As we all learned from watching The Rockford Files, small towns are extremely homicidal and conspiratorial. Every week, as Ben Stein noted back in the 1970s, ace detective Jim Rockford would venture forth from Malibu to some backwoods hamlet where all the denizens were covering up some sinister rural plot, only to make it back to the safety of the L.A. city limits by the episode's end, case solved.
Thus, Audacious "Validating Stereotypes Since 2005" Epigone calculates the rate of unsolved murders by state. The top and bottom 10s, with a higher figure indicating a higher percentage of unsolved murders:
| State | Unknown |
| 1. District of Columbia | 56.1% |
| 2. Illinois | 55.4% |
| 3. Maryland | 46.1% |
| 4. New York | 44.0% |
| 5. California | 43.9% |
| 6. Massachusetts | 43.8% |
| 7. Rhode Island | 42.0% |
| 8. New Jersey | 41.8% |
| 9. Michigan | 38.8% |
| 10. Connecticut | 37.1% |
| 41. West Virginia | 12.1% |
| 42. South Carolina | 10.6% |
| 43. Maine | 10.4% |
| 44. Iowa | 9.8% |
| 45. South Dakota | 9.2% |
| 46. Montana | 8.2% |
| 47. Vermont | 5.6% |
| 48. North Dakota | 4.5% |
| 49. Wyoming | 4.5% |
| 50. Idaho | 3.9% |
An accompanying visualization is available here. (Java only)
Oh, wait, it's almost as if TV detective shows reflect the screenwriters' neuroses more than the demographic realities. Maybe there are two different kinds of stereotypes: populist (Bad) and media (Good).
When your police force is trying to solve an order of magnitude more crime on the same budget, something has to give.
ReplyDeleteIf you think American small towns are bad, check out idyllic English villages.
ReplyDeleteAnd English stately homes are the worst, real abattoirs. (Watch out for butlers.)
ReplyDeleteThis is fascinating. Does this data mean that more than half of the murders in IL result in no conviction? Would the readers of Isteve attribute this to inability of the Chicago PD or to the unwillingness of NAMs in Chicago to cooperate with the PD?
ReplyDeletereflect the screenwriters' neuroses more than the demographic realities
ReplyDeleteIt's called the availability heuristic... Free tip: you're better off not bringing "neurosis" into it; your version of a detective teleplay--is James Brolin available?--hewing closely to statistical public records, might not pull the really important numbers
Sorry, Steve, I meant Brolin fils of course.
ReplyDeleteDoes the FBI or anyone else track homicides where the victim and perpetrator aren't known to have known one another?
ReplyDeleteSuch data would probably be illuminating of a number of things, including purported disparities in death sentences.
I don't have any statistics to back this up, but I'd wager that the victims, the ones who had prison records, weren't terribly missed by the bad guys or the good guys.
ReplyDeleteThis is fascinating. Does this data mean that more than half of the murders in IL result in no conviction? Would the readers of Isteve attribute this to inability of the Chicago PD or to the unwillingness of NAMs in Chicago to cooperate with the PD?
ReplyDeleteYes.
I've recently noticed the proliferation of detective shows in pretty much all countries. Did you know the French, Italians and Swedes all have weekly crime dramas just like in the English speaking world?
ReplyDeleteAll have more than one crime solving show but still don't compete with the US & the UK for the sheer number of detective dramas over the years. I've begun to wonder if our obsession with onscreen crime isn't having an inhibitory effect in real life Europeans and Americans. You get the vicarious satisfaction of a vicious murder, especially when the perp was a jerk, so that killer instinct gets indulged without anybody getting hurt.
I don't do this myself but perhaps every time you cut someone off in traffic, they're imagining you skewered or drawn and quartered. Step on someone's toe in a crowded elevator; they imagine your head exploding in a microwave so they don't hit you back.
Just sayin.
After we close the achievement gap, we can get working on the snitching gap.
ReplyDeleteBut South Carolina has lots of blacks. Is the Jesse Helms heritage still cracking down?
ReplyDeleteRobert Hume
The clearance rate for homicide in this city for 2012 was just 25%. Clearance means the police are satisfied and further investigation is halted due to arrests, death of perps, etc, but doesn't necessarily mean a conviction. This city drags down the statistics for the state overall.
ReplyDeleteThis means that there are hundreds of murderers walking around free on the streets here just from the last year alone. Multiply that by the number of uncleared homicides for the past, say, 20 years and you have thousands of them running around all over the place. Nice thought.
Cut the Rockford Files a break. It was written in a time when whites were still a solid majority of LA. It was a satire of the old Raymond Chandler detective stories. The criminals tended to be clever, with reasonably good planning skills -- not likely to be minorities. Ol' Jimbo usually had to work hard to bust the case.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the 70's movie Death Wish was a hoot. It depicts a crime wave in NY, where the most ethnic looking hood is Jeff Goldblum dressed like Jennifer Beal in Flashdance.
This is fascinating. Does this data mean that more than half of the murders in IL result in no conviction? Would the readers of Isteve attribute this to inability of the Chicago PD or to the unwillingness of NAMs in Chicago to cooperate with the PD?
ReplyDeleteEither way, the fact that so many go unsolved probably encourages more murders, or at the very least, more murders are committed by the murderers.
Hmm, neurotic economists and screenwriters distorting modern discourse - sounds like Steve is getting a tad annoyed with the Scotch-Irish.
ReplyDeleteLooks like Cooter and BillyJoeJimBob need to stop snitchin'.
ReplyDeleteWhites are horrible people inside the cities, too -- watch "Law and Order SVU" to see decidedly un-New York-like white men do unspeakable things in orders of magnitude disproportion to their actual rate while being pursued by our multi-cultured heroes.
ReplyDeleteHere is Ben Stein's 1976 article to which Sailer refers:
ReplyDeleteWhatever happened to small-town America?
He also turned it into a book (The View From Sunset Boulevard)
Real crime doesn't make good TV, it's horribly boring.
ReplyDeleteWith one exception all those high unsolved murder states are very far from the Mexican border, and two are right on that wonderful Canadian border everyone here says is so wonderful.
ReplyDeleteHow can that be?
My reasoned guess is that most of the states with the highest clearance rates have relatively few murders, and many of the ones they do have are easy-to-solve ones in which the victims and offenders were known to one another.
ReplyDeleteSouth Carolina seems to be the sole outlier.
Peter
I guess that's not covered by 'white privilege'.
ReplyDeleteI wondered what the heck Stein was talking about, until I read the article. He uses one episode of Rockford as an example, but he doesn't claim it was a regular plot point like Steve suggests. I recently watched the whole series, and was racking my brain to try to think of more than a few such episodes. Rockford went up against mobsters and various sorts of embezzlers and kidnappers a lot more often than small town shysters.
ReplyDeleteBut then, I know nothing about LA, so maybe there were more episodes set in the "suburbs" that I assumed were in the city. To people who actually live in rural areas and small towns, city is city; we really don't see the distinctions that city people make.
I`m suprised the Rocky Mountain States it is so hard to get away with murder. With all that open space, how could you not properly hide the body, or murder them in the middle of nowhere??
ReplyDeleteColombo, was an amazing show even though the murderers were all LA socialites. It makes for better tv.
ReplyDeleteMystery shows don't reflect screenwriters' paranoia. They reflect audience interests. So much actual crime isn't fascinating at all: it's stupid, awful people victimizing other stupid, awful people. A tv show of near-retarded and illiterate yoofs murdering each other over shinies, disses, and fugly hos would be realistic. Who would want to watch that?
ReplyDeleteAs a bit more evidence, Agatha Christie had nice people murdering each other quite a while ago.
A high conviction rate is no guarantee of getting it right. Southern states with a lot of blacks have high conviction rates. Maybe rural cops are more willing to frame people, abuse witnesses, or get cooperative juries. A lot of ways to interpret this data.
ReplyDelete"A tv show of near-retarded and illiterate yoofs murdering each other over shinies, disses, and fugly hos would be realistic. Who would want to watch that?"
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to know you're not much of a tv watcher or are you being facetious?
@ rob
ReplyDeleteBut on the other hand The Wire was pretty realistic depiction of real drug related crime, including impulsive NAM killings over girls, dogfights, and disses, and it was a huge hit.
Would Steve be happier if there were more shows on TV about gangbangers getting shot and cops not having any clues? Doesn't seem like it would be an entertaining show.
ReplyDeleteAnother factor, by the way, has got to be affirmative action in big city police departments.
"I`m suprised the Rocky Mountain States it is so hard to get away with murder. With all that open space, how could you not properly hide the body, or murder them in the middle of nowhere??"
ReplyDeleteHere's a case where the murderer did, indeed, murder in the middle of nowhere, and disposed of the body out in the boondocks, and using a backhoe, even buried her car.
Nonetheless, he was caught, though it took 15 years.
http://blogs.discovery.com/criminal_report/2007/12/lisa-marie-kimm.html
Or Oxford -- It's a wonder the anyone would send their kids there.
ReplyDelete"So much actual crime isn't fascinating at all: it's stupid, awful people victimizing other stupid, awful people. A tv show of near-retarded and illiterate yoofs murdering each other over shinies, disses, and fugly hos would be realistic. Who would want to watch that?"
ReplyDeleteI'm reading Homicide, which is by the writer of "The Wire". It is exactly as you describe - Baltimore in the 1990s, lots of drug related crime, mostly black on black crime. No matter how fancy David Simon's prose is, I still find it pretty boring. And yet it gets 4.8 stars on Amazon. I want to like it, but I am struggling to make it through.
Reading about Edgerton reminds me of Truth.
Delete"Homicide" was the Shit! Best crime drama ever.
As someone already mentioned, Columbo ususally featured a white, upper class murderer offing a wife or business partner in such a way that it looked impossible to solve. Part of the show's mass appeal was the stridently blue-collar Lt. Columbo not only offending the white glove sensibilities of his suspects, but also outsmarting them in the end. The upper class's moral decadence was a constant theme of the show.
ReplyDeleteThere were non-white areas in those days as well, East La was mainly Mexican by then and Compton was mainly black. In 1980 LA was about 12 percent black and 8 percent asian and 30 percent Hispanic.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of The Rockford Files, there is no way someone could live now like Jim Rockford did, in a trailer near a beach in California. First off, he would be towed off by police, secondly, he would be subject to many of break-ins by the "newcomers" and surf dudes who do not have the same ethos as the 1970's.
ReplyDeleteWith the exception of South Carolina, the bottom ten could all be regarded as 'blackless' states. Since blacks tend to have a "don't snitch" culture, their murders are harder to solve.
ReplyDeleteAccording to a fan site, Midsomer Murders (set in the fictitious English county of Midsomer) showed 210 murders in its first 12 seasons. During the same period, Somerset, England's most Midsomer-ish county, had fewer than 50 murders.
ReplyDeleteThe only reasonable explanation is that Inspector Barnaby is a serial killer who commits clusters of murders each episode and pins them on various innocents.
Anon at 8:49 PM;
ReplyDelete"..there is no way someone could live now like Jim Rockford did.."
Give the writers a break. In 1970, the beginning of the decade that show ran, Califonia's population was more then TWICE as small and more then TWICE as white as it is now.
Seriously, shows like that give us a historical glimpse into the social and demographic world that California once was. They could almost be sued as social history. James Garner liked to drive and you can see many shots of him on wide open freeways. No congestion or tie-ups. (If you like gridlock, then you'll love immigration.)
"The only reasonable explanation is that Inspector Barnaby is a serial killer who commits clusters of murders each episode and pins them on various innocents."
ReplyDeleteYes, I've read when they finally give in and cancel the series there'll be a show revealing these travesties of justice. Barnaby's diaries and gruesome photos are discovered in a trunk after his death. :0)
There is still a trailer park in Paradise Cove, a private beach between Malibu and Zuma. Very, very expensive trailers.
ReplyDeleteMystery shows don't reflect screenwriters' paranoia. They reflect audience interests.
ReplyDeleteWhy don't you try reading what you're responding to before hitting the keyboard? You sound completely clueless.
Audiences want to see "city slicker in small-town danger?" Where's your market research? You don't have any, and neither did the producers of shows like the Rockford Files.
Ben Stein's explanation is theoretically sound, and its empirical support is at least as strong as the support for your hypothesis.
Convictions require witnesses, and the risk of getting killed for witnessing is higher the greater the ambient crime rate; the danger could come from more directions.
ReplyDeleteIt's time to let individual cities opt out of the "confronted with the witnesses against him" part of the Sixth Amendment. Let witnesses just give confidential "depositions" to a judge. Put to a vote, I bet this idea would pass overwhelmingly in Detroit or New Orleans.
Let's face it, the "confronted with the witnesses" thing made sense in a society of respectable burghers. It doesn't stand a chance in a Hobbesian jungle.
The Chicago murders are largely drug gangs shooting each other or their customers. Chicago had 433 murders in 2011, and 305 of them were uncleared at the end of the year. If they're unsolved after the first several weeks it's unlikely they will ever be cleared.
ReplyDeleteThe nature of the drug business is that the people in it are often strangers to each other, violent, and have few incentives to talk to police. That makes it hard to connect the shooter to the shot.
In a rural area your life is on the street. Everyone knows Smoochie-Wallace has a beef with Javaris Jamar so when Javaris winds up dead they start looking for Smoochie-Wallace. They're not framing anyone, it's just a lot easier to connect the shooter to the shootie. You don't need Columbo or Hercule Poirot to do it.
What is the deal with Rhode Island? High unemployment and high rates of unsolved homicides.
ReplyDeleteperhaps the great irony of the great gun control grab of 2013, is that democrats commit the overwhelming majority of gun crime in the US.
ReplyDeletebut liberals want to take the guns away from the euro american conservatives who are doing very little of the shooting and killing.
in fact they're even going after the wrong weapons. most homicides are committed with handguns. so why are liberals going after rifles?
wait, i keep thinking this is supposed to be about logic and reason, and not simply a direct attack on the founding stock of the US.
real world: democrats killing people with handguns.
liberal fantasy world: republicans killing people with rifles.
It's time to let individual cities opt out of the "confronted with the witnesses against him" part of the Sixth Amendment
ReplyDeleteLast year in Sacramento there was a rape victim (a minor) who didn't appear at the pre-trial hearing, thus wasting a lot of people's time & negatively impacting the public fisc. After the judge tossed her in juvy until the start of the now-rescheduled trial, I watched a few different feminist-soapbox types on the evening news (themselves lawyers of course) protest this indignity. On the balance, it seems the locals this time were more on the side of prosecuting rapists than going easy on the uncooperative victim.
But I seem to have heard a lot of sophisticated international elites mocking our ludicrous Anglo-Saxon tradition--pshaw, snicker, O.J.!!!--with all its manifest flaws, so it was only a matter of time till the post-Magna Carta, post-American residents here turned against it. The fix is in...
What is the deal with Rhode Island? High unemployment and high rates of unsolved homicides.
ReplyDeletePlease... Central Falls (made famous by Pablo Escobar) is a notorious den of iniquity. And there's some others
James Garner liked to drive and you can see many shots of him on wide open freeways. No congestion or tie-ups.
ReplyDeleteOr rent "The Omega Man" w/ Charleton Heston cruising around downtown L.A.--the place is like a driver's fantasy come to life
"Seriously, shows like [The Rockford Files] give us a historical glimpse into the social and demographic world that California once was."
ReplyDeleteI love counting the number of VW Bugs and classic Ford Mustangs parked on the street during the chase scenes. It could be the basis of a great drinking game.
" Steve Sailer said...
ReplyDeleteThere is still a trailer park in Paradise Cove, a private beach between Malibu and Zuma. Very, very expensive trailers."
Now you gotta pay to park, and the Sand Castle Restaurant has been bought out and renamed. The public restrooms trailer with the little whale signs indicating gender is still there. It must have been pretty stinky for Rockford when his trailer was parked near it.
The creator of Midsomer Murders got in trouble in the British press for saying he deliberately set his mysteries in the rural white countryside to reflect the demographics of pre-immigration Britain and what he saw as a happier time. The result is the same as Law and Order, even though the motive of the creator is the opposite.
ReplyDeleteThat British tradition goes back a long way - as noted above, the mysteries of Agatha Christie and her peers took place usually in rural villages and often among the wealthy, yet they were criticized not as leftist for portraying the rich as murderers, but as conservative for focusing on the rich at all! (And indeed, they were mostly written by people of conservative disposition and politics.)
So, an enormous number of NAMs are walking around - with impunity - on America's streets despite literally 'getting away with murder'.
ReplyDeleteThink about that for a while. If (improbably, but possibly), some of those types actually manage to hold on to jobs and put on a show of 'respectability', the lawn contractor, the mailman, the school janitor, someone whom working life puts into close proximity to you might well be the foulest murderer going.
NAMs don't talk to police. Plain and simple. Stop snitchin!
ReplyDeleteAnonymous said...
ReplyDeleteThe Chicago murders are largely drug gangs shooting each other or their customers. Chicago had 433 murders in 2011, and 305 of them were uncleared at the end of the year. If they're unsolved after the first several weeks it's unlikely they will ever be cleared
WRONG!!!
Actually as surprisingly large number of gang related murders are "intragang" not "intergang".
Intergang related murders may be over prime drug dealing turf(like the Austin neighborhood) or disrepect(walking in the other's hood wearing your gang's colors). The "drive by" is the favored method of execution.
Intragang murders are usually about breaking the gang's rules, becoming a "snitch" risk, stealing another member's "shorty", embezzling funds, or the attempt or failure to move up in what are notoriously hierarchical organizations or some combination there of.
The sad truth is that being a gangbanger has its own fate not too dissimilar than that of "Logan's Run". Except the critical age is 18 instead of 30.
By age 18 the typical gangbanger has a rap sheet(snitch risk) and is easily recognized by local cops. If he is not a hard drug addict, he at least has brain damage from smoking high grade marijuana combined with binge drinking for years(estimated at an additional 8 IQ point drop), and therefore not "management material". Having a baby momma or two or three... and bitching about how much he earns makes him an expensive worker when there is no shortage of cheaper labor. Tired of being, and of little value, as a street level dealer and yet needing to move up in the gang to cover expenses, an aging gangbanger is tempted to engage in extracurricular activities(stealing, breakings, muggings...) to make ends meet which impact the gang's reputation in the hood. In the end there are only so many opportunities in any "Up or Out(dead)" organization.
I sat on a gang murder jury that could not convict. It was an intragang murder. The above facts where explained to us after the trial by the judge and prosecution.
Intragang killings help explain how the ultra violent Austin Chicago neighborhood can be situated right across the avenue from the very desirable Oak Park suburb.
I just happened to see the small-town-murder movie, Bernie, starring Jack Black along with Matthew McConaughey. It's based on a 1997 murder in Carthage, TX. I give the movie a thumbs-up and can vouch that it provides a reasonable representation of small town life--which happens to be as distinct from living in the sticks as living in the suburbs is to living in the city.
ReplyDeleteAfter the viewing, I checked McConaughey's Wikipedia entry to verify a recollection that he was, himself, raised in East Texas (he was).
From McConaughey's page, I clicked one of the genealogical references and came across this random HBD-relevant tidbit:
After the [Civil W]ar, McConaughey [Matthew's G-Grandfather] was appointed Subassistant Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau in Wharton County, Texas. In addition to racism and injustice, he had to deal with the marital issues of freed slaves.
Indeed, McConaughey asserted that his biggest problem had become the freed people themselves. "Husbands were leaving their life partners 'in droves,' asserting that they had not been joined 'by the book.' The black women were outraged and claimed that if they were good enough to be wives as slaves, they were good enough to be free men's spouses. McConaughey said that he found the women's arguments quite logical, but he regretted that all he could do was advise the families to stay together.
I'm of the belief that the 60's Cultural Revolution gets too played-up as the source of our current societal woes-- both in general society as well as within this blog, in particular.
"Anonymous Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteWhen your police force is trying to solve an order of magnitude more crime on the same budget, something has to give."
Exactly. Same reason why the darker the city, the more likely that you have a police force that takes longer to respond and often even has a list of crimes they won't respond to.
ReplyDeleteBut South Carolina has lots of blacks. Is the Jesse Helms heritage still cracking down?
Robert Hume
I think you meant "Strom Thurmond heritage". Jesse Helms was from North Carolina.
I suspect that elaborate premeditated murders like you see on detective shows are relatively rare. Most white murders probably come under the "crime of passion" category and are easily solved. White mass shootings are also easily solved. (Sorry to steal your thunder, Truth). Many NAM murders are byproducts of other criminal activity (robbery, drug dealing etc.) and are not as easily solved, due to their random nature.
I`m suprised the Rocky Mountain States it is so hard to get away with murder. With all that open space, how could you not properly hide the body, or murder them in the middle of nowhere??
ReplyDeleteAs has already been pointed out, one thug shooting another in a city means lots of people not snitching and nobody concerned about the victim in any event.
We should be glad most murders are terribly pedestrian affairs where both parties are easily connected: a woman, drug deals, drunken brawls, family feuds.
"Crime show"-level murders are extremely rare and again, pretty easy to connect. The Neuman-Sneiderman murder in affluent Dunwoody GA was solved in no time. Small towns where everybody knows everybody and everybody else's routine are even simpler. (I lived in a small town once and can remember driving behind people and knowing when they were about to make a turn. Drivers rarely used turn signals. If you're in trouble and need to disappear, head for a big city.)
About 30 years ago, there was a bizarre case in Tampa FL where a businessman had to go into hiding after the FBI uncovered his partner's plot to kill him for the proceeds of a 'key man' insurance policy. (Bodine v. Kemper Ins., the targets sued Kemper when the company's stupid bureaucracy fumbled the cancellation after being notified of the plot. That's about as sexy a crime as I can remember in my lifetime. The TV cop dramas are so ridiculous they're not even good propaganda. I remember one Law & Order episode where the intrepid detectives were hot on the case of 'South African drug dealers.'
A tv show of near-retarded and illiterate yoofs murdering each other over shinies, disses, and fugly hos would be realistic. Who would want to watch that?
ReplyDeleteI would have thought that before the rise of "Reality TV."
Convictions require witnesses, and the risk of getting killed for witnessing is higher the greater the ambient crime rate; the danger could come from more directions.
Which is why we can't end the drug war; we need an excuse to lock up the people whom no one will testify against.
Or rent "The Omega Man" w/ Charleton Heston cruising around downtown L.A.--the place is like a driver's fantasy come to life
Presumably traffic was deliberately stopped for that one - the lack of traffic did not reflect the demographics of the time it was made, but the demographics of a post-apocalyptic world.
"There is still a trailer park in Paradise Cove, a private beach between Malibu and Zuma. Very, very expensive trailers."
ReplyDeleteI believe the preferred nomenclature is "manufactured home community".
On the other hand, the 70's movie Death Wish was a hoot. It depicts a crime wave in NY, where the most ethnic looking hood is Jeff Goldblum dressed like Jennifer Beal in Flashdance.
ReplyDeleteThats a little harsh, the bad guys in DW were largely NAM.
I saw Sylvester Stallone's The Specialist the other day from 1994 though it looks very 80s, set in Miami.
There is scene where he goes Epic Beard Man on a bus where a group of white ne'er-do-wells aged in their 20s (or even 30s) are terrorizing humble, dignified, law abiding blacks and hispanics.
I didnt know whether to laugh or cry.
The Midsomer Murders guy got in trouble because he blurted out a truth about TV shows and target audiences.
ReplyDeleteYou dont set a story with lots white folks in pretty houses in the countryside if you are expecting a mass audience of blacks and asians.
But the accepted fiction is that anyone might happen to watch anything, just, please, please dont discuss it.
Since the 1980s the BBC have had a soap opera set in east London, Eastenders.
Ever since it started liberal types have been complaining it wasnt realistic, it didnt have enough minorities. This is torture for its makers because, of course, they are as impeccably left/liberals to man/woman.
But they understand that if they populated the show entirely with minorities, which they would dearly love to do, they would lose the majority white audience and that would likely be the end of the show.
Of course they cant win either because they minorities they do include are deemed to be acting white etc etc
Chicago had 433 murders in 2011, and 305 of them were uncleared at the end of the year. If they're unsolved after the first several weeks it's unlikely they will ever be cleared.
ReplyDeleteOne presumes that some of the January 2011 murderers had, by December, become murder victims themselves.
Real crime doesn't make good TV, it's horribly boring.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, years ago I read a cop (I think) saying something about most crime being stupid people doing stupid things to each other, often for stupid reasons. You get the idea.
Rockford, Poirot, Lt Columbo, Insp Barnaby, Sherlock Holmes et al instead focus on interesting people committing inventive crimes.
With all that open space, how could you not properly hide the body, or murder them in the middle of nowhere??
ReplyDeleteThere aren't many people around, true, but it works the other way -- everybody knows most everybody, the suspects are obvious, and most citizens want malefactors punished.
A high conviction rate is no guarantee of getting it right. Southern states with a lot of blacks have high conviction rates. Maybe rural cops are more willing to frame people, abuse witnesses, or get cooperative juries. A lot of ways to interpret this data.
ReplyDeleteBehold the power of decades of left-wing brainwashing. Garbage in, garbage out.
following up on steve's post about gangster rap, it seems miami rapper rick ross had a drive-by incident of his own yesterday.
ReplyDeleteit was probably a registered republican blasting away at the esteemed musician with one of those AR-15 things. joe biden will get right on this.
"But on the other hand The Wire was pretty realistic depiction of real drug related crime, including impulsive NAM killings over girls, dogfights, and disses, and it was a huge hit."
ReplyDeleteExcept that it wasn't. I would say that seasons #3 and 4 of The Wire were the greatest dramatic television ever made, but the show was a commercial failure, and never really drew an audience. HBO kept it going for 5 years because as a critically hailed vanity vehicle, it produced a halo effect for it's other shows
"I suspect that elaborate premeditated murders like you see on detective shows are relatively rare. Most white murders probably come under the "crime of passion" category and are easily solved. White mass shootings are also easily solved. (Sorry to steal your thunder, Truth)"
ReplyDeleteInteresting hypothesis, but no, probably not. The discrepancy in solved murders can be summed up, mainly, in three factors:
1) The police are much more motivated to solve murders in white areas.
2) There are less of them.
3) Witnesses are much more motivated to co-operate with police.
After the viewing, I checked McConaughey's Wikipedia entry to verify a recollection that he was, himself, raised in East Texas (he was).
ReplyDeleteBut he was born in South Texas (Uvalde) where he remains notorious (at least among my mother-in-law's family) for biting my wife's cousin in kindergarten.
He no doubt had his shirt off when he perpetrated the biting.
DeleteWas one state left out? The table you present us with includes DC, but the last place state is #50. Shouldn't it be 51?
ReplyDeleteOmega Man - Presumably traffic was deliberately stopped for that one - the lack of traffic did not reflect the demographics of the time it was made, but the demographics of a post-apocalyptic world.
ReplyDeleteI seem to remember reading that in fact daytime exteriors were largely shot very early on Sunday mornings.
I remember seeing an interview with Peter Falk. He told the interviewer that occasionally he would hit his glass eye with his spoon if he wanted to freak someone out.
ReplyDeleteThe reason there is exponentially more crime associated with crack than power cocaine is that it is sold on a retail basis whereas power coke is sold on a referral basis. If there is only enough foot traffic in a shopping mall to support 3 shoe stores and there are 4, one will go out of business and reopen as a T-Shirt vendor. If there are 4 crack dealers and only enough room for 3, or 1, there will be a shootout possibly killing all 4. The buyers and sellers often don't know each other either so it always opens up the possibility of a rip off.
ReplyDelete"I remember seeing an interview with Peter Falk. He told the interviewer that occasionally he would hit his glass eye with his spoon if he wanted to freak someone out. "
ReplyDeleteI was so sad when Peter Falk died. He was the best, they really don´t make ´em like that anymore...
"Would the readers of Isteve attribute this to inability of the Chicago PD or to the unwillingness of NAMs in Chicago to cooperate with the PD?"
ReplyDeleteBoth. The police give up - mainly because of the lack of public support mainly because the media won't tell the whole truth.
.
"if there were more shows on TV about gangbangers getting shot and cops not having any clues?"
"NAMs don't talk to police. Plain and simple. Stop snitchin!"
Yeah they do. They say who did it, why, what with and various extraneous details about the love lives of the individuals concerned *but not in court* because most of it is connected to gangs and that means reprisals.
In places where there's still a white minority left they won't cooperate with the police either for the same reason.
.
"WRONG!!! Actually as surprisingly large number of gang related murders are "intragang" not "intergang"."
Yes. I hate the myth that it's mostly intergang as it leads to the idea that the problem will go away if you ignore it long enough.
(In reality if you allow a gang culture to take over a neighborhood it will get worse as the sucessfully violent have more kids. Ignoring it makes it worse.)
What it is is a lot of very impulsively violent people all together in a group so obviously they are forever killing each other (and random passers by) over all sorts of stupid nonsense.
(The main reason why hispanic gangbangers generally push out black gangbangers is they do the same thing but at a slightly lower rate.)
.
"Which is why we can't end the drug war; we need an excuse to lock up the people whom no one will testify against."
You need a crime that almost all the worst killers go through at an early stage e.g. street robberies, gang rapes etc, and then give those crimes exceptional sentences.
imo
I second the kudos for Homicide. It was superior to The Wire, but your average film school grad/critic needs the cursing and gratuitous sex to "keep it real', never mind that they never had any contact with the real in their lives.
ReplyDelete"I second the kudos for Homicide. It was superior to The Wire"
ReplyDeleteI'd say that was true of the first couple of seasons. I think the Wire pips it if you compare across the whole of both series.
Hm - my wife is proud of coming from a small town in the American South that once in the '80s had the highest unsolved murder rate of any city in the US, beating out Detroit.
ReplyDeleteAlthough she did point out that 'unsolved' does not mean 'don't know who did it' as she says, "We have our own justice". >:)