“I’m sorry to inform you that your son was ‘upticked’ last night”

The new Mayor of Washington, DC is just like the old mayor of Washington, DC – downplaying crime statistics, according to the Washington Examiner;

D.C.’s mayor and police chief on Monday attempted to downplay a spike in the District’s homicide rate as a mere “uptick” in an overall decrease during the past decade.

 

Over the weekend, the city experienced its 109th killing, meaning with six weeks to go in 2007 the year’s total to date is already near 2006’s final sum. But Mayor Adrian Fenty, speaking at Anacostia High School, noted that homicide rates in recent years are nowhere near as high as they were in the early 1990s.

“In 1991 we tapped out at 479. It’s been up a year or two at a time since … yet crime is going down,” Fenty said. “Any time anything is going in a downward trend, there are going to be time-to-time upticks.”

Much more critical to the mayor than year-to-year changes is that over time a downward trend continues, he said. But not everyone dismissed the pace of homicides.

The article misstates the 109 murders for this year – it’s 169 homicides, according to the Metro Police website as of yesterday morning.

I think it’s extremely callous of the mayor and his police chief to call this an “uptick”. If the Metro Police were out actually patrolling neighborhoods outside of their cars (which still have the flashing parking lights running while they patrol to warn criminals to wait until they pass) that might, at least, make it appear as if they want to stop crime.

But to call 18 more homicides than last year an “uptick” only reinforces Stalin’s quote that “one death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” Does Fenty want to be remembered for his Stalinist attitude towards crime in his city?

While you’re looking at the Metro Police website, notice they confiscated 1971 firearms so far this year – 33 years after the most draconian gun laws in the country were enacted. And if police confiscated the guns, they were recovered from people committing crimes. Funny, huh?

Category: Politics, Society