BattleCry and Teenage Brainwashing

[wolf]

Originally Posted by Beestie

Cool. I actually made that yesterday. I won't tell you which smiley I started with to morph into Dolph.

It was the village people one, wasn't it?

[Beestie]

Originally Posted by wolf

It was the village people one, wasn't it?

The moustache was just too perfect. Had to lose the hat and push the hairline back a bit and boom! there he was. Never woulda believed who was hiding out under all that if I hadn't seen it for myself.

This graph shows a sharp drop-off in violent crime since 1993.



This graph shows the homicide victimization rate for European and African Americans, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics.

These trends have continued in the last years at an even more drastic decline.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051020-5461.html

Britain, Australia top U.S. in violent crime
Rates Down Under increase despite strict gun-control measures
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/ar...TICLE_ID=21902


http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...09-crime_x.htm
09/09/2002 - Updated 12:53 AM ET
Violent crime rate in America continues steep declineWASHINGTON — The number of people who were victims of all violent crimes except murder fell by 9% in 2001, sending the crime rate to its lowest level since it was first tracked in 1973, the government reported Sunday. The decline was due primarily to a record low number of reported assaults, the most common form of violent crime.
The drop is detailed in the 2001 National Crime Victimization Survey, which is based on interviews with victims and thus does not include murder. The Bureau of Justice Statistics report was obtained Sunday by The Associated Press in advance of its release this week.

Preliminary figures from another FBI report — gleaned from more than 17,000 city, county and state law enforcement agencies and released in June — reflected an increase in murders of 3.1% in 2001.

Experts discussing the new report on violent crime said the decrease, part of a decade-long trend, is the result primarily of the strong economy in the 1990s and the prevalence of tougher sentencing laws.

"Despite our perceptions, based on television or chats around the water-cooler, it is clear crime is on the decline in a significant way and has been for some years now," said Ralph Myers, a criminologist at Stanford University.

"When people have jobs and poor neighborhoods improve, crime goes down," Myers said. "Crime also has been impacted by the implementation of tough sentencing laws at the end of the 1980s."

Since 1993, the violent crime rate has decreased by almost 50%.

The new report says that between 2000 and 2001, the number of people who reported they were victims of violent crime fell from about 28 per 1,000 to about 25 per 1,000, a 10% drop. The number of people reporting violent crimes fell from 6,323,000 in 2000 to 5,744,000 in 2001.

Only about half of the violent crimes reported in the survey were reported to police.

The report showed a 10% decrease in the violent crime rate for whites. It also included an 11.6% decrease for blacks and a 3.9% increase for Hispanics, but the report gave neither of those figures the highest grade of confidence because of analytical formulas that suggest they could be flawed.

Assault was down 10%, but victim reports reflected a 13% increase in injuries.

The effect of tougher sentencing laws can best be seen in the drop in the rate at which people in the United States are assaulted, said Bruce Fenmore, a criminal statistician at the Institute for Crime and Punishment, a Chicago-based think tank.

"There is overwhelming evidence that people who commit assaults do it as a general course of their affairs," Fenmore said. "Putting those people behind bars drops the rate."

The rate at which criminals used guns to accomplish their crimes held steady, about 26%.

Victims of rape and assault were the least likely (7%) to face an armed offender, while robbery victims were the most likely (55%).

Rape fell 8%, and sexual assaults — which include verbal threats and fondling — fell 20%. About half the women who reported rapes said the perpetrator was a friend or acquaintance. The rate at which women reported rape to the police fell 19% in 2001.

The overall property crime rate fell 6% between 2000 and 2001 because of a 6.3% decrease in theft and a 9.7% decrease in household burglaries.

The car theft rate was up 7%, reflecting a jump from 937,000 car thefts in 2000 to 1,009,000 in 2001.

Teenagers seemed less likely to be victims of violent crime. The crime rate against those between ages 16 and 19 fell 13.2%.

Crime also fell in each of the regions of the United States but showed the most dramatic decline, 19.7%, in the Midwest.

The decline also was felt in urban, suburban and rural areas. The rate of violence experienced by suburbanites fell 14%. In urban and rural areas, the rate fell 5.4% and 10.6%, respectively.

The preliminary summary of the report did not include a state-by-state breakdown.

Crime trends related to personal income also shifted.

Americans making less than $7,500 a year experienced a drop in the violent crime rate of about 23%. Those making $75,000 or more saw a 17% decrease. Most in between saw little change.

Who's the real victim? - television coverage of violent crime -
Column USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 1994 by Joe Saltzman

It has been an American tradition to admire the outlaw, the Western gunslinger, the young couple who rob banks, and the citizen vigilante. Today, television coverage of news events that eventually end up in court has created a new kind of hero for the 1990s - the abused victim who takes the law into his or her own hands in a quest for personal justice.

Juries, and a public fired up by massive courtroom TV coverage of sensational trials, have concluded that a woman who cut off her husband's penis or two brothers who murdered their parents had good reasons to do so. The victims of these criminal acts gradually come to be held responsible for being attacked, and the persons committing the crimes slowly emerge as victims themselves.

It is easy to see how this has happened. Television news usually is limited to covering an event after it has occurred. With rare exceptions, the coverage of a breaking news story consists of interviews with eyewitnesses and officials, pictures of the scene of the crime, and a reporter summing up what has happened and trying to figure out what will happen next.

In a murder, for instance, all that remains of the victim is a covered body and some old photographs. This material is supplemented with statements from survivors who knew and cared about the victim. The accused murderer occasionally is seen being arrested or, more often, either going to court, coming from it, or appearing in the courtroom. Statements about the alleged killer come from surprised friends, relatives, and neighbors.

Even if victims are alive and well, the focus shifts from them to the accused, who, if counseled properly, usually are apologetic for what has happened. Their lawyers, struggling to get their clients the best deal possible, often go into the attacker's personal history to paint a picture that consists of deprivation, abuse, and temporary insanity. Slowly, the original victim is forgotten and the accused - a human being crying out to be understood - becomes a more sympathetic victim trying to set things right.

This process happens daily in our judicial system, whether or not a camera is in the courtroom. Juries, listening to lengthy testimony about the individual accused of the crime, are persuaded to be sympathetic to that person's plight. A rape trial ends up being a horrible ordeal for most women, since attorneys try to create the impression that the criminal act of rape is just a misunderstanding. The victim, especially an attractive woman with no visible bruises, seldom finds justice in the American courts. She is painted as the seducer, someone with loose morals, someone who didn't say no. There is confusion over who is really the victim and who is the perpetrator.

Television magnifies the process by extending it to a mass electronic audience. When the news first was heard that two brothers shot their father dead, then reloaded to finish off their wounded mother, the reaction was immediate: horror and repulsion. Yet, as the details became more and more familiar, the acts themselves became less appalling in the public mind.

This is the first step in the rehabilitation of the accused's image. The crime becomes less repugnant. Slowly, the reasons for the crime and, if possible, contrition for the act itself take over. The parents' disfigured bodies, never shown on TV because of taste and censorship, fade into the background, replaced by their two sons' tearful faces. They are not confessed murderers. They are two boys who couldn't take it any more, two sons trying to do everything possible to prevent their parents from committing more acts of cruelty.

If television news and courtroom TV continue to cover such events, it would be helpful to emphasize the victim's side of the story with whatever it takes to graphically keep the accused from dominating the trial coverage. This happened in the Rodney King case when the videotape of police officers beating him into submission was played over and over, in slow motion, in freeze frames, and in an enhanced version. The audience watching never forgot what the police did and, no matter what was said in court, the images on that tape remained firm in the public consciousness. When the accused officers were acquitted, a public outcry resulted in a new trial and convictions.

What faded from view were the events that transpired before the video camera was turned on. Few were swayed by the police testimony that King had been under the influence of alcohol and had led the cops on a chase through city streets. The video tape of King being unmercifully beaten by public servants dominated the day. The accused received little public sympathy.

Most of the time, however, there is no videotape of the victim's pain and suffering - no collective memory of the sadistic attack, the knife or bullets ripping through flesh, the blood and gore, or the indelible images of the crime itself. The grisly aftermath of a murder is considered too gruesome for public consumption, so even the victim's last testimony of the crime itself is seldom seen by the viewers. In the abstract, the public cry is for vengeance and retribution. Three strikes and you are out of circulation. But, as we get to intimately know the accused, we slowly turn to look at them sympathetically. Instead of seeing the monster, we see another victim and are confused. And in that confusion, we are reluctant to punish the accused, even one who already has confessed to the most hideous of crimes.
Television didn't create this situation, but it has the power to turn almost any crime into this kind of public spectacle. The next time this happens, it would be helpful if the crime and the true victim weren't pushed into the background. To leave out the obscenity of the crime is to create a situation where accused killers are given more than the benefit of the doubt. They are given a chance to paint their own sympathetic public images at the expense of the victims they slaughtered.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

[Ibby]

Originally Posted by rkzenrage

This graph shows a sharp drop-off in violent crime since 1993.



This graph shows the homicide victimization rate for European and African Americans, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Why do the graphs for black homicides and violent crime looks so similar?
Somethin's funky with those graphs.

Lots of black on black crime in the US... nothin' new.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by tw

The Economist is anti-American because it is published by Brits.

The Economist is not an Anti-American publication.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Just another one of tw's lies.

tw, on what do you base that statement?

[tw]

Originally Posted by rkzenrage

tw, on what do you base that statement?

Which statements?

[Happy Monkey]

The "Economist" stuff actually came from Bruce initially.

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

If the economist, that patriotic American... oh wait, that's a British publication, isn't it? Anyway, if it ceased publication, you would dry up and blow away. Even though most parrots live a long time, without feed they die, just as your online persona would without those Brits supplying your posts.

[xoxoxoBruce]

What I said and what tw posted are not the same statements.

[Happy Monkey]

You're the one who made the Economist/patriotic American connection. tw's post was facetiously responding to yours. TheMercenary misinterpreted it as tw actually claiming that the Economist is anti-American, which he was not.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Only a child reading with their emotions instead of reading what was written would make such an unpatriotic connection.
maybe HM is not a patriot, why else would HM make that emotional connection like an unpatriotic child instead of reading what was posted, as it was posted.