(no subject)
I saw this story on the news earlier. Yeah, this city is a safe place to live...NOT. Hell, with 4 million+ people here , crime was sure to rise but not that much. Damn. Now another thing to worry about. And another reason I don't like it here (among other things). But I guess we just have to be careful out there. I worry about two of my younger cousins. They are ages 15 and 16 and I worry about them following the "wrong" crowd but I hope that they won't. I would hope that they're smarter than that.
Violent Crime In Houston Increases, FBI Figures Show
FBI statistics Monday confirmed what big cities like Houston, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Las Vegas have seen on the streets: Violent crime in the U.S. is on the rise, posting its biggest one-year increase since 1991.
Murders climbed from 272 in 2004 to 334 in 2005 in Houston, a 23 percent rise, and from 131 to 144 in Las Vegas, a 10 percent increase.
In Philadelphia, homicides jumped from 330 in 2004 to 377 in 2005, a 14 percent increase, according to the FBI.
Jeffrey Sedgwick, director of the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, cautioned that it is not yet clear whether the FBI numbers reflect a real increase, or the ordinary year-to-year variations that statisticians call "static noise."
Sedgwick said it is possible that crime rates in the U.S. are approaching a floor below which it may be difficult or even impossible to go. "I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect you can always drive the crime rate down," he said.
Some criminal justice experts said the statistics reflect the nation's complacency in fighting crime. Crime dropped dramatically during 1990s, and some cities have since abandoned effective programs that emphasized prevention, the putting of more cops on the street, and controls on the spread of guns.
Mayor Bill White said most Houston neighborhoods are safer than they were a few years ago, with violent crime concentrated in just a few areas.
For instance, 30 percent of the city's homicides occurred in three police districts on the southwest side.
"Much of it is gang related and it has been exacerbated by the presence of some of the New Orleans gangs where some of the gangs were operating in the city of Houston," White said.
Transplanted New Orleans residents are as much victims as they are perpetrators, officials said.
The FBI figures were released on the same day authorities announced the arrest in Louisiana of a Katrina evacuee considered one of the Houston area's most-wanted killers. Authorities said he robbed two other evacuees of their FEMA money and shot them, killing one.
Criminologist Bob Walsh said poverty, youth and population density are all factors in crime. But he said there is no way to know for sure what is driving the increase now.
"We don't have a good sense of actually what causes it, so therefore, what prevents it is just as much of a mystery," he said.
HPD is spending millions of dollars in overtime to target some high crime areas of Houston. White said he expects to see some results by the end of the summer.
"We see that budgets for policing are being slashed and the federal government has gotten out of that business," said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston. Still, Fox said, "We're still far better off than we were during the double-digit crime inflation we saw in the 1970s."
In Philadelphia, which has had more than 160 murders this year, the police department has responded by creating a special unit charged with roaming the streets in the dangerous hours between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. The program, which is expected to start soon, will shift 46 officers from other assignments.
Philadelphia police Capt. Benjamin Naish said more people appear to be settling disputes with guns.
"I think that everybody continues to be frustrated within the government, within the department," he said. Philadelphia police have stressed that the number of killings is still below the averages in the mid-1990s and far below the 525 homicides in 1990.
The overall national increase in violent crime was modest, 2.5 percent, which equates to more than 1.4 million crimes. Nevertheless, that was the largest percentage increase since 1991.
Nationally, murders rose 4.8 percent, meaning there were more than 16,900 victims in 2005. That would be the most since 1998 and the largest percentage increase in 15 years. Some big cities felt the brunt.
Murders rose from 59 to 104 in Birmingham, Ala., up 76 percent; from 59 to 85 in Charlotte-Mecklenburg County, N.C., a 44 percent spike; from 89 to 126 in Kansas City, Mo., a 42 percent rise; from 87 to 122 in Milwaukee, a 40 percent jump; and from 79 to 109 in Cleveland, up 38 percent.
"The killings are going in spurts," said Judy Martin, a victims' advocate in Cleveland whose son was shot to death in a 1994 carjacking. "A number of the murders this year seem to come from a number of young men jumping on someone and killing them. We are going downhill."
Detroit, Los Angeles and New York were among several big cities that saw murder numbers drop.
Theories about New York's decline vary. Some experts point to favorable shifts in demographics and the economy, as well as the crash of a once-thriving crack market that fueled violence in the 1980s.
Officials in the 36,000-officer department, the nation's largest, credit their crime-fighting approach. They cite a tactic refined over the past decade in which commanders use computers to track crime patterns -- particularly those involving guns and drugs -- and deploy patrols where and when criminals are most active.