2/4/2008

6 Responses to “L.A.’s Homicides”

1. You’re right. Terrific article.

   DRJ (517d26) — 2/5/2008 @ 12:06 am

   
   

2. so out of 1000 only six blacks and 7 Latinos, two others.

   All but the press could be subdued, and it would of course hurt like hell, but what is worse, single sweep, or the continued piece meal approach to killing by either drug gangs, bad attitudes or cops?

   Remember always that probably 90% plus of these deaths of any race is caused or contributed by the “War on Drugs”! Yeah libertarian sorta view.

   But look at it with serious eyes. We spend 250 billion plus on fighting a non violent crime, drug use, which creates demand, and so forth.

   If such was legalized, or at least made none criminal, and taxed, we gain over 300 billion.

   That’s dollars.

   One might could even factor in the crooked DA’s running for higher office and so on and so on… Basically it’s multiplier effect.

   Meth, one very horrible drug, might not even exist today. MIGHT!

   But Patt, if what I have suggested is even remotely out of line, why is it that CA allows medical approval and use of cannabis? Oh and allows the feds to continue to bust it within your states borders?

   No guts, No glory eh?

   TC (1cf350) — 2/5/2008 @ 3:34 am

   
   

3. Cigarettes are legal and taxed. And there is a black market, smuggling and hijacking of legal shipments.

   What, you think all the criminals currently involved in the drug trade will get honest jobs if drugs are legalized?

   What is predictable is that if drugs are legalized, drug use will increase. And more people will have their lives messed up.

   LarryD (feb78b) — 2/5/2008 @ 7:40 am

   
   

4. The article does not address the race or ethnicity of the murderers themselves. In fact, it barely mentions the perpetrators of these horrible statistics at all. It employs an oddly passive sentence construction, as if murders just happen, without specific people choosing to commit these acts. This paper so often reports on the victims of gang shootings, but rarely on the gang members committing the murders.

   Karen (8859ed) — 2/5/2008 @ 11:31 am

   
   

5. Levoy’s Homicide Blog is a fantastic resource. Every big city should have one.

   I’d also like to see a news blog related to vehicular/transportation related deaths. One that would catalog every death on the road to get a better picture of this issue.

   Justin Levine (20f2b5) — 2/5/2008 @ 4:39 pm

   
   

6. I agree Karen, there is much left out of the narrative that promotes more questions than the piece answers. The first impulse is that it’s just senseless violence, but no violent act is without a reason, no matter how banal or petty. This lament-in-print begs the “why” question of each murder. The “how” is a fact. Shot, stabbed, bludgeoned. The whys are much more subtle, but way more important than how. That most of the murderers and murdered are from immigrant populations is not as important as to how recently they, or their parents, immigrated to the US and under what circumstances. The article presents these abstract statistics of the LA murder rate as a: “Lesson too late for the learning”, yet begs silently for answers that are obviously too painful to follow to a satisfactory conclusion. Too bad.

   Norris (c1966f) — 2/6/2008 @ 11:38 am