America’s safer streets: why is elusive

[ganulv]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknap...rime-epidemic/

How Lead Caused America's Violent Crime Epidemic

Interesting! But I do wonder if the author has shown that the drop is basically unicausal as opposed to being due to policy changes of which the phasing out of leaded gasoline was but a part? My grasp of statistical methods is too poor to evaluate the findings at that level.

[Fuchs]

Lead poisoning was quite widespread after the early canned food appeared.

A possible test to see if the correlation may point at a causality would be to look up if there was a crime wave 20+ years after introduction of canned food.
More specifically, crime amongst sailors (who ate much canned food AFAIK) should be well-documented (Royal Navy archives go back centuries in amazing detail).

[Bill Moore]

Interesting observation on the canned food. From a futures perspective I wonder if we'll an upward trend in China and other developing nations that have a growing pollution problem (assuming lead is part of that equation)?

[davidbfpo]

The exchange on lead in petrol, tins etc made me think of a new thread 'What's lead got to do with it?'

Fuchs - don't worry a new thread is not coming.

[davidbfpo]

A different way of looking at criminal justice and more in the USA, a left-leaning UK think tank has published a short paper to impact policies in the UK. It has some amazing statistics and quotes. This one is a stunner, even if the question "Are you on parole or probation?" features in some of our TV diet of US cops shows here:

The overcriminalisation of America has exacted a stunning toll: when you add those who are on probation or parole to the total number of prisoners, one of every 32 adults is under government control. That is a startlingly large swathe of our population to place in the hands of the government.

Link:http://www.ippr.org/images/media/fil...2013_10616.pdf

[Bill Moore]

I think our legal system is trending downwards, especially when we detain people for using drugs and have privatized prisons. Selling drugs and the associated violence is a crime, but using drugs is just stupid, and we confuse being stupid with being a criminal and stress our justice system by doing so. For profit prisons equate to a profit incentive to keep people in jail that gains political power over time when those companies that run these prisons gain greater lobbying power with Congress.

However, all that said I think the rate of violent crime based on percentage of the population is higher in both Australia and England than the U.S.? We have a serious and growing problem with gangs, and while arresting and detaining these gang members may by us time, ultimately we have to find a better way to effective intervene and reduce this threat to civil safety. More prisons would indicate to me that we're failing on a deeper level.

[davidbfpo]

A NYT article, with some surprising figures cited, having worked in an urban area plagued over ten years ago with street robberies for cellphones it tells a familiar story:

In San Francisco last year, nearly half of all robberies involved a cellphone, up from 36 percent the year before; in Washington, cellphones were taken in 42 percent of robberies, a record. In New York, theft of iPhones and iPads last year accounted for 14 percent of all crimes.

Some compare the epidemic of phone theft to car theft, which was a rampant problem more than a decade ago until auto manufacturers improved antitheft technology.

Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/te...pagewanted=all

Our experience with the manufacturers action to improve security may not end the problem, rather shift it and sometimes with a higher level of violence to the victim - "home invasions" for the keys for performance cars for example.