Crime

The major approaches shown in the video for preventing crime all center around providing opportunities for inner city minorities. The suggestions include creating job opportunities and offering a better education so that more jobs and careers are open to inner city youths. Community involvement, such as church events and mentoring as well after school events so that young people can talk. The mad dads are an example of mentors, similar to big brothers, who can replace drug dealers and gangsters to serve as male role models for young men who have no fathers in their lives. Another suggestion was to discourage out of wedlock births with an aim to promote two parent families. Increased police presence in the neighborhoods was also suggested. Finally, incentives for obeying the law were also suggested. The suggestion made for handling crime was to increase the punishment to act as a deterrent and punish those who commit crimes more severely. Notably, there was no mention of rehabilitation of criminals or re-entry programs to help those who come out of prison to succeed. 

Police should handle neighborhoods with extreme violence by implementing and taking part in programs to prevent the violence before it happens. In addition to prevention suggestions mentioned in the video, the police should participate in community policing, which is where the officers are members of the community, they know everybody who lives there, and they treat people with respect in order to gain their trust. Then, the police can have a positive influence on the community. An opposite approach, the one almost always implemented despite it’s poor success rate, is zero tolerance and criminalization of the activities of the poor, such as drug abuse. If drug abuse were decriminalized and treated like an illness, those who abuse drugs would have more opportunity to be rehabilitated and become productive members of society. 

Laws that allow guns to be on campus promote a culture of violence and paranoia. The focus of the campus should be on education, not on self defense or offense. Bringing a gun to campus is unlikely to prevent or promote crime on campus. Our country is one of the most violent in the world, and we also have some of the most permissible gun laws, so it seems there might be a correlation between the two. 

Laws that allow the police to ask people for their papers to prove they are in the country legally promote a culture of segregation, finger pointing, and fear. The statistics on whether crime has been reduced since SB 1070 was passed are not reliable because the statistics on kidnapping before the law was passed were later found to be inflated. Hispanics feel attacked by the law, and making any group feel attacked is generally not good policy.