THE REASON GUNS AREN'T A POLITICAL ISSUE ANYMORE:

NYC crime down 40 percent from same time in '08 (COLLEEN LONG, 9/18/09, Associated Press)

Just how low can the crime rate go?

The New York Police Department says the city is heading toward a record low number of murders this year, about 457. That would break the low of 497 set in 2007. There have been 325 homicides in New York this year through Friday morning.

Even with fewer officers and budget cuts, overall crime is down nearly 40 percent from the same time last year.

Street Fighting Man (Victorino Matus, September 18, 2009, Weekly Standard)

Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, and the subject of the 2005 Oscar-nominated documentary Street Fight, is once again at the center of a new 5-part docu-series, Brick City, airing on the Sundance Channel all next week.

In one way, Brick City is a sequel to Street Fight. Now that Booker is finally in power, how have the idealistic promises of that young Stanford football player/Rhodes Scholar/Yale law graduate been translated into action in a city like Newark, where one-third of its residents lived below the poverty line in 2002 and the high school graduation rate hovered around 40 percent? It's as if someone made a followup film to Robert Redford's The Candidate (whose very last lines are by the senator-elect who asks, "Now what?").

By 2008, homicides had been reduced by roughly 32 percent, and in no small part is this due to Police Director Garry McCarthy and a crime-reduction strategy involving street corner surveillance known as Operation Impact.

We're too safe to fear them or want them anymore.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 18, 2009 11:11 AM