OCR Text |
Show The Paper That Dares To Take A Stand Page 6 The Utah Independent April 14, 1977 Continued from page FEDERAL 1 While the L.E.A.A. was funding a Communist Front to attack police in Chicago, flying a professor to lecture Texas officers on thq relevance of Karl Marx, and spending billions to take control of our local police, crime was up 18 percent last year. Since the Fedcop program began, crime has risen 60 percent. . guese and flap off to Brazil, nor to our knowledge has a single mugger decided to forsake skull cracking to take up the translation of ancient Phoenician psalms. Indeed, crime now pays better than ever. In fact, the government statisticians tell us that while the L.E.A.A. crime warriors have been flailing away at things like local police hiring standards, crime has climbed to new up a stultifying sixty perheights cent since the federal crime fighters began issuing their secret decoders and magic detective rings. On November 17, 1975, the Associated Press gave us the latest gory statistics on the national mugathon: Criminals struck 19 times every minute to claim 20,000 lives and $2.6 billion in loot as crime in the United States rose 18 percent fast year, the FBI reported Monday. Murderers killed enough people to d town and robpopulate a bers and thieves hauled off loot valued at more than the Justice Departments annual budget and more than twice what it costs to operate the city of Chicago for a year. While the crime rate continued' to climb in all parts of the country, police showed no improvement in their ability to solve crimes with arrests. About one in five crimes reported to police in 1974 were solved fair-size- with an arrest, about the same performance recorded for the past five years. That jump of eighteen percent was the biggest leap for a single year in the annals of crime. The situation is so bad that Time magazine now calls our cities canyons of fear and reports: A study made by a mathematician at M.I.T. showed that one out of every eleven children bom in Atlanta in 1974 who stayed in the city would eventually be killed if the murder rate continued to grow as it has in the past. Epidemic is the description applied to soaring crime rates by U.S. News & World Report, which points out that in 1974 there were over 10,100,000 serious crimes committed in America. This is more than triple the 1960 figure. The statistics on larceny, burglary, robbery, forcible rape, aggravated assault, auto theft, and murder have all lept upward like a cowboy sitting down on a cactus. The most accurate of these figures involve murders, since a dead body is usually left behind as a clue that a crime has been committed. Not so with other types of crime. The L.E.A.A. admits, according to the New York Daily News, that only one out of every three felonies that occur is reported by the victims. It seems that the muggees are afraid to report the muggers for fear that teary-eye- d Liberal judges will quickly free the predators for revenge. What sayeth the L.E.A.A. about its dismal war record? Lets hear it from Gerald M. Caplan, director of the National Institute of Law and Criminal Justice of the L.E.A.A., from a speech' entitled Reassessing The War On Crime. According to Mr. Caplan, crime had been little studied before the creation of L.E.A.A. Nobody knew what caused crime or how to reduce or prevent it. Never mind that the academic booboisie has been examining criminals under microscopes for more years than Carter has been peddling liver pills. If the sociologists havent discovered what makes people become criminals by now, all the bureaucratic grants in the world are not about to unravel the riddle. Now Caplan admits: En-forceme- nt When Fedcop tried to take over the Los Angeles Police Department, Chief Ed Davis (r) told them to keep their $10 million and get out. The City Council backed him unanimously. Chief Davis knows that dictatorship begins with national control of local police, and he says the L.E.A.A. should be abolished. and the resources to reach this goal, titled Crime Experts All But Give All we need is the dedication. Up. Here we learn that those police d PeterRussell state alternative methods that Twenty months later, son was gone and Gerald Cohen was L.E.A.A. s Gerald Caplan talked confessing that L.E.A.A. hasnt the about may be necessary after all: faintest idea what causes crime or how it can be reduced. The war A collection of 15 men and women who have made it their business to against crime is over. Crime won. The defeat and demoralization fight crime or study it examined the rampant among the double-dom- e problem with a group of reporters and crime fighters is evident in a re- - editors in a conference sponsored by What can be said about our crime port in the Los Angeles Herald-Ex- the Washington Journalism reduction capacity? Not much that is for September 21. 1975. en- - ter . encouraging. . rose-colore- Cen-amin- ... We have learned little about er re- ducing the incidence of crime and have no reason to believe that significant reductions will be secured in the The reason we near future dont do better in curbing crime is that we dont know how. Why crime goes up or down is poorly understood. There are, of course, alternative approaches to crime control, which have been used in other nations. Repressive measures by the government in the courts, general curfews on the streets, and the establishment of check points in the central city areas for pedestrian and vehicular inspection might be used to control deviant behavior. While they might be equally successful here, they are not the kinds of experiments we think ought to be considered. .... That is, not yet. M. The latest L.E.A.A. police cars cost a mere $49,078 each. They contain (above) a $10,000 in the trunk which is linked to a sensor. The sensor a operates monitor which can tell officers in the car whether the siren is on or off. Development of this absurd Batmobile cost the U.S. taxpayers $2.3 million. The nations crime rate . . . rose all the resident L.E.A.A. attorneys 17 percent last year and the upward and sociologists gainfully employed trend is continuing at about the same through Fiscal 1981. Even the profli-rat- e this year. Other studies indicate gate House was sufficiently dis-ththe number of crimes actually gusted to cut the proposal by $5.7 committed may be two or three times billion. as much as is reported to police. While the causes and cures of I dont feel the crime situation crime remain the mystery of the age will improve immediately. Were in for the Liberal supersleuths bum-fo- r a long, hard fight. Its going to get bling and fumbling along at said L.E.A.A., such ordinary citizens as worse before it gets better, Charles R. Work, deputy chief of the cab drivers and beauty-parlo- r opera-LaEnforcement Assistance Admin- - tors, possessed of what was once istration called common sense, are well aware I dont see any glimmer of hope that the sociologists, college profes-fo- r the present criminal justice sys- - sors, government planners, and in our present society. We dont reaucrats pretending to be baffled have the glue any more, said Donald about the cause of escalating crime E. Santarelli, a Washington lawyer, are themselves largely responsible. It former head of L.E.A.A. and a for- - was ey wh created the permissive mer District of Columbia prosecutor, climate and called forth the Zeitgeist of something for nothing which use to turn our courts and The response of President Gerald a.ve into nurseries for the cosset-pus- h Ford to the failure of L.E.A.A. was to Prisns micro-comput- Mr. Caplan was tooting the frustration blues to his Los Angeles audience in January 1976, but only thirty-tw- o months earlier the L.E.A.A. had been burbling with confidence that the federal government would soon slay the Jabberwocky of crime. The L.E.A.A. Newsletter for September-Octobe- r 1973 tells of a press confern ence held by Russell W. Peterson on an L.E.A.A. flnanced then-chairma- -- study grandiloquently entitled A National Strategy To Reduce Crime. The study, announced L.E.A.A., gives top priority to reduction of murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery and burglary. According to Peterson, the reports most important recommendation was the establishment of a qualitative crime reduction goal. That goal, trumpeted the L.E.A.A., is to cut in half by 1983 the rate of high fear crimes. Taxpayers will be relieved to know this L.E.A.A. study cost only $1.75 million. And Peterson confidently declared: We have the know-how er at w .... bu-te- for a $6.8 billion bill to keep i8 even m most vicious crim- - |