Check out today’s story in Dallas’ Only Daily Newspaper about the drop in the city’s murder rate. It’s vintage Morning News reporting, in which every side of the issue is reported, endorsed and then rejected. The goal being, I suppose, to show that nothing we do to reduce crime makes a difference, so why bother? That way, we don’t have to raise taxes to hire more cops.
This attitude reminds me of the late Chicago Cubs announcer Jack Brickhouse, who kept insisting, year after year, that the assortment of stiffs who played for the Cubs were overdue — overdue to get a big hit, overdue to pitch a good game, overdue to be decent players. They weren’t overdue. They were stiffs, and they had the numbers to prove it.
That’s the case here. Say what you want about crime statistics and how they are gathered and what they mean, but they’re the only way we have to measure crime. And the statistics show, in cities across the country, that there is a relationship between hiring more police and cutting crime. The extra cops need to be used effectively, but if they are, crime goes down. It has worked in New York City, so why won’t we try it here?
