Murders up 20 Percent City Wide
For years it seemed the murder rate couldn’t go any lower, but it just kept on dropping and dropping. Now the City reports it’s up 20 percent since the beginning of the year, vs. the same period in 2014. New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton blamed pot dealers, DNAinfo reported. Here are the stats, released at a press…
For years it seemed the murder rate couldn’t go any lower, but it just kept on dropping and dropping. Now the City reports it’s up 20 percent since the beginning of the year, vs. the same period in 2014. New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton blamed pot dealers, DNAinfo reported.
Here are the stats, released at a press conference Monday: There have been 54 murders so far in 2015, vs. 45 during the same period last year. Murders involving drugs ticked up 15 percent so far this year. Of those murders, 60 percent were related to marijuana specifically. The head of detectives said most of the drug-related murders are not turf wars, but rather robberies.
Most of the violence took place in only five of the City’s 77 police precincts, including three in Brooklyn: the 67th, 63rd and 75th precincts — aka Flatbush, Flatlands and East New York.
Shootings were also up 20 percent, reported the Daily News. There have been 149 shootings so far this year, vs. 126 during the same period in 2014.
But, the paper continued, crime is down 11 percent in other categories, including rape, robbery, burglary, grand larceny and auto theft.
Do you think this means we’re going to see a serious rise in crime in Brooklyn, or is this just a one-time statistical fluke that will even out later this year? And what do you think of the marijuana explanation?
Murders up 20 Percent in 2015 in Year-to-Year Comparison, NYPD Says [NY Daily News]
Bratton Blames Marijuana for Surge in Murders [DNA]
Here comes the hot stepper, murderer
I’m the lyrical gangster, murderer
Pick up the crew in-a de area, murderer
Still love you like that, murderer
.
No no we don’t die, yes we multiply
Anyone test will hear the fat lady sing
Act like you know, Rico
I know what Bo don’t know
Touch them up and go, uh-oh!
Ch-ch-chang chang
.
Here comes the hot stepper, murderer
I’m the lyrical gangster, murderer
Excuse me mister officer, murderer
Still love you like that, murderer
Extraordinary, juice like a strawberry
Money to burn baby, all of the time
Cut to fade is me, fade to cut is she
Come juggle with me, I say every time
.
Here comes the hot stepper, murderer
I’m the lyrical gangster, murderer
Dial emergency number, murderer
Still love you like that, murderer
.
The What
Someday this war is gonna end…
The gothamist article has a link to a PDF released by the NYPD, on the sheet it says 49 murders in 2015 and 42 in 2014 a 16.7% difference or 7 additional murders not necessarily attributed to marijuana:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/cscity.pdf
http://gothamist.com/2015/03/03/marijuana_is_murder_bratton.php
spread out across the 5 boroughs thats maybe 1 or 2 additional murders per borough. That doesn’t sound as drastic as saying 20% rise due to weed.
Legalize pot – regulate pot – tax pot. Look at Colorado. They’re swimming in cash. If pot sellers could call the cops, use licensed security guards, open up storefronts with rollgates and form legitimate business they wouldn’t be getting gunned down in the streets, they would be contributing to the legal economy and responding to a huge existing demand for a product less harmful than cigarettes or alcohol. Come on.
http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/2015/03/advocates-nypd-commissioner-brattons-statement-linking-marijuana-and-increased-shooting
Bratton is trotting out a tired old drug war chestnut that firmly places current NYPD policy on a spectrum of ignorance straight out of the “reefer madness” days of the 1930’s, with it’s attendant racist underpinnings and lack of acknowledgment of scientific and medical research on marijuana, addiction and drug use.
If there are “turf wars” being fought over drug sales, then take this market out of the hands of criminals. The drug war is rotting this nation from the inside out; destroying lives, discouraging real talk with our children about how to protect themselves against unsafe drug use, instilling shame in those who might otherwise seek help for addictions and dependencies.
This infographic shows the relationship between the drug war, started by Nixon, and America’s out of control prison population http://prorev.com/1211PRISXONUP.jpg
Do you know someone in prison for a non-violent drug offense committed in their youth? Do you know the yearly cost of imprisoning them? How can we calculate the waste of locking someone up away from their family and community–they aren’t in school, they aren’t building a resume or raising their children…what social cost are all of us paying to these parasites: the war on drugs, an ever-increasingly militarized police force, privatized prisons that are paying prisoners pennies an hour for labor formerly done by non-incarcerated Americans who were paid an actual wage… ???
Brooklyn is a fine city and the bad days are a thing of the past.
.
The What
Someday this war is gonna end…
Lots of reasons:
– If pot were legal and sold in SECURE businesses with cameras, guards, etc., robberies would be uncommon.
– If pot were legal the price may come down and the risk/reward ratio would increase.
– Crime between criminals is always higher than normal because you can’t go to the cops and say “this guy stole $10,000 of my cash that I got from selling pot.”
Just think for second. Did robberies/murders go up during prohibition? Yes. Same thing here.
More to the point, is is a white and gold elephant, or a blue and black elephant?
From the text that accompanied that gif:
“Mass incarceration is costly — and it doesn’t work: Comparing the housing of prisoners to the education of students might seem like comparing apples and oranges. After all, a student is spending about a third of a day at school, while a prisoner is being kept alive 24/7.
In light of that fact, there are two points worth noting:
First, the U.S. should simply not be spending any money on incarcerating many of the millions in prison all over the country. Since the 1970s, the U.S. has built a system of mass incarceration that is unrivaled the world over: About 25% of the world’s prisoners are incarcerated in America, even though it hosts only 5% of the world’s population. Brutal sentencing practices — lengthy minimum sentences, harsh penalties for minor drug possession, three strikes laws — have filled up our prisons at rates that outpace Russia and China. In other words, every state is spending huge sums of money on people who should either not be incarcerated in the first place or should at least be serving far shorter sentences.
Second, the U.S. incarceration system is basically an inversion of its education system. As flawed as the public school system is in this country, children routinely emerge with knowledge and skills that allow them to contribute more effectively to society. By contrast, the voracious prison system systematically fails to rehabilitate its inmates. Nearly two-thirds of the inmates released every year return to prison. Those that manage to remain outside of it are often far worse off than before they were incarcerated, as they endure discrimination in housing, employment and political participation.
Perhaps if more money were spent on creating and sustaining an education system that met all of its students’ needs, we wouldn’t need to spend so much money on putting people behind bars.”
From my perspective: This is a conversation about the wider choices a society makes and the outcomes it can expect as a result. The war on drugs is not an inevitable, inescapable natural life process that cannot be ended. It is a social choice that we all continue to allow our government to make. It’s an expression of our priorities and beliefs. At this point I ask again: do you know someone in prison for a non-violent drug offense? If so, have you spent any time thinking about what kind of a person they are, what circumstances they grew up with, what kind of education they received?
It should not take a no-knock raid by a DEA agent throwing a flash grenade into your toddler’s crib (on the word of a confidential informant) to wake you up to the reality of how the war on drugs is changing America for the worse. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/05/baby-in-coma-after-police-grenade-dropped-in-crib-during-drug-raid/
thanks, it’s rather shocking when you look at how our country has changed since the war on drugs was declared. I have always believed that you need to only look at the timing of it–after the “end” of Jim Crow and the tumult of the 60’s when it looked like perhaps the status quo was not as secure as we all once believed. The racially incendiary tone of much anti-drug rhetoric should also be a clue as to the real motivation behind this failure in sense and policy.
If you believe that the drug war is truly about “protecting our children” or doing the best for our youth, please look at the real and shocking disparity between what is spent to educate a child and what is spent to keep someone in prison.
http://mic.com/articles/109340/this-is-how-much-the-us-spends-on-imprisoning-vs-educating-people-in-one-startling-gif