This reflection on the crime problem in New Orleans seems to apply to Minneapolis. At least some parts, anyway:

A terrible, horrible crime occurs. The city gets up in arms. March on City Hall. Demand change. We're mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore! Editorials bray against the madness. Politicians bloviate. Time passes. Nothing changes.
…
When — and how — do we really change? When do we stop frantically looking for answers under the same sofa cushions we've looked under hundreds of times before? Schools. Playgrounds. Jobs.

As the Income Tax filing deadline approaches, we at the Eastside Defender remind the bad guys that, according to IRS Publication 17, their booty is subject to tax:

Instapundit comments on a court ruling which said NYC subway workers are not obligated to take action to stop a rape:

A Queens judge ruled yesterday that subway employees do not have to do anything but pick up their phones if they see a crime — as he threw out a suit against the MTA and two workers who did nothing more to stop a rape.

Vox Day reflects on last weekend’s murder of three Oakland police officers:

First, notice how the parolee was armed with an "assault" rifle, whatever that's supposed to mean. I somehow doubt he was armed with an M-16 on full-auto. Second, the SWAT teams aren't anywhere nearly as invulnerable as they'd like Americans to believe they are; it's a little tougher taking down an armed criminal who knows you're after him than killing an elderly woman in her sleep during a no-knock raid in the middle of the night.

CNN reports on the value of neighborhood watch groups:

Martin Floss, a professor and director of the Institute for Law and Justice at Hilbert College in Hamburg, New York, said that for the past 15 years, crime rates across the board have dropped to historically low levels.

Floss, a former crime prevention coordinator for a neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, said that as the economy worsens, property crimes tend to increase.

Well-trained neighborhood watch groups can be great assets to local law enforcement, Floss said. "If you can get them to organize, to look out for each other and to work closely with the police, that is only going to do good things," he said.

The story also offers something to for Eastsiders to keep in mind as warmer weather arrives:

From the Christian Science Monitor:

High foreclosure rates, a spike in brazen break-ins, and slashed police budgets are causing turmoil in America's transitioning urban communities, auguring what Atlanta anticrime activist Larry Ely calls an "urban war."

Posted on my blog Negative Railroad:

Last night another question popped into my mind. We used to hear a daily body count from Iraq. The News Hour would end a segment each day by showing photos of US military personnel who died fighting for liberty. (That’s not how Jim Lehrer framed it, though) I wondered, are they still running that feature? What is the “death toll” since the turn of the year?

From the New York Times:

The celebrated reduction in murder rates nationally has concealed a “worrisome divergence,” said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University who wrote the report, to be released Monday, with Marc L. Swatt. And there are signs, they said, that the racial gap will grow without countermeasures like restoring police officers in the streets and creating social programs for poor youths.

The abstract of a 2008 study states:

Thousands of gun shows take place in the U.S. each year. Gun control advocates argue that because sales at gun shows are much less regulated than other sales, such shows make it easier for potential criminals to obtain a gun. Similarly, one might be concerned that gun shows would exacerbate suicide rates by providing individuals considering suicide with a more lethal means of ending their lives. On the other hand, proponents argue that gun shows are innocuous since potential criminals can acquire guns quite easily through other black market sales or theft.

In 2005, the US Supreme Court ruled that police have no Constitutional duty to protect any individual person.

Since we’ve seen several stories of daytime burglaries bubble to the top of local crime news, I thought I would offer a couple of burglary prevention links. It's advice most have heard before. More than once. Maybe this will inspire someone—even me—to take one more step toward making Northeast a “hard target” for these criminals.

First, the Minneapolis Police Department has a large library of crime prevention tips. From Minimum Home Security (pdf):

The Wall Street Journal reports on a Hawaiian program to reduce probation violations through swift and certain punishment. The program, known by the official acronym HOPE, was proposed by a Judge who:

…was assigned to criminal court in 2004 and immediately faced a slew of motions to revoke probation. In every case, he recalls, the defendant had "pages of violations stretching back months or even years" yet had suffered virtually no consequences for any of them.

Witness this stranger-than-fiction combination of hunger for justice and blind faith in authority. From the NY Times:

Like so many rural communities in the country’s middle, this tiny town had wrestled for years with the woes of methamphetamine. Then, several months ago, a federal agent showed up.

Mayor Otis Schulte of Gerald said Bill A. Jakob went to great lengths to make police officers think he was a federal agent.

Busts began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, “a meth capital of the United States,” the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.

The national political debate often seems largely irrelevant to our local quality of life. We focus on general principles that align with an ideology, while the actual regulation of our daily living is left to a small cabal of insiders and activists. I contend our lives are impacted more by the local application of ideology than by the corresponding Federal directives.

Following are excerpts from an article titled American Murder Mystery, in the July/August 2008 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Read the whole story.

About five years ago, Janikowski embarked on a more ambitious project. He’d built up enough trust with the police to get them to send him daily crime and arrest reports, including addresses and types of crime. He began mapping all violent and property crimes, block by block, across the city. “These cops on the streets were saying that crime patterns are changing,” he said, so he wanted to look into it.

When his map was complete, a clear if strangely shaped pattern emerged: Wait a minute, he recalled thinking. I see this bunny rabbit coming up. People are going to accuse me of being on shrooms! The inner city, where crime used to be concentrated, was now clean. But everywhere else looked much worse: arrests had skyrocketed along two corridors north and west of the central city (the bunny rabbit’s ears) and along one in the southeast (the tail). Hot spots had proliferated since the mid-1990s, and little islands of crime had sprung up where none had existed before, dotting the map all around the city.