America’s safer streets: why is elusive

[carl]

The point of the questions were to clarify intent of the war for our national leadership. They need to openly discuss why are we waging it to begin with it? What is the real threat? Why is the problem getting worse after 40 years or so of fighting the drug war? What are the consequences of fighting the drug war?

Bill:

Sorry I misunderstood.

I think the smart ones have asked all those questions. Their answers to themselves are that it doesn't work and the whole thing needs to be radically changed-ie. legalization to some extent of some to all of it. But they won't admit that openly because they are afraid of the 'But what about the children?' argument.

Here in Colorado the legalization of marijuana is on the ballot. The radio commercials for are what you would expect, it doesn't work, it treats adults like children, tides of money for the cartels and marijuana isn't actually all that bad. The radio commercials against are variations of the 'But what about the children?' argument. We'll see how it plays out.

A fellow I know, a magnificent old gentleman who has done things only a handful of people in the world have done, decided to vote for legalization because he said it just sort of occurred to him that the current course doesn't make any sense. He can't be the only one out there, so maybe things will change.

[Fuchs]

I cannot confirm this is legit, but it#s certainly interesting if it is:

http://www.good.is/posts/black-and-a...es-of-drug-use

A study published today in the Archives of General Psychiatry says that black and Asian teens are less likely to use drugs and alcohol than white people their age. In a survey of more than 72,000 young people conducted by Dan Blazer, a psychiatry professor at Duke Medical Center, 39 percent of white teens and 37 percent of Latinos reported having abused substances in the past year, compared to 32 percent of blacks and 24 percent of Asians. When it came to drugs alone, 20 percent of whites, 19 percent of blacks, and 12 percent of Asians reported using.

coupled with

Juvenile Arrest Rate Trends
Drug abuse violation arrest rates were equal for white juveniles and black juveniles in 1980.
Juvenile Arrest Rates for Drug Abuse Violations by Race, 1980-2009

makes the whole war on drugs look more like a race war that replaced segregation nation-wide than like actual policing.

[ganulv]

I cannot confirm this is legit

The journal is published by the AMA and is considered perhaps the flagship U.S. psychiatric journal. That does not necessarily, of course, insure lack of issues in research design, the usual problems inherent in the peer review process, or lack of intellectual integrity on the part of the authors, but I would say it qualifies the article as legit.

[M]akes the whole war on drugs look more like a race war that replaced segregation nation-wide than like actual policing.

False dichotomy!

I have not read the article, but I do wonder how the numbers breakdown by locale. For example, does anyone know if drug-related arrests take place at a higher rate in urban vs. rural areas?

[Fuchs]

False dichotomy!

Add a "to me" at the end and it'll be impervious to such criticism.

[davidbfpo]

A catchy title from the NYT (thanks to a Twitter alert). Which opens with:

Now that the United States has the world’s highest reported rate of incarceration, many criminologists are contemplating another strategy. What if America reverted to the penal policies of the 1980s? What if the prison population shrank drastically? What if money now spent guarding cellblocks was instead used for policing the streets?

In short, what would happen if the rest of the country followed New York City’s example?

Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/26/ny...pagewanted=all

Lots of links to explore.

Personally I wonder if crime and the better criminals have realised street crime is just too dangerous and not so profitable - fraud & forgery for example are generally safer for the criminal. Secondly, by jailing fewer NYC has reduced the educational impact of being in jail.

[Bill Moore]

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

How Lead Caused America's Violent Crime Epidemic

All of it points to one simple idea: violent crime rose as a result of lead poisoning because of leaded gasoline. It declined because of lead abatement policies.

There are three basic reasons why this theory should be believed.

Identified in the article

This quote is relevant to the Effects Based Operations crowd and their faith in measuring observables:

In particular, it’s important because this is precisely the kind of problem that people are uncomfortable about believing. It’s hard for us to see the link between cause and effect when there’s a 20+ year gap between one and the other. Additionally, none of us like thinking that our autonomy as human beings can be destroyed by forces beyond our control that we can’t even see.

But such time lags between cause and effect do exist.

Lot of interesting links at the article below. The article that kicked this off was in Mother Earth News

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-dru...crime-linkfest

Lead and Crime: A Linkfest

Baselines vs. crime waves. Lots of things contribute to baseline levels of crime. But lead is uniquely able to explain why there was such a huge rise of crime above the baseline during the 60s, 70s, and 80s, followed by an equally huge reduction back to the baseline in the 90s and aughts.

Big cities vs. small cities. Surprisingly, it turns out that once you reduce exposure to gasoline lead, big cities aren't really all that much more dangerous than small ones after all

.

[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.