One of the many points that won President Reagan the presidency in 1980 was his analogy about recessions.
If you’re too young to recall, the Jimmy Carter campaign had claimed that Ronald Reagan couldn’t even define a recession – a foolish barb, considering that Ronald Reagan’s degree was in economics, back when colleges actually took economics seriously.
Reagan replied with his trademark wit: “A Recession… is when your neighbor loses his job. A Depression… is when you lose yours. And Recovery… is when Jimmy Carter loses his!”
What kind of economy are we in today? The stock market looks good, at first glance, and reported inflation is low, but then, the official inflation numbers don’t really count any of the things we actually spend our money on, do they… all of which are skyrocketing.
So economic statistics can be deceptive, to say the least, and we are well advised – as President Reagan always recommended – to base our decision-making not on the officially biased statistics of some Washington number-cruncher, but on our real personal experience. Are you (and your neighbors, and your community) better off today than you were four years ago? That’s the real question.
The same lesson goes double for crime.
We measure and report crime statistics in every imaginable way. How many property crimes / sex crimes / violent crimes per 100,000 people, or per square mile, or per city, or per state? How many felonies, how many prosecutions, how many convictions?
When we read the news, we see our mayors and police chiefs brag that crime is going down. How can that be? Well, they say so, that’s all.
How do we know it? Because this statistic or that one has dropped from year to year. There were fewer arrested for this crime, this year than last year. There were only so many of this or that crime reported, which is a drop versus the prior year.
It always sounds good. It always sounds like things are getting better.
We are happy to hear it, and confident in its belief, because after all, they wouldn’t lie, would they? The media would call them on it, if it weren’t true. So we accept it.
It’s only in studying the issue more deeply that we realize that all is not as it seems.
Turns out, it’s easy to say that property crimes are dropping if it becomes known that the county will not prosecute thefts totaling under a thousand dollars. Since most retail thefts do total less than a thousand dollars, and so many Soros-bankrolled prosecutors have publicly announced that they will not prosecute these, there has naturally been an increase in such crimes. The criminal element may be immoral, but they aren’t completely stupid; once they know what they won’t be arrested for, that’s what they do.
You can steal $900 each from ten different stores per day in a dozen cities and never be prosecuted for it.
And so they do.
So the reality of crime goes up, but the statistics – the number of crimes reported and prosecuted – go down.
We can also look at the efforts toward keeping police out of crime-ridden neighborhoods, because “the community” claims they don’t want police in there.
Does anybody really believe that law-abiding residents don’t want police in their neighborhoods to make their communities safer? Of course not. The people who don’t want police in their neighborhoods are the criminals, who now have the ear of the politicians and the heart of the media because that’s become the popular philosophy “in the community.”
And so the terrorized people in the neighborhoods are scared out of reporting robberies, drug deals, beatings or rapes, because they’ll get in even more trouble for reporting it and involving the police.
Does this mean the crimes aren’t happening? Of course not. The crimes just aren’t getting reported. If a rape isn’t reported, if a mugging isn’t reported, the neighborhood gets more and more dangerous, and life gets more and more miserable, but the statistics look good: the mayor and police chief can proudly say the statistics are improving.
If all a politician is measured by is a number, he can focus on doctoring that number; he can get away with disregarding the reality of life on the streets.
Many of the crimes (not most, probably, but many) are committed by illegal aliens, or by legal immigrants pursuing eventual citizenship, or by their relatives. Reporting their crimes doesn’t just involve the police, it sometimes involves immigration enforcement, and federal drug enforcement. As lax as the current regime has been on these matters, the communities still fear such enforcement, so they avoid reporting such crimes, for fear of drawing immigration enforcement into their community.
And the cycle continues. Their communities get more dangerous, while the statistics appear – on paper – to be improving.
We cannot leave this issue without considering the problem of plea-bargaining. It’s a legitimate process, often a needed approach, but we must remember that it affects every single statistic, and it’s long been omnipresent in our big cities:
Thousands of people are caught and prosecuted; the police, the prosecutors, and the courts don’t have time to process them all properly. So they offer deals. These hundred were arrested for this, let’s offer to plead them down to that. These hundred were arrested for this, let’s let them all plead down to that.
Again and again it goes, until nearly everyone who gets convicted in a big city isn’t really convicted for what they actually did at all.
And what does that reality do to our crime statistics?
70 years ago, if a city reported a hundred muggings and a hundred rapes and a hundred drug sales, then that meant there really were a hundred muggings and a hundred rapes and a hundred drug sales.
But today, if a city reports the same statistics, it means that virtually every one of those perpetrators committed something much more serious than that, because that number only represents what they pled down to. Whatever a criminal is convicted of today, it’s most likely – not guaranteed, but certainly most likely – that he was really guilty of something far worse.
But what is the solution, we ask ourselves? How can we tell whether our community has a crime problem or not, if we can’t trust the statistics?
There are ways.
- Check your mail. What’s happening to your homeowner’s insurance and your auto insurance? This isn’t a sure tell, but when insurance rates go up, that can mean crime is on the uptick.
- Watch the news. Are big box stores, or fast food places, or convenience stores, or liquor stores, or gas stations, pulling out of your city? Are they closing down, boarding up, fleeing to the suburbs – or to other states – as fast as they possibly can? Sure, that could just be because the tax climate is onerous or the local minimum wage makes it financially impossible to operate. And it could be that the potential clientele simply can’t afford to shop there anymore. But most of the time, companies pull out of cities because they just can’t afford the shrinkage. Too much theft eventually means the store simply has to shut down.
- Look for locks. Has there been a change in the way the local shops display their wares? If all the product used to be on the shelf, regardless of its price, ask yourself: is it still within reach? Or do you now have to ask for it? Is the good stuff under lock and key now? Or worse still – is everything – not only the good stuff – under lock and key now?
This last one is the easiest to notice.
Most of us grew up with everything in every store being on the shelves, in open display cases, or hung on racks and within easy reach of every customer. But it wasn’t always like that.
Once upon a time, long ago, the great American general store was ubiquitous. Everything was behind the counter, and shoppers would ask the proprietor for every item, one by one. The personal service was absolute; the efficiency and speed, however, were nonexistent.
From the late 1800s onward, retail was transformed as extensive variety and heretofore unimagined inventory were displayed for the customer’s convenience. With everything within easy reach, we could shop faster and buy more.
No longer. Where retail is concerned, we’re going backwards at an amazing clip.
Guns and ammunition are in a locked case. Okay, that’s not so odd.
The cigarettes are in a locked case. You still can’t buy it unless you’re of age; why the locks? Well, just in case, we’re told. Just in case of what? Oh, just in case.
The “over the counter” allergy medication is in a locked case too. Why? People might make meth out of it, we’re told.
The replacement blades for safety razors are in a locked case now. Why? Are people trying to kill each other with 1/8” blades build into handles?
So too, the electric handheld, battery-operated beard trimmers. A locked case for them too. Why? Do you have to be over 21 to grow a beard now?
A personal example, Gentle Reader: This writer stopped in the local Walmart this weekend to find that a new row of locked cases has been added to the liquor section overnight. Beer and wine are still freely displayed on a shelf, but hard liquor is in a locked case. Why a $10 bottle of wine is not locked up, but a $10 bottle of gin is, is beyond the ken of your nimble scrivener, but I post the information for your consideration.
In many of our big cities today, the above descriptions are a drop in the bucket. The deeper into the urban jungle one goes, the worse it gets.
It has become common to put everything – yes, everything – behind lock and key at the Walgreens or CVS. They can’t afford security guards to follow every customer, so this is their only option.
$5 makeup, $7 lipstick, $10 face cream? All in a locked case now. $2.50 deodorant, $3.50 shampoo, $5.50 hair spray? They’re in locked cases too.
It’s not just about the value anymore. People walk in and steal boxes of diapers; they aren’t prosecuted. They steal bags of cosmetics or hair products; we watch them walk out without pursuit. Criminals enter with a garbage can, sweep the contents of entire shelves into it, and roll the can out into the street.
They’re on camera, their fingerprints are everywhere, but they know better than to fear the chase or the prosecution. Why?
Because they’re stealing less than a thousand dollars worth of product, of course. And they know the game.
Check your local stores. See if they bear these tell-tale signs.
And if they do – then you know darned well what the real crime trends are, no matter whether the lying-through-their-teeth Democrat mayors and their publicly-announced statistics admit such unpleasant truths or not.
Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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