Reply to Is a liberal city council soft on crime or are the recent bills justified?

Forum Index » Metropolitan DC Local Politics

Reply to "Is a liberal city council soft on crime or are the recent bills justified?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]To say DC is “soft” on crime suggests that criminals are neither being policed nor punished adequately.

DC has 549 police per 100,000 people. These are just the locally hired police, not the university cops, the Secret Service, the transit police, and the dozens of other groups armed officers in the federal city. We have the sixth largest police force in the nation and the greatest number of cops per capita among cities over 250k people.

DC also incarcerates a lot of people. There are over 6,000 DC residents in jail or federal prisons. There are many ways to calculate our rate of imprisonment, but estimates vary from 
930 per 100,000 residents to 1,153 per 100,000. Regardless of how you calculate it, DC ranks in the top five among states in the nation for incarcerating its residents. (Whether it makes sense to compare DC to states is a matter that can be debated.)

The rate of policing and incarceration has had no effect on crime. To the extent that there has been any pattern to crime, it seems to be correlated to prosperity —sometimes lower in economic boom times than in times when jobs are in shorter supply.

Some of our city leadership and some in the justice system are seeing that policing and sentencing aren’t reducing crime. If the goal is a safer society, not just a more punitive one, it suggests that we need a different approach if crime is to be prevented in the first place. That doesn’t not mean doing away with accountability for violent and repeat offenders. It means supplementing out justice system with new tools until we find some that work.
[/quote]

Did you actually read the thread before you posted?[/quote]

I can;t believe survivors rights groups aren't protesting Allen. The issue isn't the crux of the law, it's blocking judges from considering the nature of the original crime. He doesn't trust judges to discern who was a wayward youth and who is a serious sicko. Allen is smarter than judges, so taking care of that for them.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics