October 5, 2014
BOOKIES STOPPED TAKING BETS ON THE 2014 FOX BUTTERFIELD AFTER THIS ONE:
More Americans Killed By Police Than By Terrorists: With Crime Down, Why Is Police Aggression Up? (Dave Lindorff, AlterNet)
The hilarity of this story ought not preclude our considering the degree to which crime ceased to be a factor in our lives and politics over the past thirty years.You might not know it from watching TV news, but FBI statistics show that crime in the U.S.--including violent crime--has been trending steadily downward for years, falling 19% between 1987 and 2011. The job of being a police officer has become safer too, as the number of police killed by gunfire plunged to 33 last year, down 50% from 2012, to its lowest level since, wait for it, 1887, a time when the population was 75% lower than it is today.So why are we seeing an ever increasing militarization of policing across the country?Given the good news on crime, what are we to make of a report by the Justice Policy Institute, a not-for-profit justice reform group, showing that state and local spending on police has soared from $40 billion in 1982 to more than $100 billion in 2012.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 5, 2014 7:48 PM
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