Thread: Law & Order is STUFFED.

Earlier this year London topped New York for having a higher murder rate for the first time ever....

Originally Posted by ozscott

Mick can you post the link to the Govt data? If you have seen it you can post it up? Cheers

Just Google Crime Statistics Victoria.
This thread is not in Current Affairs so I'm not saying anything which someone might report me for.

Originally Posted by Pickles2

Put any take on it you like, there's plenty on the net about what He did, I heard talk of a 60% drop in assaults & burglaries, which I thought was pretty "high", but I just saw an article where the figure is quoted at 58%!!..still pretty good IMHO.
Pickles.

This thread...

I'm not putting any take on it. I just googled and this was the first article to come up. I read it. It makes sense and it's by the New York Times for goodness sake who should know something about it... it appears that the reduction in crime is to a large degree down to police training and police NOT cracking down with random frisk searches etc. So just the opposite of what you were citing the Juliani experience to prove. Seriously...

Originally Posted by DiscoMick

Just Google Crime Statistics Victoria.
This thread is not in Current Affairs so I'm not saying anything which someone might report me for.

What do you mean mate. I just posted a link to government stats...Govt site. You are saying that there are what? More recent official figures? Cant get into trouble for posting a link to that... or are you referring to non-official Chicken Little the sky is falling in web sites or forums...if so I have no interest matey.

Cheers

Originally Posted by bee utey

Maybe what you need to do is a media detox, just stop obsessively devouring every bad news story that's fed to you and look at the ordinary people getting on with their unremarkable lives. Some media companies are simply bad for your health.

I've spent a big chunk of my life living in Japan, basically my wife and myself have been splitting our time between Japan and Australia for about 30 years. Japan is one of the safest countries in the world, more so even than Australia. When my wife and I moved back to Japan in the early 2000s she suddenly became obsessed with security and safety. This was bit of a puzzle because she'd been pretty relaxed in Australia. So I asked what was going on: what had happened was that she was suddenly reading the Japanese press who relentlessly wrote about crime - even though Japan really doesn't have any (I remember seeing the NHK national news breathlessly reporting that someone had - gasp - stolen peaches from an orchard. I don't think that would make the national news in Australia). Anyway, there was a particularly grisly murder in Tokyo that the press were all carrying on about and which my wife was obsessing over - and then I pointed out that Tokyo is a city of 34 million and that Japan's murder rate is actually lower than Australia's. So, yeah, the media can have a big impact on how people perceive crime.

Originally Posted by trout1105

I Seriously doubt that the police would disagree with me because they are constantly charging and arresting the same people over and over
again that the courts have put back on the streets, It would be very frustrating for the coppers dealing with these same ratbags all the time.

Suggest you have a read of this:

Cops in Melbourne'''s west who are both bloodhounds and sheepdogs

Originally Posted by trout1105

Thugs terrorising our streets IS something new and there IS something we can do about it.

Well, no: there have always been street gangs of kids fighting and causing trouble - the Push, the Mods in the 50s, the Broady Boys - and pretty much any Saturday night in the country town I grew up in.

Gangs and Pushes - Entry - eMelbourne - The Encyclopedia of Melbourne Online
"Gangs and Pushes

Before World War II Melbourne street-gangs were known as 'pushes'. During the last quarter of the 19th century journalists and courts identified gang-like street crime with young 'larrikins' or 'larrikinesses', a term applied to groups of young people who annoyed customers in busy shopping strips, or stormed pubs and shops to steal drink, food and clothing. Characteristically, the larrikin displayed contempt for authority and fought the police whenever arrests were attempted. In the argot of the street, larrikins had to be 'carted'.
Fears of larrikinism stemmed from British-born Melburnians uncertain about the morality of colonial youth, and derived in large part from the seemingly inappropriate self-assurance of unskilled workers. In the boom times of the 1870s and 1880s, labourers in Collingwood or leather-workers in West Melbourne were able to earn relatively high wages and so escape the constant surveillance that went with an apprenticeship or domestic service. Both C.J. Dennis' depiction of the Sentimental Bloke, and the few snatches of push slang left to us, reflect an insouciance and bravado, the posturing of well-paid workers free to roam the streets, rather than the desperate brutality of thugs warped by a life of poverty. And yet, pushes in areas like Bouverie Street, South Carlton, were frighteningly violent, and single constables were hesitant to chase push members into the impoverished lanes here, and in places like Montague or the Collingwood 'Flat'.
Gangs from different corners of Collingwood would gather each Friday or Saturday night, parodying, or hurling flour and ochre at, the Salvation Army, pestering local shopkeepers, or fighting each other and the police. Over time these localised identities hardened, so that in the first decades of the 20th century pushes like the Crutchy Push from North Melbourne, the Salt Lake Bruisers from Montague, or the Woolpacks (named for the Woolpack Hotel in Carlton) had grown, in the minds of the police, more violent, more identified with industrial locales, and more easily drawn into an adult life of crime.
In the 1920s the 'terrible ten', a special police squad apparently recruited to break up street gangs by brutal means, saw the end of the 'larrikin menace', and while young people continued to gather into loosely knit street-bands, the gang only re-emerged as a supposedly dangerous phenomenon in the 1950s. New folk devils, 'bodgies' and 'widgies', identified by hairstyle, dress and a penchant for rock music, were linked again to working-class districts. Subsequent gang identities, 'sharpies', 'mods', 'skinheads' and 'bogans' equally, have reflected a class-based youth culture, with Housing Commission estates in Jordanville, Doveton, Broadmeadows and Sunshine linked to particular gang styles and occasional 'outrages'. In the 1950s local cinemas and football grounds or less frequently dance halls and nightclubs, rather than the industrial street corner, emerged as sites for gang conflicts with immigrants from Southern Europe sometimes a target, just as the Chinese had been in the 19th century.
However, the motor car, television and the pop music industry have made any link between working-class youth, suburban solidarity and gang rivalries less clear. More recently, gang memberships have sometimes overlapped with ethnic identity. Latin American youth in the outer south-eastern suburbs have been linked to a gang identified by postcode. In the inner north, the 'Lebanese Tigers' were often described as a gang of mainly Middle Eastern origin.
While it is possible to identify gang-like structures among youth of recent immigrant groups, fears of ethnic street-gangs and their violence have more to do with media images drawn from Los Angeles than with the reality of life in Melbourne. For much of the city's history, the youth street-gang has been a constant, if sometimes dangerous phenomenon, drawing together mainly working-class males. For some young people, the loose comradeship of the street has provided security and identity in the difficult and increasingly delayed transition from school to adulthood.
Chris Mcconville"

Originally Posted by Pickles2

... do-gooder judiciary, many of whom think the "softly softly" approach will work. In the majority of cases, it doesn't.

Some of those "do-gooder judiciary" are friends of mine.