Friday, January 1, 2010

The Brooklyn Body Count

YourNabe.com reports on the 2009 murder statistics for the Borough of Brooklyn.

While the city is touting the lowest homicide rate in over four decades, nearly half of the 461 killings that did occur took place right here in the borough of churches.

As this paper went to press, cops from the Patrol Borough Brooklyn South logged in 92 homicides. Patrol Borough Brooklyn North had 108 homicides for a grand total of 200 --— far outpacing their NYPD counterparts in the Bronx (who will round out the year with 108 killings), Queens (79 slayings) and Manhattan, where 58 homicides were investigated. Staten Island had the lowest number of homicides at 16.

Yet despite this high number, Brooklyn homicides were slightly less than in 2008, during which 207 people were murdered as of December 27, according to NYPD CompStat numbers.

So, even in Brooklyn, where they have murders almost every day, they're patting themselves on the back. It reminds me of what Fidel Castro said a few years ago to the World Food Summit here in Rome (I couldn't find a link to it). All the speakers, Heads of State and other big shots, were proclaiming what a wonderful program they were putting in place to cut world hunger in half by 2015 or something like that. So, by that date there would only be a half-a-billion people starving instead of a whole billion. When Castro spoke he shocked everybody by telling them they should be ashamed of themselves for bragging about such feeble progress when they had the means to do so much better.

You know I hate making comparisons, but couldn't the same thing be said about the gun violence. Just because there were 6 murders a day in New York in 1990, should we be happy that there are an average of only one-and-a-half today? I don't think so. I think it's disgraceful, just like Castro said to those food bureaucrats.

What's your opinion? Should we be happy with the drop in murders? Or should we recognize the more needs to be done? Do you think the increasing numbers of guns in American society is helping to keep those numbers as high as they are? Wouldn't reducing the number of guns go a long way towards seriously improving this situation?

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.

1 comment:

  1. Ha! Leave it to Mike to cite the "wisdom" of a murderous, commie, thug dictator (retired, in theory) to bolster his claim that a dramatic drop in violence, concurrent with an enormous spike in firearms sales, is somehow evidence that we need to step up the disarmament of the citizenry.

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