclusion that States cannot be forced to enforce Federal law. 

It's important to note that even in Sanctuary Cities people still may be deported, even when police decide not to comply with detainer requests, as ICE officials have other methods by which they can operate that do not require local police to comply with requests. 

So why is this important? What does the president's executive order say about Sanctuary Cities? Essentially, the Executive Order, which has been blocked in part by a San Francisco federal judge, attempts to allow states to withhold federal funds from these local positions when they refuse to comply. This is a significant issue in the discussion about reforming immigration in the US, as it's an issue that so far has seen only fighting between states as to what should be done. A former executive order by President Obama had done the exact opposite of the order in question, by ordering that federal money could not be withheld by the state from cities if they should refuse to comply with ICE. 

It's become clear as time has gone on that law enforcement is in need of more clear information about crime and justice in the context of all of the issue concerning racially-motivated police problems. One of the facts consistently supported by studies has found that immigrants, regardless of legal status, are less likely to commit crimes than natural-born citizens. See the following quote from this article:

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, while the overall percentage of immigrants and the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. both increased sharply between 1990 and 2010, the violent crime rate in the U.S. during that time plummeted 45 percent and the property crime rate dropped by 42 percent. Studies have consistently found that immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans and that there was no correlation between crime rates and levels of immigration.  Other studies have in fact found that crime rates are lowest in states with the highest immigration growth rates.

In addition, in areas where the police are strict about following detainer requests it is actually much more difficult for police to do their jobs due to the fact that entire sections of the population are afraid to speak with them for fear of being deported. J. Thomas Manger, President of the Major Cities Chiefs Association said in a press conference that "the bad guys know that many immigrants will not call the police." This is very important when we consider that it is near impossible for a police officer to do their job (such as in collecting information regarding a case) when people can't trust the police as a whole. Charlie Beck, Chief of Police of the LAPD said in a statement that "Five hundred thousand people who live in Los Angeles are undocumented immigrants. I need their cooperation. I need them to work with their local police stations. I need them to be witnesses to violent crime."

Very recently in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has moved to pass his own order to deny funding to cities that can be considered Sanctuary Cities, exactly as Trump's order seeks to do throughout the nation. However, this can easily put local law enforcement in a tricky spot, as their decision over whether or not to detain an illegal immigrant will boil down to what the police station believes is more important - maintaining safety in the community by keeping the public's cooperation, or keeping themselves funded.

US-World Relations

One of the few things virtually everyone in the US knows about the Near East is very similar to what they know about a lot of problems facing the country today: it's very complicated. The history behind the Syrian regime, the rebel group opposing it, and ISIS is not easily understood at a glance, and one of the only things everyone can agree on is that the thing that makes US involvement in Syria so tricky is that there is no good answer, no correct tactic to take in order to solve all of the problems in the region. Let's face it, if there were someone would have tried a long time ago.

For starters, the key difficulty in simply backing the Syrian rebels begins with Russia. Much like many of the conflicts the US and Russia have gotten involved in since World War Two ended, they find themselves supporting the opposite sides either openly or through indirect support. Russia currently backs the Syrian regime headed by President Bashar al-Assad, which everyone knows from recent news has been committing war crimes against its own citizens - noncombatants - for many years. US involvement is currently very hard to pin-point as there is no unified message on the topic. Some have suggested that the US's primary objective in the region is to first defeat ISIS, but with the recent missile barrage by American President Trump it now seems as though that focus has shifted to ousting President Assad. And this barrage has made matters with many international discussions infinitely more complicated.

For starters, while campaigning then-candidate Trump had repeatedly bashed NATO due to the disproportionate amount the US was paying into the system compared to many of the other member-states, and the countries who are paying the agreed upon 2% of their GDP into the system may surprise you - they are the US, Greece, Britain, Estonia, and Poland. However, this organization comes to the forefront with the issues at hand, and Trump himself has recently come forward saying that "NATO is no longer obsolete," which is a strange and unexpected flip from his earlier stance - one that fired up a base eager to see America turn its attention away from policing the world, and toward improving itself on the home-front. This is significant because NATO is a critical component to checking Russia's increasingly aggressive and expansionist tactics under President Putin, tactics that have only become more raw and abrasive with the recent missile strike in Syria.

Adding to the tensions in an extremely counter-productive fashion is the UN. US representative to the UN Nikki Haley has become an upcoming focal point on matters involving Syria and Russia, however her message is difficult to decipher as it seems to emphasize more finger-pointing and conspiracy weaving than typical UN discussions. Over the course of this past week Haley has claimed that Russia knew about Assad's plans to use chemical weapons ahead of time, and that even made fun of the country, saying it was 'nervous' and an 'island,' referencing the lack of international support Russia seems to be getting amid the tensions.

An additional matter that cannot be ignored would be North Korea. For reasons unbeknownst to most, there is currently a US strike force en route to the Korean peninsula. North Korea held yet another major missile test April 5th, to which the US responded by sending the USS Carl Vinson (an aircraft carrier), USS Wayne E. Meyer (destroyer), USS Michael Murphy (also destroyer), and USS Lake Champlain (a cruiser) to the region as a show of force. The group had been previously stationed in Singapore. The primary catch in this case would be the incredible amount of tension surrounding the North Korean state-run media on this movement. The North Korean people are told very frequently that the western world and specifically the US will attack again, keeping the Korean War in the back of the peoples' minds. Therefore, this move has given the state media an incredible amount of evidence to point to, legitimizing everything that the people had been told already. Adding to the conflict is the fact that the South Korean capitol of Seoul is a mere 35 miles away from the demilitarized zone between the nations, still technically at war. This combines to make the decision to send a strike force to the region very dicey, as it is guaranteed only to dramatically increase tensions in a region where a lot of tension has existed for decades already.

Criminal Justice and the War on Drugs

If you've never heard of the War on Drugs, consider looking into it a bit in your spare time. In short, in June 1971 President Richard Nixon declared what he called a "war on drugs," due in large part to the greatly increased use of drugs by people in the US. The government halted research into the medical effects of drugs, and dramatically increased the size of federal drug control agencies and their presence in the country. Notably, there was a backlash by some in government around this time. In 1972 the commission formed by Nixon himself, led by Republican governor of Pennsylvania of Raymond Shafer, decided unanimously to recommend decriminalizing the possession and distribution of marijuana, a recommendation ignored by Nixon.  

The controversy around the War on Drugs mainly consists of a few key questions: How did this effect people who where and are using drugs, and what effect did this have on the country over all? One thing lost about the 1980s, coming increasingly into public view now as we review prison policy, is the effect the war on drugs had on incarcerations in the country. The 80s brought with it a remarkable amount of drug hysteria and mass incarcerations, fueled in part by President Reagan's very controversial mandatory minimums policy, a response to the rise of crack and crack cocaine in the country. The policy states, naturally, that there is a minimum sentence to be imposed on people depending on the crimes they are being charged with. This policy is responsible, in part, for the extreme rise in prison populations in the United States, which has an extreme proportion of the prison population of the world. 

Significantly, the War on Drugs and the actions that followed it have had extremely negative effects on the US as a whole. It has helped to fuel anti-drug hysteria and unreasonably harsh laws which have greatly damaged America's prisons system.

Globally and Nationally, the War on Drugs destabilized a wide range of communities, including those in Latin America which have seen a dramatic rise in cartel violence. This can be explained in the fact that the war on drugs and mass incarcerations does nothing to decrease the demand for drugs in the US, it simply punishes people without providing much-needed assistance. In a most basic model,the US has reduced the supply of drugs in the country by cracking down on drug dealers and traffickers, however it did nothing to reduce the demand, which of course resulted in a dramatic rise in drug prices, making drug manufacturing and trafficking all the more profitable.

Police Militarization

One of the biggest domestic problems facing America today is the debate surrounding law enforcement. While some justify the increased use of military-grade hardware by law enforcement officers as necessary for the protection of the community and the officers themselves, others see a disturbing trend in the lack of oversight in the training and methods used by some police officers.

One of the key issues surrounding the law enforcement debate is the issue of military-grade equipment being used by police agencies. For example, some police departments have received armored vehicles, assault rifles and body armor, and intimidating masks and helmets as a result, in part of the surplus of these sorts of materials. The argument to be made, of course, is whether or not a police department actually needs a mine-resistant vehicle intended for use in war-ridden countries in order to enforce the law in American communities. The fear of foreign attacks and terrorism has, in part, contributed to the expansion of this idea, however as I have discussed, there is virtually no statistical reason to believe that a police agency will end up using their materials for these reasons, realistically.

Perhaps the biggest complaint to be made is that most law enforcement officers do not receive proper training on how to use the materials they are now being given, and the result is a emboldened group of people who search for opportunities to use their new-found equipment. For instance, use of assault rifles by police officers has risen dramatically over past years, however in a real military situation it is incredibly foolish (and in fact, very dangerous in some cases) to point them at someone you do not immediately intend to shoot. So, when a police force deploys people equipped with assault weapons and body armor for a drug-raid, and we see images of people being arrested with guns pointed at them, that is an example of misuse of police hardware.

Further, on the topic of drug raids, the foremost reason SWAT teams are deployed in the US is for drug raids, despite the fact that these teams are equipped to handle terrorist attacks and hostage situations. Studies show the deployment of excessively forceful units actually elevates the danger in situations where negotiating and common tactics would have been preferable, putting law enforcement officers in more danger.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the obvious racial disparity in law enforcement. Not only is there a major issue in many towns in the difference between the proportion of the population of black residents and the proportion of black officers, but black citizens are significantly more likely to be the victims of aggressive law enforcement and profiling. And, to predict a commonly made argument that locally high crime rates are responsible for these unusually high rates, studies have long since disproved this idea. There is no correlation between local crime rates and police violence; in other words, police are not more aggressive in some areas because of crime rates, they are quite simply aggressive everywhere.