Crime News

Hard to pin down real national crime statistics

I foolishly thought I could Google “national crime statistics” and easily find some useful, meaningful national crime statistics. But I kept digging and finally came to a site called “2008 Crime in the United States,” located on the FBI’s website. Even there, you need to click through a lot of links to find this now-out-dated information.

Essentially, according to that site, “an estimated 1,382,012 violent crimes occurred nationwide in 2008, showing a decrease of 1.9 percent from the 2007 estimate.”

I tried looking for 2009 stats, but they apparently haven’t yet been processed.

I got started on all this because we’ve had some news stories in recent weeks — and one nearly personal “close call” violent crime situation in my family’s case last summer — that started me wondering about violent crimes, property crimes, increased crime reporting, etc.

Personally, I don’t think crime and violence in general have gotten too much worse than when I was a kid. I think that REPORTING of crime and violence has gotten much better and much more widespread. But all that’s just my opinion.

What I do recall vividly is the nearby violent crime in our neighborhood last summer. For those of you living in larger cities where shootings, drive-by shootings, and all that other stuff is routine, this won’t mean as much, I suppose. But dinky on Springfield, Missouri, “Queen City of the Ozarks,” isn’t the sort of place where you expect gun violence in the streets. (Except for a rather historical shootout on our town square involving Wild Bill Hickok back in the 1860s.)

I heard three rapid “bang” noises one afternoon last summer, followed quickly by either two or three deeper, louder “boom” noises. My wife and I thought it sounded like it could be fireworks and that it may have come from somewhere quite a bit south of our home. I quickly peeked out from behind our “faux wood blinds” (i.e., plastic window shades) and looked in that direction, seeing nothing.

I went outside and saw my neighbor leaving his car and walking toward his front porch. He’d heard the noise, and both of us concluded it was probably fireworks or cars backfiring, or something.

As we were speaking about it, two police cars raced down the street and turned the nearby corner. Within a minute, an ambulance did the same thing.

We walked down to the end of the block and looked southward down the street. Cops, a couple of vehicles with one door swung open, and an ambulance were there. The cops were already putting up “crime scene” yellow tapes and neighbors were standing on their porches looking.

We discovered the next day that three people — two men and a woman, the woman being from a house in that block — were arguing in the two empty vehicles. One guy pulled a small caliber gun and started shooting. The other guy pulled a larger gun and fired twice, hitting and killing the first guy.

All of this happened in front of a house which has a backyard that abuts MY backyard.

It may be hard to pin down real, accurate, current national crime statistics. But I know now that’s a close as I ever hope to come to becoming a crime statistic!

Several states want laws to execute child molesters — what do you think?

Several states, including where I live, Missouri, are passing or considering laws that would make raping a child under the age of X a capital crime and call for the death penalty to those convicted of such child rapes.

How do you feel about this? We’ve had two extremely gruesome, awful such cases in our city and in a nearby town within the last year. My personal, heart-felt feeling is that anyone who would rape a young child shouldn’t be sharing the air I breathe.

My better senses about the whole issue say that these people should be put away for life, not executed.

Proponents of executing child rapists make the case for such violence and such barbarian behavior must be dealt with harshly, no excuses. I certainly understand and appreciate that. If I thought executing such people would 1) deter the rape of children, or, 2) somehow restore the innocent child to wholeness, I would be in favor of such measures.

In one of the cases I know of here in Missouri, a 9-year-old girl’s own stepfather, who swears to this day that he loved her like a daughter, and the stepfather’s friend, have been charged (and I believe made some confessions) with raping and murdering the girl, then hiding her body in a cave in the woods. Searchers from throughout the area looked for the body for several days before locating it.

If indeed that stepfather and his friend are convicted, it’s hard NOT to want them put to death rather than allowing them to continue living. Absolutely horrendous crime, no question.

BUT — there are so many problems with capital punishment for child rapists:

1. The whole death penalty system in America is so messed up that year after year people awaiting death are exonerated by such methods as DNA research. Do we really want to risk putting truly innocent people to death in error any more than we do currently?

2. Setting up a hard and fast capital punishment penalty for those who rape children put the children in a tough spot, with the necessity of repeated court appearances and trauma.

3. If child rapists know they’ll get the death penalty if convicted, it would seem they would be more likely to rape then kill a child, rather than risking having the child as a living witness to the crime.

I would rather have states get serious about “life sentences,” which in some states are set up “without the possibility of parole,” and in some states allow parole after X number of years even for a “life” sentence. Making a life sentence a true life sentence would get these people out of society without the problems associated with a required death penalty for child rape.

I don’t have the answers to such tough questions. How do you feel about the issue? What are your thoughts?

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