Dyna, I'm so glad you mentioned this. The 13th murder you mention was likely first classified as a suspicious death. I don't know the details on these and exactly why some deaths get qualified as this and others not. But when what the media isn't giving us are those numbers on top fo the number of murders. And it's reasonable to believe that a certain number of suspicious deaths were murders. Whether that is 20% or 70%, I do not know. There may be some rules-of-thumb that are generally agreed upon in the crimnal justice community. No matter what it is, if we want to have a good discussion about crime in certain neighborhoods, suspeciious deaths should be included. That we as a community don't raise more of a fuss to see those numbers is unfortunate. I suspect it's just a matter of people understanding this. So beside the high number of murders in 2005 Year to date, we should also be looking at the number of suspeicious deaths in those neighborhoods. I'd speculate that the we'd see a corresponding jump in those, just as with the murders. Maybe not though. It is afterall a very short period of time that is being looked at. Either way, I hope to see these numbers cited more frequently along with murders. Not because they are murders but that it's likely a percentage of them are.
Allen Graetz Lowry Hill
Dyna wrote:
Connie and Wizard, clearly you good citizens have a better read on Minneapolis' crime trends than our police department and their politician bosses. The Strib has been keeping up to date stats on the murders at least, reporting an almost unheard of 13 in the first three cold winter months of this year. That number rose from 12 when bullet wounds were found in an elder who Minneapolis police thought had died of natural causes in his home. One wonders if perhaps other murders have been conveniently ignored to keep the tally down- when a house fire took the life of a child in Hawthorne a few weeks ago, police appeared to be searching the neighborhood for a suspect. That fire had a height, speed, and intensity of flame more typical of an "accelerant" than a wood frame structure. Was this our 14th murder? Are there others mislabeled as "accidental deaths"?
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