Not-so-fun fact time…
Tag: crime
Biden Asks Congress for Tens of Billions to Back Federal Anti-Crime Plan
The Biden administration on Thursday said it is asking Congress for $37 billion in funding to deal with surging crime while calling for a ban on “assault weapons” and “high-capacity magazines.”
“We need to fund police who walk the beat, know the neighborhood, are accountable to those they are sworn to serve, and build community trust and safety,” said the White House in a statement, coming two years after top Democrats embraced the polarizing “defund the police” rhetoric amid nationwide Black Lives Matter riots.
The statement added that the United States needs to “invest in mental health and substance use treatment services, crisis responders, and social workers to reduce the burden on police officers and prevent violent crime” while also expanding community interventions.
Turning to firearms themselves, the administration called to “ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines,” which was not clearly defined in the White House statement. Pro-gun groups have said that the terms “assault weapon” and “high-capacity magazine” are nebulous and don’t have a clear definition and prefer terms such as “modern sporting rifle” instead.
The Left Is Doing Its Best To Make Self-Defense A Crime
The same left-wing prosecutors who let rioting run rampant and let repeat offenders out on low bail also want to make it difficult for you to defend yourself.
We don’t yet know all the details about an apparent fatal stabbing of an agitated man by bodega clerk Jose Alba in New York City last week, but we do know that the clerk was quickly charged with murder and initially held at Rikers Island on $250,000 bail while video surveillance seems to indicate he likely acted in self-defense. Surveillance videos show the unnamed girlfriend of Austin Simon, the man Alba killed who had a history of felony arrests and was out on parole, becoming upset with Alba when her card was declined and threatening to “bring my n– down here and he gonna f-ck you up.”
Another video shows Simon walking behind the counter to Alba, shoving him, and getting in his face before Alba stood up and appeared to try to walk past Simon, at which point the two wrestled until Alba eventually stabbed the other man. “I don’t want a problem,” Alba told Simon when he walked in, according to the New York Post. Further footage appears to show the girlfriend pulling out a knife of her own and slashing Alba, although she has not been charged.
After outrage over Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s decision to charge Alba, who has no prior criminal record, with murder, and his pursuit of such a high bail while Alba languished at Rikers, the bail amount was reduced — but the charges have so far not been dropped. In the meantime, GoFundMe deleted a fundraising page for Alba’s defense, in a move that has become common for the platform when its leaders don’t agree with a cause.
A fearless citizen with the will and means to defend himself is a threat to left-wing bureaucrats who want to boss him around — like they did when they knocked on doors sniffing out “unauthorized” religious services and gatherings during Covid lockdowns, or when they allowed lawless riots to hold cities hostage during the summer of 2020. Bragg’s decision to crack down on what appears to at least potentially be a strong case of self-defense may not have been an intentional ploy to criminalize self-protective autonomy, but it does follow a long string of actions and attitudes on the left that are hostile to the idea of a law-abiding citizen using a lethal weapon to protect himself and his property.
Nearly Half of Murders Now Go Unsolved in America, The Lowest Clearance Rate on Record
Welcome to the New America™.
From CBS News, “A ‘coin flip’: Nearly half of U.S. murders go unsolved as cases rise”:
Across a nation that is already in the grips of a rise in violent crime, murders are going unsolved at a historic pace, a CBS News investigation has found. A review of FBI statistics shows that the murder clearance rate — the share of cases each year that are solved, meaning police make an arrest or close the case due to other reasons — has fallen to its lowest point in more than half a century.
“It’s a 50-50 coin flip,” says Thomas Hargrove, who runs the Murder Accountability Project, which tracks unsolved murders nationwide. “It’s never been this bad. During the last seven months of 2020, most murders went unsolved. That’s never happened before in America.”
Police are far less likely to solve a murder when the victim is Black or Hispanic, according to CBS News’ analysis. In 2020, the murders of White victims were about 30% more likely to be solved than in cases with Hispanic victims, and about 50% more than when the victims were Black, the data show.
In dozens of interviews across the country, police and criminal justice experts have offered a range of explanations for these trends.
They’ve got to find some way to blame white people.
Check out the roundabout way they addressed the real issue: snitches get stitches.
Some factors are evident when visiting communities such as Jackson, Mississippi, which has suffered from one of the nation’s highest murder rates.
In that city of about 160,000 people, the police department responded to 153 murders in the past year but has just eight homicide detectives to work that caseload. FBI guidelines suggest homicide detectives should be covering no more than five cases at a time.
Police Chief James Davis said his department needs more of everything to keep up with the violence.
“The whole system is backlogged,” Davis said. “I could use more police officers. I could use more homicide detectives, but if the state is backed up, the court is backed up, we will still have the same problem by developing these cases that we’re already doing.”
Police are also contending with a breakdown in trust between their officers and the communities they serve, a result of decades of tensions that spilled over during high-profile cases of police misconduct in recent years.
That has made it harder for police to receive tips or obtain help from witnesses, said Danielle Outlaw, the commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department. Outlaw told CBS News there is a history of “systemic inequities that contribute to the mistrust” in many communities most affected by crime.
Gee, I wonder what could have caused this breakdown in trust?
Was there some sort of “Movement” in 2020 that came to a head which said police are all evil white racists who are oppressing black people for no reason whatsoever other than the color of their skin?
Did police and the FBI decide to take a knee and blame white people for all of society’s ills rather than address our serious “inner city” crime problem?
Is THIS where NYPD’s subway resources are going, Mayor Eric? Outrage as beloved busker with his dancing toy cats is taken down by six cops while serious crime soars and terrified commuters REFUSE to take train
New York City Mayor Eric Adams said he was stunned by how bad Big Apple subway riders had it until he rode the subway himself last week and realized how poorly cops were being used to crack down on crime underground.
As subway crime continues to spike – rising nearly 40 percent from the first half of last year – Adams, in an exclusive interview with the New York Post, said he patrolled the transit system himself late at night for three hours and didn’t care for what he saw.
‘Let me tell you something: When I started looking into this, I was shocked at how bad this place is,’ Adams told the Post.
Days before the mayor touted his awakening on the hazards of subway travel, a video emerged of at least six NYPD officers arresting busker John Ajilo, a saxophone player with the catch phrase ‘Dancing is Happiness.’
‘I was shut down, handcuffed and taken to the police station for performing in the same spot 34th Herald Square I have been performing [in] on and off for about five years,’ he said on his GoFundMe page, which has already collected over $30,000.
Mayor Adams said he first knew he had to do something about subway crime about three weeks in office.
‘It was probably, the third — third or fourth week in January. I spent a lot of time in the office,’ he said. ‘And I started peeling back layers and what it started to unveil to me is how we just had this good shell, but underneath — it’s bad.’
The New York City subway is run by the New York City Transit Authority, which falls under the state Metropolitan Transportation Authority, controlled by the chairman, Janno Lieber, who was appointed by Gov. Kathy Hochul and confirmed by the state Senate in January.
The mayor appoints several members of the MTA board, but has little control over the operation and maintenance of the system.
Ridership on the subway is just under 60 percent of what it was pre-pandemic, with roughly 3.4 million daily commuters using the system.
Woman committed over Slender Man stabbing seeks her release
The second of two Wisconsin women who were sent to a state mental health facility after a 2014 stabbing attack on a sixth-grade classmate that they claimed was to appease the horror character Slender Man is petitioning for her release.
Morgan Geyser, 20, asked Waukesha County Judge Michael Bohren on June 14 to order her release as he did last year for her co-defendant, Anissa Weier, who spent nearly four years at a mental health facility in Oshkosh.
During a hearing Thursday, Bohren appointed three doctors to evaluate Geyser’s mental state and to submit their reports by Aug. 26. Prosecutors and defense attorneys will return to court on Sept. 12 to schedule another hearing to review the reports.
According to prosecutors, Geyser and Weier lured Payton Leutner to a Waukesha park following a sleepover in May 2014, and Geyser repeatedly stabbed Leutner while Weier urged her on. All three girls were 12 at the time.
Geyser and Weier left Leutner for dead, but she managed to crawl out of the woods in the park and was discovered by a passing bicyclist.
She suffered 19 stab wounds and barely survived, according to medical staff who treated her. Police found Weier and Geyser later that day walking on Interstate 94 in Waukesha. They said they were traveling to Slender Man’s mansion in northern Wisconsin and attacked Leutner because they thought it would make them Slender Man’s servants and prevent him from killing their families.
Disney World employee among 12 alleged sexual predators busted in undercover operation
A Disney World employee was among 12 men nabbed by Florida law enforcement for allegedly soliciting children for sex online, officials said.
The suspects, between the ages of 20 and 67, are facing a total of 49 felony charges following a two-week-long undercover investigation dubbed “Operation Child Protector II,” the Polk County Sheriff’s Office announced Friday.
Among those arrested is 30-year-old Zachary Hudson, who was employed as a bus driver at Disney World, cops said.
Between June 4 and 5, Hudson allegedly exchanged online messages with an undercover detective posing as a 15-year-old girl.
The detective asked Hudson if he had a problem with her only being 15, to which he replied as long as “my being older doesn’t bother you,” according to authorities. He later reportedly told her “age is just a number.”
The conversation moved to text messaging, where police say Hudson described the sexual acts he desired to do to her. He also sent a nude photo to the girl, cops said.
“What would an operation be — either a pornography investigation or predator operation or human trafficking operation — without a Disney employee? We always have a Disney employee,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd told WKMG-TV.
Accepting reality only hurts for a minute…
Wickr, Amazon’s encrypted chat app, has a child sex abuse problem — and little is being done to stop it
Wickr Me, an encrypted messaging app owned by Amazon Web Services, has become a go-to destination for people to exchange images of child sexual abuse, according to court documents, online communities, law enforcement and anti-exploitation activists.
It’s not the only tech platform that needs to crack down on such illegal content, according to data gathered by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, or NCMEC. But Amazon is doing comparatively little to proactively address the problem, experts and law enforcement officials say, attracting people who want to trade such material because there is less risk of detection than in the brighter corners of the internet.
NBC News reviewed court documents from 72 state and federal child sexual abuse or child pornography prosecutions where the defendant allegedly used Wickr (as it’s commonly known) from the last five years in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, using a combination of private and public legal and news databases and search engines. Nearly every prosecution reviewed has resulted in a conviction aside from those still being adjudicated. Almost none of the criminal complaints reviewed note cooperation from Wickr itself at the time of filing, aside from limited instances where Wickr was legally compelled to provide information via a search warrant. Over 25 percent of the prosecutions stemmed from undercover operations conducted by law enforcement on Wickr and other tech platforms.
These court cases only represent a small fraction of the problem, according to two law enforcement officers involved in investigating child exploitation cases, two experts studying child exploitation and two people who have seen firsthand how individuals frequently use Wickr and other platforms for criminal transactions on the dark web. They point to direct knowledge of child exploitation investigations and sting operations, interviews with victims and perpetrators of abuse, and interactions with individuals soliciting child sexual abuse material as evidence that Wickr is being used by many people who exploit children.
Posts linking Wickr and child sexual abuse material are also littered across the internet. On social media platforms such as Reddit, Tumblr and Twitter, NBC News found dozens of forums, accounts and blogs where hundreds of posts have been made soliciting minors, those who have access to them, or those interested in trading child sexual abuse material alongside Wickr screen names. No child sexual abuse imagery was viewed in the course of reporting this article.
Thomas Sowell on gun control…
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