Born in the USA and Getting Away with Murder

Born in the USA and Getting Away with Murder

The United States is increasingly looking like a third world country when it comes to law enforcement. Convicted violent criminals are pardoned when their violence, which injured and resulted in the death of police officers, was in support of the President. Clemency and other pardon activities favor donors (and their family members) to Presidential campaign coffers and favored candidates. Our reconfigured FBI is headed by an idealogue with no police experience who spends more time in his beloved Las Vegas (enjoying the nightlife) than he does at the helm of his storied agency… not to mention purging agents that may have been involved in Trump investigations and using agents to track down pro-Trump discredited conspiracy theories.

For the most part, local police are woefully undertrained, at least by international standards. As police officers in much of Europe train for up to three years, a local US cop is lucky to get even 6 months of training. The number of successful lawsuits against police use of excessive force not only reflects this undertraining but saps local municipal budgets with massive judicially determined payouts. Understaffing is the consequence of such payouts. The use of powerful “non-lethal” containment methods, from large projectile to powerful tasers, makes matters worse. As do the ubiquitous smartphone videos of officers pummeling handcuffed arrestees already subdued and pinned to the ground. The recent use of federalized National Guardsmen, backed by active-duty Marines, deploys reluctant untrained “cops for a week or two” almost exclusively against pollical protestors opposing the incumbent administration.

So, police are too often called to counter protesters who support causes that the local administration opposes (or is under national pressure to oppose). Meanwhile, federal agencies aimed at preventing consumer fraud, criminal dumping of toxic effluents, intentionally releasing addictive drugs and substandard prescription drugs by major companies, etc. are being defunded or actually being shut down. The resultant rise in what were once prevented crimes is staggering.

But what happens when our local police are shifted to priorities that just do not keep Americans safe, where court rulings ensure the open use and spread of firearms, from AR-15s to large capacity handguns, including unpermitted concealed or open carry rights? Do “stand your ground” laws deter crime or cause crime? The statistics in places like Texas and Florida are not good. But as part of this official encouragement of lawlessness, a reflection of the distraction of local police everywhere from traditional law enforcement priorities, is this harsh reality from the resulting staffing shortages: roughly half of all the murders in the United States remain unsolved.

Starting with Louisville, KY, a typical small city where murderers have even odds of never getting caught, NY Times columnist, German Lopez, writes (on July 7th): “Louisville’s police department acknowledges serious problems; it says it is about 300 officers below full staffing. The department is trying to address those issues, said Jennifer Keeney, a spokeswoman. She shared a message for the family members of murder victims: ‘We understand they are grieving, frustrated and in pain. We want them to know it’s frustrating for us, too, and that we do care.’

“Louisville is representative of a national issue. In the United States, people often get away with murder. The clearance rate — the share of cases that result in an arrest or are otherwise solved — was 58 percent in 2023, the latest year for which F.B.I. data is available. And that figure is inflated because it includes murders from previous years that police solved in 2023…

“Compared with its peers, America overall does an unusually poor job of solving killings. The murder clearance rates of other rich nations, including Australia, Britain and Germany, hover in the 70s, 80s and even 90s. Several issues, including a lack of resources, the sheer volume of cases and a distrust of the police, have converged to make the jobs of American detectives much more difficult. ‘It’s a serious problem,’ said Philip Cook, a criminal justice researcher at Duke University.

“The lack of legal accountability emboldens criminals, leading to more crime and violence… ‘It’s a vicious cycle,’ Brian Forst, a criminologist at American University, told me. ‘When the bad guys see that the police are not there to deter crime and catch criminals, they remain on the streets to do more bad stuff. And the rest of the community is less deterred from crime. They think, ‘Why not? I’m not going to get caught.’’”

Let’s face it, we prioritize gun ownership over the lives of our children (guns are the leading cause of death among children and teens in the US), we have more guns than people and a serious misinterpretation of an amendment that simply allowed Revolutionary War citizen soldiers to keep their weapons in the ensuing peacetime… to promulgate a fairly unrestricted individual right to own firearms of all descriptions, often arming street gangs with weapons superior to the police engaged to arrest them. What’s even more absurd, the seminal case on point and the first such case since the Second Amendment was passed in 1789 to address open gun ownership rights, the 2008 Supreme Court in Heller vs DC, went so far as to require the application of gun ownership rules from 1789 (i.e., that applied to flintlocks and muskets).

We watch online and television criminal process programming where the cops always get their man (perpetrator, anyway), applying readily available state-of-the-art forensics, a team of dedicated expert investigators and statistically extraordinary results… that hardly reflect real world facts. Unless you use your weapon in plain sight, often under the obviously watchful eye of nearby cameras, the United States is a great place to murder, whether for profit or simply… because one can. I wonder how many murders were committed under the NRA expression: “the only way to kill a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The rights of the bad guy with a gun and the good guy with a gun to have a gun are often the same.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while rightwing zealots decry the failure to support the rule of law, they seldom really mean traditional crimes… they usually mean containing those expressing views they do not like.