well, I wasn't going to get into this, but I'll stick to stats dicussions and leave opinion out of it:
Ace O Spades: crime rates skyrocketed in the late 60's. Before that, criminologist referred to the golden age, as in, a flat line of crime--and the line was extremely low. No one has the definative answer on what changed between the 50's and 60's but you can well imagine that there are lots of studies and opinions on it.
Then they became a bit jagged during the 80's. Some people attribute this to crack cocaine. It began to go down during the 90's. Some people attribute that to economic shifts, but the important to note in regard to the last couple of posts is that crime rates have
not been falling for the past few years. That ended ~2000. Since that time, violent crime has been on the upswing again.
Analyze this all in the context with what pennywise wrote about reclassification of crime, because he's right on the money regarding shifting crimes around, non-reporting crimes, etc. in order to obtain funding and accolades. I haven't looked at Canada's crime stats for a while, but US crime is currently on the upswing--just not as steep as it was during the 70's.
See what it's doing here as of 2002?
