dammit wrote:
Good one. The ex mayor on New York had an excellent strategy. Here is a bit I found on the 'net
Quote:
"The police measure that most consistently reduces crime is the arrest rate? Felony arrest rates (except for motor vehicle thefts) rose 50 to 70 percent in the 1990s. When arrests of burglars increased 10 percent, the number of burglaries fell 2.7 to 3.2 percent. When the arrest rate of robbers rose 10 percent, the number of robberies fell 5.7 to 5.9 percent."
During the 1990s, crime rates in New York City dropped dramatically, even more than in the United States as a whole. Violent crime declined by more than 56 percent in the City, compared to about 28 percent in the nation as whole. Property crimes tumbled by about 65 percent, but fell only 26 percent nationally.
Many attribute New York's crime reduction to specific "get-tough" policies carried out by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's administration. The most prominent of his policy changes was the aggressive policing of lower-level crimes, a policy which has been dubbed the "broken windows" approach to law enforcement. In this view, small disorders lead to larger ones and perhaps even to crime. As Mr. Guiliani told the press in 1998, "Obviously murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes. But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other."
So, how do we translate this into South Africa as a whole - remembering that SA and New York are vastly different places?
The answer must be to police petty crime - and this is exactly the opposite of the unstated policy the ANC does.
This makes complete sense: if you ticket a taxi driver for blowing his hooter to solicit passengers (which is breaking a bi-law) then it follows that eventually this anything-goes (you can't catch me) attitude will cease and desist forthwith.
The purpose of the police must shift from collecting statistics to pursuing criminals. Bring back traffic cops! Please!
The other thing is that the courts are horrible overloaded. This will require the ANC to train and deploy 1000's of legal people to ensure the smooth flow of cases through the courts. South Africa's legal system (the one they inherited from the Apartheid government) wasn't designed to manage this kind of volume.[
Dammit,
I read a book called "Freakanomics" that examined the crime story in New York under Guilliani, they stipulated that the actual statistics for the drop in crime in New York at the time was in fact at almost the same rate that the crime fell across the whole of the USA at the time.
"Cause and effect" is the issue i.e. how can crime accross the USA fall as a whole due to Guilianis coppers busting punk kids for peeing on the sidewalk and smashing the window of a derelict building in NY?
The books authors attribute the fall in crime to "Roe vs Wade" court case which legalised abortion about 15 yrs earlier, ie less unwanted kids from broken homes, less new members for gangs, less kids likely to come from broken homes only to end up committing the crimes etc.
If this theory is correct then we will see proper crime in SA fifteen years up the road if Aids keeps robbing the kids of their parents in this country (thanks Dr Beetroot).
Who will educate, feed, or teach this generation of orphans right from wrong?
I think it would be interesting to compare crime stats in places like china, saudi, Thailand, etc that albeit possibly are not shining beacons of human rights but i believe have negligible murder and theft rates relative to head of population?
I could be wrong but do not believe that people can say death penalty is not a deterrent.
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