Armstrong and Getty react to and read from a few articles making the point that out of almost all nations of comparable size, we are #1 in infrastructure soundness. Here are some of the articles read from (note, stories go in order of: Left Leaning; Libertarian; Conservative)
No, America’s Infrastructure Is Not ‘Crumbling’ (WASHINGTON POST at FREE MEDIA: reproduced below)
Our Infrastructure Is Not ‘Crumbling.’ Repeat: Our Infrastructure Is Not ‘Crumbling’ (REASON)
End of the Runway: Rethinking the Airport Improvement Program and the Federal Role in Airport Funding (HERITAGE FOUNDATION)
One of my beefs, as an example, is this:
A few days after the Chicago City Council approved a $1.3 million legal defense fund to help illegal immigrants facing deportation, officials in Los Angeles unveiled their version with more than seven times the money. It appears to be a growing trend of using public funds to protect those who have violated federal law. The offenders are municipalities that have long offered illegal aliens sanctuary and an array of taxpayer-funded benefits.
[….]
Shortly after the city announced its fund, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors offered to kick in another $3 million to provide lawyers for illegal aliens that may face removal under the new administration. The board voted 4-1 in favor of contributing to the L.A. Justice Fund. The supervisor who voted against it, Kathryn Barger, said it’s irresponsible for the board to allocate funding for such a program.
That is a lot of funds that could have been used for city and county infrastructure projects instead of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Why do I say TDS? Because Obama deported more people than Trump… and not a single public money program was spent on legal defense of ILLEGALaliens.
We already spend almost 500-Billion on infrastructure, and Biden’s “Build Back Better”/Partly The Green New Deal, spends “Only $110 billion of the so-called $1 trillion-plus bipartisan infrastructure package goes toward road, bridges, and other major projects that the American people generally consider ‘infrastructure,’” (BREITBART)…. over ten years.
The WASHINGTON POST story that the ARMSTRONG and GETTY SHOW read from, but it is behind a paywall. So the following is an unlocked version of it.
No, America’s Infrastructure Is Not ‘Crumbling’ (FREE MEDIA)
By Charles Lane,
The United States covers 3.8 million square miles, with 95,471 miles of shoreline and about 12,000 miles of commercially navigable inland waterways; it soars from 282 feet below sea level in Death Valley to 20,310 feet above sea level at Mount Denali.
Knitting this vast and varied territory together are 2.7 million miles of paved roads, more than 500 commercial airports, more than 615,000 bridges, approximately 140,000 miles of freight railroad and more than 300 ports on the coasts, Great Lakes and inland waterways.
Miraculous as these engineering marvels are, it would be even more amazing if some U.S. infrastructure — e.g., the Boston-to-Washington passenger rail corridor, the up to 10 million homes that still get their water through lead pipes, or Texas’s electrical grid — did not need expensive modernization or replacement.
Yet the task before us is not to rescue a neglected, “crumbling” system, as President Biden put it while announcing his $2 trillion American Jobs Plan — in rare agreement with his predecessor, Donald Trump, who pitched his own infrastructure bill (without success) by talking about tiles falling from the ceiling inside New York City’s tunnels.
The real challenge is to take what is by any reasonable measure the best, or nearly the best, infrastructure in the world, and to sustain improvements that have already been occurring in recent years.
Biden warned that U.S. infrastructure is “ranked 13th in the world,” as if it were shameful to outscore about 90 percent of the 141 economies analyzed in 2019 by the World Economic Forum.
In fact, 13th place represents an upward shift of about 10 spots since the 2011-2012 WEF survey — and still underrates the United States.
Of the 12 economies the WEF ranked ahead of the United States in 2019, three — Singapore, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates — are tiny coastal city-states. It’s patently spurious to compare their infrastructure challenges with those of the United States.
Among the 10 geographically largest countries, including Canada, Australia, China and Russia, the United States places first, based on WEF criteria. The United States is also top among the 10 most populous countries.
Relative to other wealthy countries, the United States does still trail the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, Korea, Spain, Germany, France, Austria and the United Kingdom. However, it’s more realistic to treat the six continental European countries in this group as a unit, since goods and people move through them freely, via the borderless Schengen area. (The European Union members partly share infrastructure costs.) Coupled with deletion of the aforementioned micro-states, this adjustment puts the United States in the top five.
WEF ratings rest largely on a subjective survey in which business executives rate their countries’ roads, ports, and air and rail services on a scale of 1 to 7. This tilts against the United States because the rail-quality question does not distinguish between passenger (poor in the United States but excellent in Europe) and freight (a U.S. strength).
The American Society of Civil Engineers, a pro-construction lobby, issues quadrennial, and unflattering, “report cards” on U.S. infrastructure, frequently cited in support of the “crumbling” talking point. The ASCE’s 2021 report card gave the United States a C-.
But that was the best grade in 20 years. “Five category grades — aviation, drinking water, energy, inland waterways, and ports — went up, while just one category — bridges — went down,” relative to ASCE’s 2017 report card, the organization acknowledged.
That lone downgrade (from C+ to C) occurred despite a decline in the share of highway bridges the U.S. government rates as “poor,” to just 7.5 percent, concentrated in lightly traveled rural areas. The ASCE complained, nevertheless, that “the rate of improvements has slowed,” while a small percentage of the nation’s bridges slipped from “good” to “fair.” (Both “good” and “fair” denote safe, usable structures.)
Talk about accentuating the negative! The impartial Congressional Research Service saw the cup half full in a May 2020 report, noting that “the number and share of bridges in poor condition have dropped significantly over the past 20 years,” and that “a relatively modest increase in spending” between now and 2040 could solve the problem.
As for interstate highways, a 2019 study by economists from the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University confirmed that “over the past generation, the condition of the interstate highway network improved consistently,” according to government data, even as “its extent increased modestly, and traffic about doubled.”
Obviously, all such assessments incorporate subjective judgments and debatable definitions. The big picture, though, is that the gigantic U.S. infrastructure is fundamentally sound — impressively, but not surprisingly, given that governments at all levels spent $370.5 billion on it in 2018, up from $284 billion in 2008, according to official data. Recent projects include the $8 billion modernization of New York’s LaGuardia Airport, a $4.4 billion bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, and a more than $2.4 billion overhaul of Central Florida’s I-4 highway.
To repeat: There’s no reason for complacency about U.S. infrastructure. Yet alarmist generalizations don’t help us identify the most pressing needs with the greatest potential economic benefits. They might pave the way to wasted resources and public disenchantment.
ARMSTRONG and GETTY SHOW read from the following article as well “Highways and Bridges Are Not Crumbling (REASON)“
One of the great myths of American politics, no matter who is president and no matter who runs Congress, is that our infrastructure is “crumbling.” Former President Barack Obama repeatedly warned us about our “crumbling infrastructure.” President Donald Trump now tells us that our infrastructure is “crumbling.” The next president is going to hatch a giant plan to fix our crumbling infrastructure as well, because most voters want to believe infrastructure is crumbling.
The infrastructure is not crumbling. Ask someone about infrastructure and his thoughts will probably wander to the worst pothole-infested road he traverses rather than the hundreds of roads he drives on that are perfectly safe and smooth. That’s human nature.
So “crumbling infrastructure” peddlers play on this concern by habitually agonizing over things like the impending outbreak of tragic bridge collapses that will kill thousands. They bring up tragedies like the 2007 disaster with the Interstate 35 bridge over the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis even though, according to federal investigators, the collapse was due to a design flaw rather than decaying infrastructure. Many outlets and politicians simply ignore the inconvenient fact that the rare fatality involving infrastructure typically has nothing to do with “crumbling” and everything to do with natural elements or human error.
In reality, the number of structurally deficient bridges, never high to begin with, has been dropping over the past 30 years despite all the hand-wringing. The overall number has fallen from over 22 percent in 1992 to under 10 percent in 2016. According to a Reuters analysis of those bridges, only 4 percent of those that carry significant traffic need repairs. Of the nation’s 1,200 busiest bridges, the number of those structurally deficient falls to under 2 percent—or fewer than 20 bridges in the entire country. And none of those bridges need repair to save them from collapse.
That has never stopped politicians from fearmongering, however. “Our roads and bridges are falling apart; our airports are in Third World condition,” Trump claimed during his 2016 campaign. Yet as the Heritage Foundation’s Michael Sargent points out, the percentage of airport runways deemed as poor has fallen from 4 percent in 2004 to 2 percent in 2016. And for the past 30 years, the number of “acceptable” or above roads has remained relatively consistent at approximately 85 percent.
Perhaps because they’re constantly being told that America’s roads are on the verge of disintegrating into dust, some voters aren’t aware that federal, state and local governments spent $416 billion on transportation and water infrastructure in 2014—around the same 2.4 percent of gross domestic product they’ve been spending for decades. About $165 billion of that $416 billion, incidentally, was spent on highways. (This doesn’t count the bipartisan Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act of 2015, which added another $305 billion over five years.)………..
A recent report from the RAND Corporation looks at America’s infrastructure and concludes that “not everything is broken.” In face, what is broken, more than the infrastructure itself, is “our approach to funding and financing public works.” This is largely because governments by-pass market signals and rely on “often complicated and multilayered governance arrangements and competing public goals and preferences” to make decisions about where to spend money.
For example, the report shows that government spending on infrastructure as a percentage of gross domestic product declined from a peak of 3 percent of GDP in 1960 to about 2.5 percent in 1980, and has hovered between 2.5 and 2.7 percent since then. But governments also made a clear trade-off in infrastructure spending: spending on roads declined from 1.6 percent of GPD in 1960 to around 1 percent in and since 1980, while government spending on mass transit grew from 0.1 percent in 1970 to 0.4 percent in and since 1980.
This would be fine if spending on mass transit had been as productive as spending on highways had been. But it wasn’t. Until the 2008 financial crisis, per capita driving continued to grow despite the lack of much capital spending on new roads, while per capita transit ridership was stagnant or declining. The report doesn’t have data after 2014, when per capita driving began to increase again while transit ridership began to collapse.
Firstly, at the very end of this upload, Maryam Qudrat, a parent who called out the teacher union’s almost fascistic obsession with race mentions they are trying to create a race war. Thomas Sowell as well mentions this in a 2013 National Review article: “Early Skirmishes in a Race War”
Larry Elder discusses the latest regarding Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), L.A.’s largest teachers union. This woman is a radical Marxist. She pushed the self-admitted Marxist organization Black Lives Matter onto teachers and children. She has close ties to Bernie Sanders, and is really a racist at heart.
(Remember, you can change the quality of the video in the settings icon)
This is really FASCISMproper. Dennis Prager explains:
…Following Schumer’s quota-based logic, Prager asked if the share of Jews within the judiciary should be reduced in pursuit of proportionate ethnic representation:
I wonder, if [Chuck Schumer] thinks [the judiciary] should look like America — I’m just curious, since I’m a Jew, I can ask this question, because if a non-Jew asked this he’d be accused of anti-Semitism — so I would like to know, I’ll bet you that the proportion of judges who are Jewish is greater than the proportion of Jews in the society. Would Chuck Schumer like to see fewer Jews in the judiciary so that the judiciary looked like the American population? Is that an unfair question? I’m serious, is it unfair? If he’s serious about what he said, does he think Asians overrepresent? Does he feel this way about sports?
Having members of one’s race represented politically or within the government does not afford one tangible benefits, said Prager:
So what does that mean exactly? The judiciary is supposed to racially reflect the racial composition of American life? And why, exactly? Why is that a ideal that it looks like the American people? What benefit is there? [The left] speaks constantly of a racist society and the problems of the black underclass — which is a problem worth speaking about, incidentally. So I always ask, “Name me one benefit that having all the black mayors and all the black congressmen that we have has accrued to black life.” I would like to know one single tangible benefit.
There are virtually — I’ve always pointed this out — no Asian congressmen, Asian governors, Asia judges — well, maybe some Asian judges — and they are the most successful community in the United States of America. … There is zero correlation between having your race represented in Congress or the judiciary and benefits to your race. Zero. This is all a fraudulent appeal to pure racial thought in the United States. The left is the most racist movement since the Nazis. I’m not comparing the left to Nazis, they’re not opening up death camps, they’re not rounding up people to send to gas chambers, I’m totally aware of that, and nothing in imputed in what I just said to suggest that. I’m merely stating a fact. The most racist doctrine since Nazism is modern leftism. That’s it. This is how they think. They think in terms of race.
Prager regularly describes the left as subscribing to a political trinity of race, gender, and class.
Here is a good short noting of the above via FREEDOM WIRE:
…In Los Angeles, a radical socialist who spoke at a national socialist convention last year has taken over as the head of the teacher’s union in the nation’s second-largest school district.
Cecily Myart-Cruz is a major player in the Black Lives Matter Movement and intends on forcing LA schools to bend to the will of BLM.
The Daily Wire reported her statements as follows: “‘We need to have a set of demands that dovetail with Black Lives Matter,’ Myart-Cruz continued. ‘We have to have massive political education. People will say, ‘Not all police are bad,’ but we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about racism as a social construct, systemic and institutional racism, and wrapped on top is white supremacist culture, which is the dominant culture. So as educators, how are we going to equip ourselves to become anti-racist, not for ourselves but for our students? We serve a school district with a 90% free-and-reduced lunch student population. We have to move the needle. It’s imperative to move the needle around racial and social justice.’
‘I see teaching as a revolutionary act, just the way I see organizing,” Cecily Myart-Cruz, who captured almost 69% of the vote, has said.”…
Other Resources used for this upload are as follows:
LA teachers’ union refuses to budge on school reopenings: ‘Structural racism’ (FOX NEWS)
Black Parents Plan School Reopening Rally After Teachers Union Claims White, Rich People Are Behind Push To Reopen (DAILY WIRE)
Afghan-American mom slams ‘racist’ LA teachers union for asking her ethnicity when she pushed to reopen schools – after they said only ‘white wealthy parents’ want children to return classrooms (DAILY MAIL)
South LA parents say they want schools to reopen, disagree with UTLA president’s remarks (FOX 11 LOS ANGELES | YOUTUBE VIDEO)
Mom accuses UTLA of conducting racial opposition research on parents pushing for in-person classes (FOX 11 LOS ANGELES VIDEO)
Black parents slam Los Angeles teachers’ union boss for blaming push to reopen on white, wealthy parents (POST MILLENNIAL)
‘Propagating structural racism’: LA teachers union head blasts state’s school reopening plan — and ‘white, wealthy parents’ for rushing return (THE BLAZE)
Wow! You have to wonder how many Americans hold the same (VERY-incorrect) assumptions. Watch what happened when Will Witt and Brandon Tatum changed minds with some basic facts.
EDITOR’S NOTE: I love at the 2:30 mark when Will Witt was looking to Tatum for confirmation that he is black — lol. Also, the stats about Los Angeles were great.
Parts of San Francisco resemble the poorest slums in the world — even though the city is one of the richest in America.
“There is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen growing up here,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed told KNTV. “That is a huge problem and we are not just talking about from dogs — we’re talking about from humans.” (DAILY CALLER)
A website and related app that allows local residents to request maintenance or non-emergency services from the city has received 16,034 complaints with the keyword ‘feces’ in the last week at the time of this writing, and many pertain to human waste in public places.
The point is, here, that when a city becomes very Left leaning in it’s culture and years run (city council, mayors, etc.), it becomes a “shithole” city. LITERALLY.
“The city suffers from an excess of [human] excrement on public streets and even in the innards of subway escalators, where it renders them unusable.” (FAST COMPANY)
…HotPads used “reports made to 311 in San Francisco from DataSF,” mapping 4,000 data points (a.k.a. poop sites) from January to June 2013.” Mapping S.F.’s most pooped-upon neighborhoods–and their paradoxically pricey real estate
Most of us might guess this list, but in case we need confirmation, the top 3 poopy neighborhoods are:
The Tenderloin
Mission District – 16th Street BART Station
South of Market
But prices therein do not reflect the frequency of feces. Witness:
The “Loin”
Poop strewn though it may be, the Tenderloin has enjoyed some new-found glory (and inflated home/rent prices) in the recent past, thanks to a tech surge led primarily by Twitter anchoring itself in that area. See Redfin’s data at right.
For instance, there is this home, in the heart of it all on O’Farrell: the price tag, given the location—despite its obvious ostentatious glory—should raise an eyebrow. $3,950,000 with HOA dues at $4,299/mo. It’s been on the market almost a year.
[…..]
South of Market
Of all of these pooped-upon neighborhoods, SoMa has increased in value the most dramatically, thanks to a combination of new construction, UC Mission Bay, and the aforementioned tech boom in the city. Again per Redfin, “The asking price of homes for sale in SoMa has increased 96% since December last year, while the number of homes for sale has increased 83.3%.”
A web developer named Jennifer Wong created interactive maps entitled “(Human) Wasteland” that illustrate the concentrations of human excrement in San Francisco, as reports Reuters.
The maps are intended to shed light on the amount of individuals living homeless in San Francisco. Wong created the maps using a city database that organizes telephone complaints to the Department of Public Works about human poop and urine….
….But she says perception is sometimes the reality to clients. The drive to get to her parking space is often trashed, where people have also used the bathroom, and she says the homeless on the street make for an uncomfortable arrival for her clients.
So she’s considering not renewing her lease and moving elsewhere.
“Who wants to come to a place where there’s litter on the streets, the bouquet of urine is in the air, I mean it will eventually take a toll,” she said….
One commentator said this of a story reported on the issue:
Finally an example of a run down, shot-up, burned out, poverty-stricken, urine-soaked, rat-infested, crime-ridden, feces-friendly city run by democRATS actually delivering on their promise of Free Shit!!
Survey: 34% of Portlanders considered leaving because of homelessness
….The average Portlander sees someone living in a tent and someone panhandling five times a week. Residents said they see drug paraphernalia and human waste or urine more than twice a week….
Los Angeles, etc. It is all the same story. Many of these places pass out free, sterile, needles to the drug addicted… offer food and comfort, and a “no harass” policy for the police. Then they raise the taxes to grow these services on the businesses affected by them.
How dirty is San Francisco? An NBC Bay Area Investigation reveals a dangerous mix of drug needles, garbage, and feces throughout downtown San Francisco. The Investigative Unit surveyed 153 blocks of the city – the more than 20-mile stretch includes popular tourist spots like Union Square and major hotel chains. The area – bordered by Van Ness Avenue, Market Street, Post Street and Grant Avenue – is also home to City Hall, schools, playgrounds, and a police station. …
The Investigate [sic] Unit spent three days assessing conditions on the streets of downtown San Francisco and discovered trash on each of the 153 blocks surveyed. While some streets were littered with items as small as a candy wrapper, the vast majority of trash found included large heaps of garbage, food, and discarded junk. The investigation also found 100 drug needles and more than 300 piles of feces throughout downtown.
…Here’s what the math looks like: I pay my employees $10.50 an hour, plus productivity bonuses. In addition, I pay payroll taxes and one of the highest worker compensation rates in the state. Even still, I could likely absorb a minimum wage as high as $11.50 an hour. But a $15-an-hour wage for my employees translates into $18.90 in costs for me — or just under $40,000 a year per full-time employee.
…When the $15 minimum wage is fully phased in, my company would be losing in excess of $200,000 a year (and far more if my workforce grows as anticipated). That may be a drop in the bucket for large corporations, but a small business cannot absorb such losses. I could try to charge more to offset that cost, but my customers —the companies that are looking for someone to produce their clothing line — wouldn’t pay it. The result would be layoffs.
When Los Angeles County’s minimum wage ordinance was approved in July, I began looking at Ventura County, Orange County and other parts of the state. Then, when California embraced a $15 wage target, I realized that my company couldn’t continue to operate in the state. After considering Texas and North Carolina, I’ve settled on moving the business to Las Vegas, where I’m looking for the right facility. About half of our employees will make the move with us.
Nevada’s minimum wage is only $8.25 right now, so I can keep my current pay structure or possibly increase wages. Even in the event that Nevada raises its minimum wage, I’ll still be better off with reduced regulations, no state taxes, and significantly less expensive worker compensation insurance. I have had the opportunity to meet with Las Vegas city officials (including the mayor)…
Breitbart notes the impact of the impending law via California Gov. Jerry Brown
The first accomplishment of California’s pioneering $15 minimum wage law is killing the revival of America’s clothing industry.
American Apparel, which provided 10 percent of all apparel manufacturing jobs in Los Angeles, has terminated 500 employees in the last two weeks. Chief Executive Paula Schneider also told the Los Angeles Times that “manufacturing of more complicated pieces, such as jeans, could soon be outsourced to a third-party company.”
The company did not tie the announcement directly to California Governor Jerry Brownsigning of the nation’s first statewide $15 minimum wage on April 4. But the layoffs started shortly almost immediately after Brown’s action, and were announced on April 14 as labor organizers filled Los Angeles streets with fast-food workers set to strike, supported by unionized home-care and child-care workers.
Lloyd Greif, Chief Executive of Los Angeles investment banking firm Greif & Co. told LATimes, “They’re headed out of Dodge.” He added, “They are going to outsource all garments. It’s only a matter of time.”
At the turn of the 21st Century, Los Angeles County was the “rag trade” capital of America. With 4,000 active apparel-making sites employing almost 90,000 workers, the Los Angeles area was over twice the size of the rag trade in the New York region.
Apparel-making got cut in half over the next decade, as Chinese and Asian imports coming through Los Angeles ports sky-rocketed to $46 billion. The number of local apparel-making sites fell to 2,200 and local industry jobs shriveled to 46,000.
But according to the California Fashion Association, Los Angeles apparel-making was back to growth by 2013 as a “steady inflation rate” in China, driven by higher labor costs, increasingly pushed apparel manufacturing and textile contractors to move to lower wage countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, and Bangladesh. Coupled with high sea, land, and air shipping costs, the advantage in outsourcing apparel-making versus U.S. manufacturing became much less attractive….
Los Angeles’ turf rebate program saved less water per dollar spent than other Department of Water and Power conservation programs, an audit released by the city controller said Friday.
Auditors found that money spent for rebates on items such as high-efficiency appliances yielded a water savings almost five times higher than turf replacement. They also found that the DWP does not prioritize water conservation projects based on which are the most cost-effective.
City Controller Ron Galperin called on the water provider to focus its conservation programs in order to achieve more sustained and cost-effective water savings.
“If money is no object, turf replacement rebates are a relatively expedient way to save water,” Galperin said. “But, of course, money is an object.”
In fiscal year 2014-15, the DWP spent $40.2 million on customer incentive and rebate programs, Galperin’s office said. Nearly $17.8 million of that went to turf rebates. Each dollar invested in turf rebates is expected to save 350 gallons of water over the estimated 10-year “life expectancy” of residential turf replacement, the audit said.
In comparison, the department spent $14.9 million on rebates for high-efficiency appliances and fixtures. Those rebates yield a per-dollar savings of more than 1,700 gallons of water over their estimated lifetimes of up to 19 years, Galperin’s office said.
The turf rebate program “had value as a gimmick that … probably spurred a heightened awareness,” Galperin said at a news conference, adding: “It’s the job of my office to look at return on investment.”…
When the government of L.A., or for that matter our one party state, uses tax-payer monies… “money is no object.” The California boondoggles of solar power and trains come to mind. Or even the Democrats teaming up with eco-fascists to create water shortages! (See the “drought” posts here)
Larry Elder interviews Randy Thomas… Randy lost his business through regulations “said” to save the environment… however, during the course of this program we learn how the Teamster (and other) Unions of California use Federal EPA and California “green” mandates to close down mom-and-pop businesses and force them onto the Union dole.
Only between BIG-business and BIG-government can true monopolies exist (Milton Freidman)… and you see here a stark example of the unions in California doing ALL they can to shut down forcefully the free-market options in Democrat run cities. (This has been going on for 5-years.)
Inserted into this upload is a NASA “aeresol” map that the jet-streams/trade-winds move primarily from India and China to America and other parts of the world. So the artificial readings often in L.A. are messaged by the left who are fully aware that their regulations have no environmental impact. They are — instead — means for leftist cities to join forces with unions to fill their dole and keep the votes coming in for them.
To see an example of how this works, see “The Machine” by ReasonTV.
For more clear thinking like this from Larry Elder… I invite you to visit:
Garcetti focuses on pay-rate myths in the genders. Again and again the Right has to deal with these mantras of the Left. Video of Mika Brezezski spreading this lie is included in the audio.
James Craig just took over the office of police chief last summer, but he’s already making waves in Detroit. A reorganization of the police force in the bankrupt metropolis has resulted in a higher clearance rate in murder cases, and the murder rate dropped almost 14% in 2013 from its two-decade high in 2012. However, Craig has some advice for his fellow citizens in Motor City if they really want a drop in crime — arm yourselves:
If more citizens were armed, criminals would think twice about attacking them, Detroit Police Chief James Craig said Thursday.
Urban police chiefs are typically in favor of gun control or reluctant to discuss the issue, but Craig on Thursday was candid about how he’s changed his mind.
“When we look at the good community members who have concealed weapons permits, the likelihood they’ll shoot is based on a lack of confidence in this Police Department,” Craig said at a press conference at police headquarters, adding that he thinks more Detroit citizens feel safer, thanks in part to a 7 percent drop in violent crime in 2013.
Craig wasn’t always in favor of carry permits. While serving in Los Angeles, where permits are issued on a notoriously miserly (and some would add arbitrary) manner, Craig thought that disarmament was the answer. It wasn’t until he went to a carry-friendly jurisdiction that he understood the difference:
Craig said he started believing that legal gun owners can deter crime when he became police chief in Portland, Maine, in 2009.
“Coming from California (Craig was on the Los Angeles police force for 28 years), where it takes an act of Congress to get a concealed weapon permit, I got to Maine, where they give out lots of CCWs (carrying concealed weapon permits), and I had a stack of CCW permits I was denying; that was my orientation.
“I changed my orientation real quick. Maine is one of the safest places in America. Clearly, suspects knew that good Americans were armed.”
It’s not the first time that Craig has endorsed carry permits. Two weeks ago, the Detroit News notes, he told a local radio show that responsibly armed citizens act as a deterrent, in a city that can clearly use one. Even though the murder rate has dropped, Detroit had as many homicides in 2013 as New York City, which has more than ten times its population.
[….]
At least one recent study suggests that Craig hits the nail on the head. A long-range study by a Quinnipiac University economist shows that states with more restrictions on firearm ownership and carry permits had higher murder rates by guns than gun-friendly states, and suggests that increasing restrictions on concealed-carry permits pushes the murder rate up, not down. It also showed that assault-weapons bans had no effect on murder rates.
Perhaps more police chiefs will change their orientation with this information at hand. State legislatures should get ahead of that curve.