Crime rates are down within Metro\u2019s jurisdiction for the five major categories reported to the FBI, Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie proudly reported Feb. 7.<\/p>\n
Most of the drops are substantial, and impressive. The drop in Las Vegas auto thefts — though attributable in part to an economic climate that finds fewer people placing \u201corders\u201d for fancy car parts, once stolen on demand at a much higher frequency by sophisticated \u201cchop shops\u201d (street cops tell me) — is particularly good news, since those rate impact our insurance premiums.<\/p>\n
And then there are the robberies.<\/p>\n
Within Metro\u2019s jurisdiction, robberies are reported down 20 percent for 2011 compared to 2010 — nearly 50 percent since 2006. Asked why, Lt. Ron Fox offered a number of reasons at the big Feb. 7 press conference — better technology, better community outreach. But he somehow neglected to mention the biggest reason.<\/p>\n
Officers have discretion on how to charge a robbery, a category where Metro reports its own statistics. And given that the department looks better when crime statistics drop, street officers say they\u2019ve gotten the word, very clearly, to fudge these numbers.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you don\u2019t have to make it a robbery, you\u2019re supposed to report it as a non-reportable (to the FBI) crime,\u201d one long-time Metro street officer tells me. \u201cThis is no secret, they talk about it openly in briefing. They\u2019ll hold up a report and they\u2019ll go \u2018I can\u2019t believe the officer charged this as a 407,\u2019 a robbery, \u2018when he could have changed it to petty larceny\u2019 — a crime that doesn\u2019t have to be reported to the FBI. And this is a case where the perpetrator gave the clerk a bloody nose, which definitely means robbery was the right charge,\u201d my source continues. \u201cSo there\u2019s pressure there to make the department look good, it\u2019s political, and it\u2019s coming from upstairs.\u201d<\/p>\n
The overall trends are still good; Metro and its officers deserve some credit. You can\u2019t very well fudge the numbers on highway fatalities. But in categories where officers report open pressure to \u201cwrite it up the right way,\u201d it would be naive to treat all these numbers as gospel.<\/p>\n
# # #<\/p>\n
I wrote a few weeks back about sitting in a banquet hall at the Tuscany Resort in Las Vegas Jan. 30, alongside some 95 county sheriffs and a handful of deputies — most in full uniform with gleaming badges — listening to and applauding speakers you\u2019d more commonly associate with Libertarian Party gatherings or seminars sponsored by the Austrian economists of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.<\/p>\n
The most common topic of discussion appeared to be the National Defense Authorization Act recently signed into law by President Barack Obama, condemned (under the shorthand \u201cNDAA\u201d) by speaker after speaker for gutting a huge segment of the Bill of Rights by extending to the executive branch powers previously associated only with military forces operating overseas.<\/p>\n
Basically, the act was characterized — accurately, so far as I an tell — as allowing agents of the president (a supposed expert on Constitutional law!) to lock up American citizens indefinitely without trial, without any chance to confront their accusers, on a mere allegation that they\u2019re \u201cenemy combatants\u201d or have somehow given aid and comfort to unspecified enemy forces, with whom the nation doesn\u2019t even have to be officially at war.<\/p>\n
If I had to list a second most popular topic it would probably be some aspect of United Nations Agenda 21, which has given the schoolmarms of the fascist Left such popular buzz euphemisms as \u201csustainable development,\u201d but which is actually about shoving rural folk off the land under any of a thousand \u201cenvironmental\u201d pretexts, the long-term goal being to cluster a sharply reduced remnant of mankind into urban tenement ghettos from which we can be shuttled to our state-assigned jobs in little electric trolleys.<\/p>\n