See here

And here:

The drop in New York's violent crime rate, then and now, is consistent with a broader nationwide trend. Rates of violent crime have steadily declined nationwide over the past two decades, and nobody is really sure why. The best argument I've seen suggests that violent crime began to fall around the same time that the crack boom started to wane in the early 1990s. The rates have been dropping across the country since then.

We do know that the declines in violent crime in New York have been comparable to declines in cities that didn't use Compstat or broken windows. As criminologist Richard Rosenfeld put it in a 2002 paper, "homicide rates also have decreased sharply in cities that did not noticeably alter their policing policies, such as Los Angeles, or that instituted very different changes from those in New York, such as San Diego." The takeaway: Crime just keeps going down everywhere. Nobody is sure why.

If you want to reduce crime you're going to end up over arresting and convicting.  If you reduce excessive arrests, convictions and prison sentences, crime will go up. There's no perfect solution.

I don't know how many of your friends have served hard time.  I count half a dozen of mine, all Black, although I personally have never been arrested.

The War on Drugs is a big contributor to crime.  End that, treat addiction as a medical problem, not a criminal problem, and crime will go down.

No one decides that a life of crime is a great way to go.  In some parts of our country there are no options, because Mitt Romney and his rich friends sold the factories to China, and now there are no jobs that AREN'T criminal.

I have a friend who is a huge Black man, played football for one of the Florida schools.  Didn't graduate, used up his eligibility, and the school threw him away.  He wound up being an enforcer for a drug dealer and did a couple of years on a weapons charge.

My ex-con friends would have loved a real job but there weren't any.  Dealing drugs was better than starving, so that's what they did.

I don't think anyone wants to see someone punished who isn't guilty.

There is certainly a difference in opinion about what constitutes guilt.

In the recent police shootings many liberals have taken the stance the police have a long history of racism and brutality and want to see them punished even if they're not really guilty of the current crime.

Speaking as a liberal, I have no interest in seeing someone pay a price for something he or she didn't do.  I don't regard that as justice.

As a liberal, I don't want kangaroo courts, or kabuki theater.  I don't want the scales to be tipped by money or the lack thereof, by abusing or denying someone his or her rights.

As a liberal, I think sending the wrong person to prison is a travesty.

I admit that, like a lot of other people, it's hard to see people one does believe are culpable walk away from any consequence for his or her actions.  And sometimes juries produce that result.  But frequently, police-involved killings/shootings/abuses never make it past the "internal review."  In Baltimore, the police union is very, very strong.  It has vigorously resisted reforms that would make members of law enforcement more accountable - the internal review is one of those ways.

It's ironic, but the same police union that's calling for a special prosecutor in the Gray case lobbied hard and long against reform legislation that would have required that to happen.

She just took office so how can there be ethical questions about her tenure already? I would be interested in hearing from defense attorneys about her conduct of cases when she was an ASA.  That may or may not be instructive on how she will conduct her office and how her ASAs will behave.

However, in this case - and maybe she was just speaking inartfully - but I was more than a bit troubled when she said she didn't have to reveal or release evidence before trial when responding to the defense motion to inspect the knife.  Of course she will have to turn over evidence before trial during discovery and via other specific defense requests and prosecution obligations. So not sure what she meant by her almost adamant refusal to discuss what she had already discussed in her well publicized press conference - the legality of the knife.

Freddie's still dead

And he is still dead from banging his head on the backdoor of the van.

Yet, another unarmed black man killed by the police.....

"Do you think the people who took responsibility for Freddie Gray by placing him under arrest should face criminal charges arising out of his injuries?"

During my research for the producers of the PBS documentary The Massie Affair, I learned two rather disturbing things about the application of law at that particular time in U.S. history. The first one was that women were barred from jury service in Hawaii until 1955 -- Yikes! -- but for purposes of this discussion, that's another interesting topic for a later Open Thread.

The other thing I learned was that prior to the 1964 Brady ruling, prosecutors actually enjoyed a legal right in the Territory / State of Hawaii to withhold from the defense any or all exculpatory evidence (real or potential) in their possession -- even if the defense knew about such evidence and requested to see it, as they repeatedly did in the first of the two Massie trials, Hawaii v. Ben Ahakuelo, et al. In that particular trial, defense counsel William Heen's repeated subpoenas to that effect were just as repeatedly quashed by the presiding judge, Alva Steadman.

Ironically, Judge Steadman later freely admitted to a New York Times reporter that his rulings from the bench against Heen were an attempt on his part to compel jurors to convict the five Native Hawaiian and Asian-American defendants in that rape trial, because:

• The U.S. Navy, which had tremendous political influence in the Territory's affairs, both in Honolulu and in Washington, D.C., demanded justice for alleged rape victim Thalia Massie, "A white woman of refinement and culture," which meant the defendants had to be convicted of the crime, come hell or high water; and

• In his professional opinion, the actual circumstantial evidence arrayed against those five defendants at trial was remarkably weak and unconvincing, and became even more so after Mrs. Massie took the stand as the prosecution's chief witness and for all intents and purposes, proceeded to effectively perjure herself.

That Motion is now in the public domain and the facts therein will have to be dealt with sooner than later.

An honest prosecutor would by now have held a news conference to show the knife to the public to back up her charges. The authorities do that in cities all over the country to keep the public apprised of the facts behind an arrest.

A competent prosecutor would also have investigated Freddie Gray's flight into a building and then doubling back before falsely accusing the officers of making an illegal arrest.