Tag: crime

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crime and punishment folly

Crime Fighters Give Up

Canada, Toronto, police, crime, prevention

Fight crime — give criminals all your stuff today!

This isn’t my view. But it’s the apparent view of some — I hope not many — Canadian police officers.

At a recent public meeting about coping with crime, a Toronto police officer told people that to reduce the chances “of being attacked in your home, leave your [car key] fobs at your front door. Because they’re breaking into your home to steal your car. They don’t want anything else.”

To reduce the risk to you personally, give up in advance.

Are you following the reasoning? Because I’m not. And I am very disinclined to leave my car keys and cash and my Taiwanese history library in a heap near the front door to buy off home invaders.

Instead, perhaps everybody in high-risk neighborhoods should install a trap door in their vestibule, rigged in such a way that anybody who forcibly breaks into the home is immediately dropped into a vat of starving piranhas.

AIER’s John Miltimore sees an “obvious problem” with the policeman’s helpful advice. The problem is that he is asking people to encourage burglary and theft, to make it “easier, not harder, to steal vehicles, diminishing the time it takes to commit the crime, thus lowering the risk involved.” If a lot of people follow the advice, this would tend to increase car thefts.

It all reminds Miltimore of the movie Robocop and its crime-ridden landscape. “There’s something dystopian in normalizing this kind of violence. . . .”

To avoid dystopia, let’s defend ourselves instead.

And our cars. And car keys. And . . .

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture judiciary

Violent Double Standard

law, justice, crime, double standard

Trying to find justice in the justice system is sometimes like panning for gold in a dry river. But what ho, hey, we’ve found some.

Victoria Taft points us to “a federal judge who believes in justice” . . . or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Recently, California District Court Judge Cormac Carney chastised a purportedly anti-crime department of the Department of Justice for prosecuting two men who “became members of a group characterized as ‘white supremacist’” for alleged violence while carefully ignoring the often worse conduct of Antifa and BAMN members.

Carney dismissed the federal charges against the two men.

He argued that “prosecuting only members of the far right and ignoring members of the far left leads to the troubling conclusion that the government believes it is permissible to physically assault and injure Trump supporters to silence speech. . . .

“At the same Trump rallies that form the basis for Defendants’ prosecution, members of Antifa and related far-left groups engaged in organized violence to stifle protected speech.”

There’s something wrong when people who had been holding a peaceful event full of speeches and flag-waving are prosecuted — not just prosecuted, but selectively prosecuted — for defending themselves when violent leftists show up and act violently.

If a speaker commits an actual crime, sure, he should be punished, in a proportionate way and without regard to the ideology of the speaker. Equal justice under the law, that’s all.

How about it, Justice Department? Care to earn your name?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment partisanship

Caveat Preemptive

Donald Trump

Were Donald J. Trump an exemplar of strict Kantian honesty; had he a reputation for exactitude about his achievements and acumen; if hyperbole had not become his own very public modus — then, and only then, would the near half a billion judgment against him make even a modicum of sense.

But the former U.S. president and infamous branding entrepreneur is and has always been known to be something of a b.s. artist. No one has excuse to take what he says literally. Business partners and all who make deals with Trump should do their own diligence. Their watchword should be: caveat emptor.

Yet, last week, New York State regulators and prosecutors bent over backwards to find Trump guilty. “On Friday, New York County Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ordered Donald Trump to pay a staggering $355 million for repeatedly inflating asset values in statements of financial condition submitted to lenders and insurers,” explains Jacob Sullum of Reason. “When the interest that Engoron also approved is considered, the total penalty rises to $450 million. All told, Trump and his co-defendants, including three of his children and former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, are on the hook for $364 million, or about $464 million with interest.”

That is a lot of money to protect other businesses from Trump’s characteristic exaggerations, which so appalled the court. But not any of the banks Trump did business with.

No one has been harmed, for Trump repaid all the loans.

There is no victim — making Trump the biggest-name victim of victimless crime prosecution of all time.

We, the people, know that “honesty is the best policy” is not standard business practice, and that Trump doesn’t always follow it. But we are also not demanding that our governments insert themselves into every successful transaction looking for fibs and fakery.

That would be a recipe for selective prosecution.

Which is just what this case is: selective prosecution of a political opponent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment sports subsidy

A Big Step Over the Vomit

Washington DC, crime, sports

“Two hours before the Washington Capitals play in Chinatown on a crisp November evening,” Candace Buckner wrote recently in The Washington Post, “a man stretches out on the pavement near Sixth and F streets NW, wrapped beneath a gray hoodie that he’s using as a blanket. Around the corner, a woman rolls a blunt outside the arena’s sportsbook entrance, and soon the waft of marijuana will perfume the area. There’s a spillage of vomit, green, near the tree on the sidewalk. Another man, this one cradling his arms behind his back and mumbling, doesn’t seem to notice the mess as he walks over it and bends over to pick up old cigarette butts.”

Might there be some connection between the state of downtown Washington, D.C., and the decision by the owner of both the Washington Capitals hockey team and the Washington Wizards NBA team to relocate them outside the city to Virginia?

“The District faced competition from Virginia,” explained a separate news story, “only because Leonsis had begun quietly exploring a new home for his teams in 2022, after years of complaining about crime and the noise of buskers outside his arena.”

There was not only less vomit but more room to be had in Virginia. For an even more expensive “public-private partnership” project. 

My fellow Virginia taxpayers and I are not crowing — Washington’s loss is our loss. We will no doubt pay for the privilege of experiencing even worse traffic and pricier tickets to hockey and basketball games . . . with higher taxes. 

Politicians can make names for themselves with these big sports franchise grabs. That’s what happened 30 years ago in the District of Columbia’s Chinatown. 

But the names have moved on, and now so have the games.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Crime: Police or Re-define?

crime, definition, tax

Can crime be defined out of existence?

“Attorney Ben Crump proposed a solution to the issue of high crime that is plaguing the black community,” YouTube commentator Anthony Brian Logan reports on a story that an aging white fellow like myself was not apt to spot. “He said it is easy to identify criminals if laws that target specific groups of people are created. Crump brought up Eric Garner, who lost his life after struggling with police outside of a store when he was accused of selling loose cigarettes.”

Crump says crimes have been defined into existence targeting black communities.

Mr. Logan urges us to understand the context for Crump’s theorizing: the African-American lawyer “was speaking to a group of black men for an MSNBC special called ‘Black Men in America, Road To 2024.’ The purpose of the special is to rein black men back in and stop them from straying away from the Democratic Party.”

Logan is skeptical that this sort of half-cleverness is going to cut it with black men, who in increasing numbers are bolting from the ranks of the party created by Martin Van Buren. 

Many of us, of all colors, were extremely sympathetic to Eric Garner, who died at the hands of New York City police trying to block Garner’s unlicensed entrepreneurial effort enabled by high taxes on cigarettes. Yet, the real problem with Crump’s notion is that the worst crime in black neighborhoods is rampant theft and violence, the kind of activity that common sense dictates as criminal no matter who legislates, or why.

Defining crime into existence is not the current cause of increased black crime, Logan says, it’s decreased policing and punishment.

Crump’s argument, counters Anthony Brian Logan point blank, “is stupid.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Theft Thwarts Thieves

crime, criminal, vigilante, police

It happens plenty in fiction.

Thieves or ex-thieves like John Robie (“To Catch a Thief”), Alexander Mundy (“It Takes a Thief”), and Slippery Jim DiGriz (The Stainless Steel Rat) are among the many beloved reformed or semi-reformed criminals who thwart the criminality of others.

It happens in real life too. Con artist Frank Abagnale eventually taught people how to spot fraud (though apparently still committing it in his memoir Catch Me If You Can). Former black-hat hacker Kevin Mitnick taught people how to protect themselves from hacking and social engineering.

The role of criminals stopping criminals can also be played entirely accidentally.

Last Saturday, three armed men robbed a business called Hi Lo Check Cashing out in Commerce City, Colorado.

“In an unexpected and ironic twist,” says a Facebook post by the Commerce Police Department, “as the trio was robbing the business . . . a fourth criminal stole their getaway vehicle . . . which may have already been stolen.

Police are seeking the third robber and the car thief. I guess they may offer a curt “Thanks” to the latter bad guy just before jailing him.

The Goddess Fortuity won’t always intervene thus. And we don’t want to people to start stealing cars on the off chance that one of their thefts will foil some other theft.

On the other hand, it would be criminal to decline any strokes of crime-stopping luck that come our way, since the politicians and prosecutors aren’t really doing it for us these days.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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