A Colton, California URL asks how do you create safe neighborhoods?
It is not hard, and it begins by looking over some of the many studies of convicted felons to see what violent criminals are afraid of. The first item on the list of criminals fears laid out in the Wright Rossi Report from 1982 is fear of prompt punishment severe enough to be painful to the offender.
This in a world where the police are typically more than ten minutes away and…
A killer can strike and be out of sight in 15 seconds..
A rapist can finish degrading his [or her] victim and be gone in six minutes.
A robber can complete a robbery and be on his or her way out in two minutes,
And someone physically attacking another may kill or seriously injure a victim and be hon their merry way in less than one minute.
A world, in other words, when a career criminal can commit a crime every 48 hours or less for months on end, leaving the scene and the witnesses behind with five to nine minutes, thirty seconds to spare.
For the time the criminal is present, the victim is the only law enforcement in sight.
So a career criminals primary fear is being “punished,” shot, by an intended victim. When you remove that fear crime skyrockets.
Chicago makes a convenient example of what happens when restrictive gun laws cause the people are forbidden any effective means of self defense. The graph below begins just before Hollywood’s “Send the Army and confiscate all guns” campaign which began in late December, 1963.
Illinois had few restrictive gun laws in 1962, and much the same homicide rate as most cities in its size range, 7.0 per 100,000 population – and then the gun ban campaign began.
The next step is marked by an even faster rise in Chicago’s murder rate, brought on primarily by Illinois’ ill considered “Firearms Owners ID Card” scheme.
As you can see, the combination of the FOID scheme and the Federal “Gun Control Act of 1968 caused a near vertical rise in the homicide and other violent crime rates
Until Mayor Jane Byrne, convinced that State and Federal gun restrictions were the right path but just not strong enough signed “made man” Fred Roti’s mob lawyer written total gun ban took effect, resulting in the first spike in violent crime and murder rates.
The second spike resulted from a campaign to arrest and imprison Chicago’s most influential gang leaders, and resulted from the gang wars resulting from those arrests, as underlings fought for leadership positions.
And the decline after 1993? The numbers you see on the chart are not the Chicago Police Department’s numbers, they are City Hals, and fall far short of the total of victims listed by name, address, and place of death reported in the media.
Like everywhere else “touched” by the politically motivated violence the admitted total is farabove prior years. But that total will still fall substantially short of reality, as is the most common case with jurisdictions with restrictive gun laws.
Jurisdictions where pursuit is always ten minutes or more behind the criminal.
And the only really viable solutions are for the voters to throw the established politicians out, and elect competent administrators in their place.
Or for Congress to grow up and face up to their duty to rule under the Constitution, instead of trying to evade the Constitution.
Stranger