Not Anti-Crime

By Keith R. Schmitz

Once again Wednesday night, the applause that Hee Haw candidate Rick Perry got when his death penalty orgy was mentioned at the GOP presidential debate proved why these folks have to keep reminding us that they are Christian. Otherwise we'd have no way of knowing.

But what I don't get is the assertion that the death penalty is anti-crime.

It's not for two reasons.

First, the research is rich with proof that it is not a deterrent, except in John MacAdams' world. Compare crime rate in Rick Perry's death penalty paradise and Wisconsin which banned it 162 years ago. You can't.

But the other problem is that often the wrong person goes to glory compliments of the state. So for those who are in the tough on crime crowd, doesn't putting the wrong person to death mean that the real culprit goes free? How is that being tough on crime, especially when in many cases the execution closes the books on the case?

That's not just brutal, that's stupid.

Milwaukee: Safer than you think

by folkbum

I've had this open in a couple of tabs since yesterday, but Jim Rowen posted it this morning and so I thought I had better get to it as well. Carla Saulter at Grist writes about how the safest places to raise children tend to be big cities:

People, especially children, are most likely to be hurt or killed in an automobile crash, and, not surprisingly, automobile crashes are more prevalent in areas that require cars to get around. (Outer suburbs also tend to be dominated by two-lane roads, which are responsible for roughly 77 percent of automobile fatalities.) Even though the risk of homicide by a stranger (incidentally, a small percentage of all homicides) is slightly higher in central cities, the difference is not enough to overcome the significantly elevated risk in outer suburbs of a fatal car crash.

Of course, there's more to safety than staying alive. Most of us would also like to avoid being assaulted, harassed, or robbed. So what of the crime that does exist in cities? According to Skenazy, that's going down--and not just a little bit. We're talking historic lows. Crime rates have been falling in almost every category (including crimes against children) since the mid-90s, and are no higher today than they were in 1974.

Indeed, just this morning there's another story about violent crime rates being lower today than at any other point in my entire lifetime.

Saulter cites a 2002 University of Virginia study (pdf)--no doubt, with the continued decline in violent crime since then the results would be even stronger--suggesting that it is far more dangerous to live in isolated, car-heavy areas rather than in cities, a study I'd not seen before. (UVA repeated the study focusing just on VA itself in 2009 with the same results.) Milwaukee was one of nine metro areas (city plus surrounding counties) in the 2002 study; the city of Milwaukee was a safer place to live than 3/4 of the counties in the study, and safer than neighboring Washington County, where residents are more than twice as likely to die in traffic accidents than in Milwaukee. (Ozaukee and Waukesha Counties were slightly safer.) The safest of all was the inner-ring suburbs in Milwaukee County, where density and walkability are far higher than the outer-ring, exurban counties. (The City of Milwaukee was also listed as a safer place to live than any of the Wisconsin exurban counties of the Twin Cities metro region!)

Whatever you may think of life here in the urban hellhole that is Milwaukee, it's a lot safer than life in a lot of those exurban hellholes to the north and west of here.

McIlheran Watch: Rowen on DUI

by folkbum

As I wrote last week, Patrick McIlheran's Sunday column in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel was both a trip into fake-reality land (he claims, despite a lack of evidence, that the government plans to mandate alcohol-sensing ignition locks on all cars that must be used every time) and a celebration of the "responsible drunk" who knows perfectly well for himself that he's sober enough to drive.

At the time that I wrote, I did not have access to the full column, just the provocative excerpt. Now I do have access to it, and it does not exonerate him at all. In fact, it implicates him: "I drink and drive," he writes, toward the end, explaining that after a beer or a glass of wine he doesn't think twice about driving and he'll be damned if his car is ever going to tell him he's impaired.

James Rowen of the Political Environment piles on:

Wisconsin's typically American legal limit, at 0.08 BAC, is more generous that in other countries, so we already get a break--but, really, why would we celebrate it?--that other more thoughtful folk deem unacceptable. Examples--in Hungary, Brazil and the Czech Republic, the BAC is 0.00; in Norway and Sweden, 0.02; Japan, 0.03; portions of Canada, 0.05.

And consider that people who fly airplanes are not allowed to take the controls within eight hours of having any alcohol, and are considered legally-impaired if they were to test at 0.04 BAC--because alcohol slows down reflexes and muddles judgement.

If we had to abide by those standards, drunk driving crashes would pretty much disappear.

Rowen also links to evidence of how impaired drivers can be with BAC of as low as 0.05 and reminds us of the social contract: We expect you to choose to be safe, he says, and if you can't live up to that, you may need society's help to get there. You should really read the whole thing.

McIlheran Watch: It's like he wants you to drive drunk

by folkbum

I hate to interrupt my season premiere of "Eureka" for this, but every time I think I can get out, he drags me back ... you know the thing.

Anyway, McIlheran is earning his "Preview Patty" nickname this weekend. I got this excerpt of his Sunday column--yes, the Sunday column, so no linkity-blinkity--in my inbox at a bit after 6 this evening:

You knew that your government is planning to put a blood-alcohol interlock on your car’s ignition, didn’t you?

“We’d rather not call them ignition interlocks,” said Susan Ferguson of the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety, or DADSS, program. “It’s not a punitive device.” [. . .]

The devices won’t be perfect, so car-makers will err on the side of no-go. Suppose a driver measures at 0.079%, say, starts the car and runs over a pedestrian. Then the cops find that her blood-alcohol is really 0.09%. Which car-maker will want to face the victim’s family lawyer and explain tolerable error or the fact that blood-alcohol can go on rising after your last drink?

So in practice, cars will impose a lower limit--two glasses, not three, say. Ferguson concedes this: Her devices will be set with a safety margin. It’s better, she says, to erroneously stop an innocent than to erroneously permit a drunk: “We’re very keen not to let anyone over the limit drive.” [. . .]

Beyond these is the biggest question: Just why would your government presume--to the point of making you pass a test to drive your car--that you’re an irresponsible drunk?

The ellipses are his, so perhaps the real column corrects the implication contained in the opening paragraph, which is that you--responsible, literate, intelligent (you're reading this blog as opposed to, say, McIlheran's) you--will have to have a blood-alcohol ignition interlock on your car. The interlock, suggests McIlheran, will be mandated by the federal government, and all cars are going to have them and every driver will have to blow into one every time he or she wants to take a spin down to the custard stand. That includes you--attractive, sober, ambidextrous you.

McIlheran must think that you've been convicted of DUI, then. (I don't know if you can sue him for slander if he doesn't use your name in particular.) That's because the real story--what some might call the "truth," but others might call the "facts," and I include both because its important to tell both sides of every story--is that the draft federal highway bill under consideration in a subcommittee of Congress somewhere has a provision that ties a portion of federal highway money to states' passing laws requiring the interlocks on the cars of those convicted of driving under the influence.

Got it? Not you. Because you would never be convicted of DUI, since you're all very athletic chess grandmasters with clear skin and lustrous full heads of hair.

Claiming we're all going to have to blow before we go is par-for-the-course fearmongering by the pro-DUI lobby. For example, this website, which even has some sort of magical crystal-ball based future timeline which indicates that by 2019, the US will have "de facto prohibition" because the ignition lock mandatory on every car will be set at .03 BAC (.08 is the current legal limit). It's hooey, of course, but it's the kind of hooey that McIlheran peddles thrice-weekly.

What's unusual, even for him, is the blasé way he suggests that convicted DUI offenders can just be trusted not to do it again. It's surprisingly hard for me to find Wisconsin statistics, but from what I could google up, it seems about a third, give or take, of all arrests for driving under the influence are of repeat offenders. (Check out these pretty graphs from Ohio.) It should also be noted that Wisconsin is consistently last or near last when it comes to DUIs; MADD noted a couple of years ago that more of our traffic fatalities were DUI-related than any other state's.

And yet he wrote, according to the last line of the excerpt he previewed, that he can't believe the government would assume you were "an irresponsible drunk." I guess McIlheran thinks all the responsible drunks ought to be allowed to drink and drive.

It's also unusual considering that his newspaper's second-best chance for a Pulitzer this year (after the BPA dead horse) was the "Wasted in Wisconsin" series specifically about how big of a problem drinking and driving is here. (One of the stories, in fact, was about the "responsible" drunks who thought they were not impaired at all. Who needs an interlock device to tell you if you're safe when you instead have the inflated sense of self-esteem and strong feelings of invincibility that come with being drunk?) I would have thought that even if no one is checking his facts about interlock laws, someone down at 3rd and State would at least have enough sense to wonder whether putting such pro-DUI pablum on the op-ed page might just be offensive considering the dismal state of affairs reported on the news pages.

But, hey, what do I know. I don't get a column at the daily dinosaur. I'm just a guy with a meagre blog read by the wisest and most heroic people on the planet.

(Updated: More here.)

The police non-emergency number needs hold music

by folkbum

So I learned while waiting to report that some sonuvabitch broke out a window in my car last night. I keep nothing of value in the car, of course, but man, that sort of thing sure ruins a morning, ain'a?

Look, Ma! No Guns!

by capper

The Journal Sentinel reports that Green Bay Packer Noah Herron drove off some home intruders, using a bed post.

No guns at all. Now the NRA groupies might say something like, "Well, yeah, he's a well-conditioned football player. He's in top shape. Of course he could fight off some kids. If he wasn't, and didn't have a gun, he'd be dead meat."

Then how would they explain this?

Man, 71, and friend in wheelchair subdue suspect

Tue Jun 3, 7:48 PM ET

KINGSTON, Pa. - The young woman probably thought the 71-year-old veteran, whose friend was in a wheelchair, would make an easy target. She was wrong. Harry Kopenis chased and tackled the 22-year-old woman he says robbed him at an ATM in northeastern Pennsylvania. Then, with help from his friend in a wheelchair, he held her until police arrived.

I'm sure it just boggles their minds.

Speaking of residency

by folkbum

I live near what must be the most-robbed bank in the city. I can't even remember how many times it's been robbed in the last year--must be at least four, maybe five. Sheesh.

Good News for Milwaukee

by folkbum

I was wondering about this the other day, seeing the news of murders in several other places around the state, but I didn't say anything because, one, I wasn't sure I was right and, two, I didn't want to jinx it:

Twelve days into the new year, the city has yet to record its first homicide, police reported this morning.

That compares to three homicides reported for the same period in 2007, Milwaukee police Capt. Timothy Burkee said. Overall, 105 people were homicide victims in 2007, two more than had been recorded the year before.

What are the odds we can keep this up?