Quotes

"Fascism and communism both promise "social welfare," "social justice," and "fairness" to justify authoritarian means and extensive arbitrary and discretionary governmental powers." - F. A. Hayek"

"Life is a Bungling process and in no way educational." in James M. Cain

Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. Sir Winston Churchill

"summum ius summa iniuria" ("More laws, more injustice.") Cicero

As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.”

"Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan

"Law is where you buy it." Raymond Chandler

"Why did God make so many damn fools and Democrats?" Clarence Day

"If I feel like feeding squirrels to the nuts, this is the place for it." - Cluny Brown

"Oh, pshaw! When yu' can't have what you choose, yu' just choose what you have." Owen Wister "The Virginian"

Oscar Wilde said about the death scene in Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

Thomas More's definition of government as "a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth.” ~ Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” ~ Jonathon Swift

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Why is the NY Times So Full Of It?

A Tale of Two Very Different Cities by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal 20 January 2015



The New York Times resurrects a disingenuous comparison between New York and San Diego.



Who knew that the return of William J. Bratton to serve as New York police commissioner, a position he held from 1994 to 1996, would signal a return of some of the hoariest anti-police conceits from that era as well? In a columnblasting Broken Windows policing (which targets public-order offenses like graffiti and turnstile jumping), New York Times reporter Ginia Bellafante dusts off one of theTimes’s favorite questions from the 1990s: “Why doesn’t New York police itself like San Diego does?” San Diego lowered its violent crime rate from 1991 to 1998, and again from 2002 to 2012, by more than New York did, Bellafante says, without allegedly employing what she calls “broken-windows tactics.”
Times reporter Fox Butterfield regularly trotted out the same comparison in the 1990s, and it is even more inapt today than it was then. San Diego and New York’s demographics and crime profiles are worlds apart. San Diego doesn’t have a large entrenched underclass, nor did it ever have a serious violent-crime problem. Its murder rate in 1993, a year before Bratton took over the NYPD, was two-fifths that of New York. New York had 1,946 murders in 1993; San Diego had 133. Gang members did not—and do not—regularly gun each other down in San Diego as they still do in New York’s public housing projects. Yet despite San Diego’s much lower violent crime rate, in 1999, the allegedly pacific San Diego police department fatally shot civilians at 15 times the rate of the NYPD.
What about that gap from 1998 to 2002 in Bellafante’s New York–San Diego comparison? Bellafante, drawing on a report from the John Jay College Center on Race, Crime, and Justice, has chosen her dates carefully. San Diego’s 1990s crime drop came to a screeching halt by the end of the decade, while the New York Police Department continued to bring crime down year after year—the only city in the country to do so. By 2002, when San Diego’s crime rate started dropping again, New York had already saved hundreds more lives.
Bellafante summarizes a recent City Journal article by Bratton and Manhattan Institute fellow George Kelling as “arguing essentially that minorities love ‘broken windows’ [and] that critics who don’t see this ‘have never been to a police/community meeting in a poorer, mostly minority neighborhood.’” …
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