Nonetheless, it does disturb me to read daily the way people with kids and living in crime-impacted neighborhoods think about education and criminal law. It makes me have second thoughts about community crime prevention. I arrive at the conclusion that citizens in these neighborhoods certainly can be eyes for the police force. But if my money is to be spent well, they cannot be the BRAIN of the police force. Because the reasoning I read is far too emotional. It sounds like the underpinning of mob psychology, being full of myth and angst.
Especially, after reading some of the posts about drugs and crime in the 3rd precinct I'm left with a series of questions: (1) How do our participants have such an intimate idea of what the faces of resident drug addicts look like? (2) Since my discussion was not about the generic drug addict but the subset who commit violent crimes, how do they know what THEY looked like when they commited crimes, given that the minimal standard for identifying a perpetrator is a conviction, not simply a suspicion? (3) How DO they know the person is only commiting the crime because of the drug? That really requires some sort of certain knowledge of an alternative reality, one they never will see, yet they spend time rehearsing in imagination.
My bottomline is a quote from Walter Mondale: "It aint the things they don't know. It's the things they KNOW that aint so!"
Jim Mork Cooper: The Island of Relative Sanity in a Mad, Mad World
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