Sunday, June 15, 2008

American Murder Mystery

American Murder Mystery: "While crime rates in large cities stayed flat, homicide rates in many midsize cities (with populations of between 500,000 and 1 million) began increasing, sometimes by as much as 20percent a year. In 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group surveying cities from coast to coast, concluded in a report called “A Gathering Storm” that this might represent “the front end … of an epidemic of violence not seen for years.” The leaders of the group, which is made up of police chiefs and sheriffs, theorized about what might be spurring the latest crime wave: the spread of gangs, the masses of offenders coming out of prison, methamphetamines. But mostly they puzzled over the bleak new landscape. According to FBI data, America’s most dangerous spots are now places where Martin Scorsese would never think of staging a shoot-out—Florence, South Carolina; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Reading, Pennsylvania; Orlando, Florida; Memphis, Tennessee."
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Fred Pilot sent this along. The author suggests that the problem is caused by dispersal of former public housing tenants who are now using Section 8 vouchers to move from big city projects to smaller cities and suburbs.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This article deconstructs the argument of the Atlantic.

http://econpolice.blogspot.com/