The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/Ipso Facto

The Cautionary Instruction:  Falling crime rates and the fortification of America
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/Ipso Facto
December 30, 2011

The day after Christmas, Charles Lane’s column in the Washington Post touted America's dramatic decline in crime. He gleefully suggested that, "With luck, the United States could soon equal its lowest homicide rate of the modern era: 4.0 per 100,000, recorded in 1957.”

Like most observers of the criminal justice system, Lane is puzzled by the sharp decline in crime. Lane also suggested declining crime rates have a social and psychological benefit. He writes that “only” 38 percent of Americans say they fear walking alone at night within a mile of their homes.

The survey Lane cites seems to contradict his premise. Gallup also found, despite the decline in violent crime since the mid-1990s, "the majority of Americans continue to believe the nation's crime problem is getting worse." Sixty-eight percent of those surveyed say there is more crime in the U.S. than there was a year ago.
How can there be less fear of crime if more than two-thirds of Americans believe crime is on the rise?

Although the number of people who fear walking the street is lower than it was 30 years ago, it is up eight percentage points from 2001. More importantly, fear of crime has had a healthy impact on crime rates. This phenomenon is often overlooked when analyzing declining crime.

The fear of crime, realistic or not, has played a significant role in reducing crime. Experts may not say it and the average American may not admit it, but decreasing crime rates have come at a precious cost  -- the sacrifice of personal liberty.  James Q. Wilson, a renowned criminologist at Boston College recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “Another possible reason for reduced crime is that potential victims may have become better at protecting themselves by equipping their homes with burglar alarms, putting extra locks on their cars and moving into safer buildings or even safer neighborhoods.”

Homes and businesses across the country have taken measures to become more secure. What was once considered extreme is now common place -- security systems, spot lights, motion detectors, metal gates over front doors, video surveillance, car alarms, mace, pepper spray, stun guns, hand guns, personal self-defense training, even architectural design with crime prevention in mind.

Driving around rather than through some neighborhoods, avoiding a dimly lit parking lot or spacious parking garage may be accepted as prudent. But it has nonetheless altered the freedom to live and travel as one chooses.

Lane calls falling crime rates the most important social trend of the last 20 years. The most important question may be why does crime continue to fall? Many experts extol the virtues of incarceration, demographics, entitlement programs, concealed carry, a decline in demand for crack cocaine, even an increase in abortions.

Criminologists, sociologists and economists can no longer ignore the “fortification of America” as a leading factor in declining crime rates.

The Cautionary Instruction:  Money behind ignoring college abuses
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/Ipso Facto
December 9, 2011

Robert Champion, a drum major with Florida A&M University’s “Marching 100” Band, died last month. His death came hours after performing at the annual Florida Classic football game between A&M and Bethune-Cookman University.

Champion was found unresponsive on a bus parked outside a hotel after the game. Police have not been specific, but said they believe hazing played a part in his death. University officials have been more direct. As a result of hazing, four students were expelled from the school, and another 30 were dismissed from the band, according to A&M President James Ammons.

As with the Penn State and Syracuse sex scandals there appeared to be a code of silence within the Florida A&M community which permitted hazing in the form of assault, and now even murder, to continue for years. Hazing is a crime in Florida -- just as it is in Pennsylvania -- and 42 other states across the country.

A lawyer hired by the Champion family said that this was not the first such hazing report involving the band and the university, claiming administrators did not do enough to stop the practice from taking place.

"The university was on notice that this was a problem within the band," Attorney Christopher Chestnut said. "They turned a blind eye and a deaf ear."

Over the years, former A&M band director Julian White claims to have dismissed about 100 band members for hazing. He recently shared with CBS News dozens of letters he claims to have sent to administrators pleading for a tougher response to the band’s hazing problem. "More students should have been terminated from school," White said.

However, a year ago, White responded to a Frank Deford report on hazing among band members of historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) for HBO’s Real Sports. White said that Deford was just a prejudiced outsider who "made it seem like black schools are the only places where it's happening ... That's just not the case."

Whether it was happening at other universities is not the issue. It was happening at A&M and the university permitted it to continue. Just as some suggest that raping and sexually assaulting children can be overlooked at big time athletic programs, it now becomes apparent, as Deford suggested in a recent NPR commentary, abuse can happen where “HBCU bands are the headliners -- literally more popular than the football teams that they play for at halftime.”

The abuse scandals on America’s campuses are not about the culture of college sports. It is about the culture of money. Football and basketball bring in enormous amounts of cash -- so much so that university officials might choose to ignore sexual assault. Where bands fill stadiums and get television contracts they’re king. And so it goes, on those campuses administrators might choose to ignore a pattern of aggravated assault.




The Cautionary Instruction: Deaths in police custody on the rise
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/Ipso Facto
December 2, 2011

Deaths in police custody increased 16 percent between 2008 and 2009. A total of 4,183 deaths in police custody were reported to the Arrest-Related Deaths Program of the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) between 2002 and 2009, according to a BJS report issued this month. During that same time period the FBI reported that law enforcement agencies made 98 million arrests and 854 police officers died in the line of duty.

The Arrest-Related Deaths Program (ARD) grew out of the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2000 (DICRA). The DICRA defined custody related deaths as "the death of any person who is in the process of arrest, is en route to be incarcerated, or is incarcerated at a municipal or county jail, state prison, or other local or state correctional facility."

The DICRA requires each state to report police custody deaths to the ARD. The ARD expanded the definition of “the process of arrest” to include vehicular and other fatalities resulting from flight from arrest, uses of lethal force by police, suicides occurring during arrest attempts, and deaths of arrestees resulting from drug overdoses, or other medical conditions or deaths occurring during transport to a holding facility, jail, or booking center.

Before the enactment of the DICRA states had no uniform requirements for reporting the circumstances surrounding deaths in police custody. Consequently, an environment of suspicion arose surrounding many situations where a death occurred in police custody. Without specific reporting requirements a finding of suicide or death by natural causes was looked upon with distrust -- often causing community unrest.

The best known death while in police custody in Pittsburgh was that of Jonny Gammage Jr. He died in 1995 after a traffic stop. Three police officers, two from Brentwood and one from Baldwin, were charged with involuntary manslaughter, none were convicted.

Pennsylvania reported 218 deaths in police custody between 2003 and 2009. Pennsylvania trailed only California, Texas, Florida, New York and Arizona. Those six states account for about 65 percent of all such deaths.

According to BJS, a substantial majority of deaths in police custody, 2,931 out of 4,183, where ruled homicides. That sounds as though police officers are cold blooded killers. Homicide should not be confused with murder. Although murder is a form of homicide some homicides are justified. In fact, 64 percent of homicides by police are in response to felonious physical assaults on police officer. A police officer’s response with lethal force, causing the death of a felon, is justifiable homicide.

While suicide, intoxication, accidental death and natural causes account for the remaining deaths in police custody, those who succumbed while being pursued, detained or transported by police are almost exclusively men -- representing more than 95 percent of those who died in police custody.