imported post
Like the saying goes... "its the economy.
Lately, yes.
Crime is actually, overall, down greatly compared to ALL other
recessions, and "they" cant figure out why: (notice the lie in bold below...)
--------------------
Recession's good news: Cities see burglaries fall; unemployed stay home, watch
neighborhoods
Don Babwin, Associated Press Writer
He keeps an eye out for cars moving slowly down the street or strangers walking along the sidewalk of his suburban Chicago neighborhood. He wonders about the times he answers the phone and the caller hangs up.
"You don't know if that might be people staking you out, finding out if you're home or not," said the 71-year-old hospital chaplain from Glenview.
Beil is watching for burglars, and police nationwide credit him and those like him for one of the few bright spots of the recession: The number of home burglaries is falling in some cities and towns.
"
With a lot more unemployed people, a lot more people are staying home, and they see more in their neighborhood," said Sgt. Thomas Lasater, who supervises the burglary unit of the police department in St. Louis County, Mo., where authorities recorded a whopping 35 percent drop in burglaries during the first six months of 2009.
The trend is showing up in communities big and small.
In Minneapolis, the number of burglaries reported in roughly the first nine months of the year dropped more than 15 percent compared with the same period last year, and more than 25 percent compared with that period in 2007. In Boston, the 2,199 burglaries reported in roughly the first nine months of the year is 335 fewer than in the same period last year.
Aurora, a city of 170,000 outside Chicago, had 560 burglaries through the end of September, a 15.5 percent decrease from the same period last year. And in Shelby, N.C., a town of 21,000, the number of burglaries through August was 23, compared with 60 for the same time last year.
In many cities, other crimes including homicide, robbery and rape have been dropping
for several years, according to FBI statistics. But burglary stands out because it was
actually rising between 2007 and 2008, and experts expected that trend to continue as the recession dragged on and unemployment rose.
The phenomenon has surprised both police and crime researchers. "We were thinking, 'Here we go,'" said Theo Glover, deputy police chief in Rockford, a struggling
manufacturing community in Illinois that consistently has the state's highest jobless rate, hitting 16.9 percent in August.
Instead, Rockford had 1,849 burglaries through mid-October, or more than 400
fewer than in the same period last year.
A national total of this year's burglaries will not be available from the FBI until late
next year, but experts said the anecdotal evidence from individual cities paints an
unexpected picture.
Richard Rosenfeld, a sociologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who has studied crime trends, said rates typically rise during a recession, especially property crimes.
"We've seen that in every single recession in the U.S. at least since the '50s," he said. "I would have expected by now some upward movement in burglary numbers."
The burglary rate has, in fact, climbed this year in some cities, including Houston, San
Jose and Chicago. But in Chicago, the rate is climbing at a slower clip than it did last
year. And in Houston, this year's slight increase comes after a substantial drop in
burglaries between 2007 and 2008, the first full year of the recession.
In other places where burglary rates already were dropping, they are falling even faster. That includes Los Angeles, where the number of burglaries in the first three quarters of 2009 fell 6 percent, compared with 1 percent during the same period in 2008. In Phoenix, there were 429 fewer burglaries in the first nine months of 2008 -- and 4,000 fewer in the first nine months of this year.
Some police believe the falling price of copper and other scrap metals -- a target of
burglars who strip the metal from vacant homes -- may have contributed to the trend.
But they say that alone would not explain why burglaries are dropping so steeply in
so many places.
Phoenix police detective James Holmes believes his city's 14 percent drop in burglaries in the first nine months of this year mostly reflects a stepped-up effort to target habitual burglars and expand neighborhood watch programs. But he said residents clearly are paying more attention, and more people are home to keep watch.
[[Bull@#$%, plain and simple]
"We are getting a lot more calls of suspicious activities in our neighborhoods," he said.
In some cases, homeowners are even thwarting burglars. It happened in February in
Bellevue, Wash., when would-be burglars broke into a home not knowing that -- as
they stacked televisions, a computer and other valuables by the door -- the home's owner was not only unemployed, but in the basement.
Then they looked outside and saw that the getaway van they had left idling outside was gone.
"I drove to a friend's house up the street," said Patrick Rosario, the 33-year-old
homeowner who took off in the van after he crept outside. The burglars couldn't believe what happened. "My neighbor drove by and saw their faces and they had big O's for mouths."
===================
Dija catch the lie? People were home watching in every OTHER recession. Where else would they be, vacationing in the Bahamas?
WHY is crime down, you ask? Simple, because of the one segment thats thriving, FIREARM and AMMO Manufacture and Sales. Yeah theyre home watching, through gun sights:
-----------------------------------
November 16, 2009 Gun sales shoot up amid America’s fear of rising crime and terrorism (UK Newspaper source)
Americans fear recession leads inevitably to more crime, leaving them staring down the barrel of a criminal's gun
Smith & Wesson, the famed American gunmaker once owned by Tomkins, the British conglomerate, expects to nearly double its annual sales in the next three to five years as demand for its firearms soars in the recession. It is not alone.
All over America demand for firearms and ammunition is rising amid concerns that rising unemployment, which passed 10 per cent this month, will lead inexorably to higher rates of crime. Fears of terrorism have also helped to lift demand, as have concerns among gun owners that the Obama Administration may introduce restrictions on gun ownership and impose additional taxes.
Smith & Wesson is expecting sales to rise by 30 per cent to $102 million (£61 million) in the first quarter of the next financial year, after growing by more than 13 per cent this year to $335 million.
At Sturm and Ruger, sales for the third quarter hit $71.2 million, up 70 per cent from the same period last year. At Glock, the leader in law enforcement markets, pistol sales rose by 71 per cent in the first quarter of the financial year for 2010, in comparison with the same period last year.
Related Links
According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the FBI carried out more than a million background checks on behalf of gun dealers in September (a check is required with every sale), an increase of 12.4 per cent on the same period in the previous year.
Mike Golden, chief executive at Smith and Wesson, is sceptical about the so-called Obama effect on gun sales, believing that his company’s booming revenues have “nothing to do with the administration” and everything to do with the economy.
“People are worried about personal protection with unemployment and crime on the rise,” he said in a presentation to investors, adding that 30 per cent of customers who had bought the company’s guns in the first half of this year were “first-time gun owners”, up from 9 per cent nine a year earlier.
Randy Williams, industry editor at Hoover, the research firm, agreed. “
As an example of the personal safety and terrorism aspect, Smith & Wesson’s hunting rifle sales in 2009 dropped about 33 per cent at a time when the company’s other gun sales — revolvers, pistols, Walther imports, and tactical rifles — grew 33 per cent,” he said.
Even though some experts believe that the gun bubble may be about to burst, with a slowdown in the rate of sales growth, such a view is not shared across the industry.
At the Freedom Group, whose brands include Remington, Marlin, Bushmaster and Harrington & Richardson, managers are encouraged by the “meaningful percentage of current firearm sales . . . made to first-time gun purchasers, particularly women”.
The company, owned by Cerberus, the private equity group, is seeking to raise $200 million through an initial public offering.
Although there is no clear evidence of a surge in gun ownership among women (they make up about 13 per cent of gun owners), the company says in its prospectus that it believes that the introduction of first-time shooters, as well as a younger demographic of users and those who like to customise or upgrade their firearms, will sustain the increase in demand.
Freedom is also hoping for an increase in the market for hunting guns, the only segment of the industry to experience a fall during the recession as cost-conscious consumers cut back on their discretionary spending on leisure activities.
With ongoing commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, all manufacturers also believe that American military contracts will continue to provide them with large opportunities.
At Smith & Wesson, Mr Golden is taking no chances and has already started to diversify away from retail gun sales. In June he bought Universal Safety Response, which makes and installs security barriers and which he expects to bring in sales of $90 million next year.
==============
If it waddles and quacks, what
IS it?
----------------------
The 'Real' Jobless Rate: 17.5% Of Workers Are UnemployedPublished: Thursday, 19 Nov 2009 | 4:55 PM ET
CNBC.com
As experts debate the potential speed of the US recovery, one figure looms large but is often overlooked: nearly 1 in 5 Americans is either out of work or under-employed.
According to the government's broadest measure of unemployment, some 17.5 percent are either without a job entirely or underemployed. The so-called U-6 number is at the highest rate since becoming an official labor statistic in 1994.
Now help me out here, is that HOPE or CHANGE? I think its CHANGE.
----------------------
[size="+2"]
Blacks hit hard by economy's punch[/size]
34.5 percent of young African American men are unemployed
[size="-1"] By V. Dion Haynes Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, November 24, 2009
[/size]
These days, 24-year-old Delonta Spriggs spends much of his time cooped up in his mother's one-bedroom apartment in Southwest Washington, the TV blaring soap operas hour after hour, trying to stay out of the streets and out of trouble, held captive by the economy. As a young black man, Spriggs belongs to a group that has been hit much harder than any other by unemployment.
Joblessness for 16-to-24-year-old black men has reached Great Depression proportions -- 34.5 percent in October, more than three times the rate for the general U.S. population. And last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that unemployment in the District, home to many young black men, rose to 11.9 percent from 11.4 percent, even as it stayed relatively stable in Virginia and Maryland.
-----------
SERIOUSLY folks, if you live in a big City, NOWS the time to get out. When it all goes down, you wont have a chance, armed or not.
