Quote:
Originally Posted by Pastiche
Bang frickin on.
The whole 'tough on crime' wedge panders to the stupid and the fearful or both and there's no shortage of them.
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I remember doing a study for the Belleville police department back in the 90s. The police wanted to know what the citizens thought of the police and crime in the area in general. The vast majority of people thought "there is little to no crime in my neighborhood" but "crime is rampant throughout the rest of the city". The funny thing is that this opinion was held in every district of the city. And the respondents were near unanimous in saying that they believed crime was up, but police statistics show exactly the reverse. My guess is that the only thing that was really up was TV coverage of crime, creating a paranoid public willing to demand that their tax dollars be spent fighting an imaginary problem.