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This topic comprises 4 pages: 1 2 3 4
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Author
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Topic: Car Crash in North Carolina
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R. Andrew Diercks
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 232
From: Marion, Iowa (In the middle of everywhere)
Registered: May 2003
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posted 01-03-2004 10:48 AM
And I'm sure such law abiding citizens would care at all that they had no license or right to have a vehicle. Did you forget that the driver was 15 and had no license anyway! BTW if more people got severe punishment for stealing cars, less would try. If they knew there was a 85-90% chance of serious injury or death as a result why risk it for a joy ride. They would know the risk because birds of a feather flock together and they would have seen things happening to their idiot friends.
As for death row, give them one appeal and end it! Less tax money, and misery as you would call it for being there. Everyone's happy.
And prison is way too damn easy anyway. 3 hots and a cot with no expectations. Free cable internet and gym membership. Make them work, if they don't no food, just like the rest of us. If they don't work enough to pay for it, no TV, internet, or books or magazines. Let them earn supervisory positions and reward hard work with more stuff, just like the rest of us. That is rehabilitation. Teach them that good behavior and hard work will still earn respect and self-esteem, as well as more stuff!
[ 01-04-2004, 12:50 AM: Message edited by: R. Andrew Diercks ]
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 01-04-2004 12:12 PM
This thread is pretty funny. And it underscores some of the "why" talked about in "Bowling For Columbine" in how the news media deserves a lot of the blame in making Americans fearful and hateful toward each other and why we have so many murders. The media shows us easy targets to kick rather than the white collar scumbags who are robbing us blind while our collective attentions are diverted.
Fundamentally, it is an American pasttime to place a priveledged few high on a pedestal (the dangerous pretty people, athletes and the rich) and kick anyone else who is lower. So it is a natural kind of response for anyone to say, "those seven kids in that car deserved to die since it was stolen."
Granted, I think whoever stole the car should do some jail time for it. After all that's grand theft auto and a felony. But none of the them deserved to die.
On the subject of police officers "giving up the chase," there are indeed a lot of cases where they need to do exactly that. Give up the Goddamned chase. The majority of high speed chases start when a driver is avoiding getting written up for a simple traffic violation. Not very many are chases involving people who have committed a felony. Mr. Police Officer, you got his car tag, his vehicle make and all that good shit. Is it really worth it to go chasing after someone and risking lives over such small potatoes!? After all, the driver can be tracked down.
Lots of people are killed every year from these chases. Pedestrians are hit. Other cars are T-boned in intersections and more. Many others are injured for life. That shit is real. It is tough to take when it hits you personally. I saw a Wall Street worker get hit and killed by a van in Staten Island. The vision of it still bothers me to this day. Last weekend, a girl who was best friends with my coworker's daughter was killed in a car accident and they are grieving hard. If some cop rams into my car because he is chasing some guy avoiding a speeding ticket, then I need to be free to sue the living hell out of the police department for being really stupid.
I also have to come down way hard on those IDIOT SCUMBAG TV STATIONS who broadcast all these live chases. They don't need to air any of that stuff live. I equate that kind of infotainment with hardcore pornography. It is a kind of blood sport for people to watch and see who wins and who loses. The helicopter coverage actually helps encourage some of these people to run and get their 15 minutes of fame. It is huge problem in the Los Angeles area.
It is not always necessary to conduct a high speed chase to catch a criminal. The morning after Christmas here in SW OK a highway patrolman was shot and killed by a driver he stopped. OSBI was still able to track the scumbag down a couple days later. The suspect will likely be executed for capital murder of a police officer, possibly within less than five years because of all the evidence on hand.
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Randy Stankey
Film God
Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 01-04-2004 12:24 PM
quote:
Most criminals as teenagers, black or white, usually stay that way as adults from what I've seen over the years.
Well, that's substantially true. A large percentage of young offenders turn into adult career criminals *IF* they don't get "straightened out" before they become adults.
In college I had a job at the Massachusetts Parole Board as a researcher. It was my job to go down to the the Saltonstall Building, in downtown Boston, where the criminal records files were kept. I had to compile data from lists of names of people who were up for parole hearings. This data was used by the Parole Board to decide whether a prisoner was to be parolled or not.
In my experience the number one indicator of recidivism was whether or not the person in question had a GED. At first, it sounded counterintuitive but after it was explained to me it became clear. The more time a person was in prison the greater the chance they had of coming back. Those people who had GEDs were more likely to have dropped out of school. Those prisoners who didn't have diplomas had to take GED classes as part of their rehabilitation process. Therefore, it turns out that prisoners who got GEDs were in jail for a longer time. The longer the time they spend in jail (especially at a younter age) the greater the chance they have or repeating the criminal behavior.
Taking that information into account, you can imagine that IF you get juvenile offenders "back on the right track" early enough this whole process of career criminal recidivism can be short circuited. This was born out in the research I participated in. Prisoners who had bona fide high school diplomas were less likely to become career criminals.
To be fair, there was also a notable number of prisoners who had that "X-Factor". They exhibited few of the main indicators of repeat criminal behavior but still managed to end up in jail. Nobody really knows why they turned out to be crooks. They just were.
What I took away from that is that our tax dollars should be spent in two ways: Keeping the dangerous repeat criminals locked up and trying to prevent people from becoming dangerous repeat criminals in the first place. I see the way our government seems to be eager to "lock up all crooks" to be counter productive. The longer we keep people in jail the more criminals we PRODUCE. We sould spend out money on education. Research shows that better education reduces crime. Now, when education fails THEN we "lock 'em up".
The tricky part is determining where to draw the line. How do we know when education has failed? Let me tell you, when I was in college this was the subject of MANY hot debates!
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 01-05-2004 02:17 AM
quote:
Chris?
The death penalty?
For car theft?
So, basically, no matter the type of crime -- murder, car theft, robbery - you would just as soon see the perpetrator dead?
Prince Philip was once asked if he agreed with the death penalty. 'Well,' he replied, thinking a little, '...only for criminals!' ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
While I wouldn't go as far as advocating the death penalty for car crime, I do believe very strongly that the police over here (and from this incident it seems as if the same thing is going on in North Carolina) concentrate on minor motoring offences and don't put enough effort into tackling serious ones. For example, ever lower speed limits are being introduced and enforced far more rigourously than before (largely thanks to the expanding use of digital, filmless speed cameras), so much so that there is now a widespread belief that speeding fines are being used simply as an extra source of tax revenue extracted from the middle class by the government, and have little or nothing to do with safety. I couldn't help wondering this myself over Christmas, when confronted with a 30mph limit for several miles of three-lane A-road with no houses anywhere near the side of the road and no engineering works in sight.
Strict enforcement of drink-driving and mobile 'phone use while driving legislation are other similar examples, though these are obviously much more of a safety issue than many speed limits. What all three examples have in common is that they are relatively easy to enforce: speeding by cameras, drink-driving by breathalysers and mobile 'phone use by seeing the offender at it. Furthermore the vast majority of offenders are non-violent and accept that they are at fault.
15 violent thugs who steal a vehicle and then 'joy ride' it at 100mph plus are an entirely different kettle of fish. If you were a policeman, who would you prefer to apprehend: someone in a suit driving his or her Mondeo at 37 in a 30-limit, or having to chase a gang of hooligans, all of them probably armed, at dangerously high speeds?
And yes, then there is the race issue. In the Stephen Lawrence enquiry, the Police were described as 'institutionally racist'. This enquiry followed an incident in 1998 in which London police failed to properly investigate the racially motivated murder of a black teenager, with the result that the perpetrators effectively got away with it. But thanks to what were probably a small number of bad police officers, the entire force now has to operate on the basis that if anyone apprehends anybody who is anything other than 'white', they are likely to have the race card thrown at them.
More recently, the BBC's TV programme The Secret Policeman used undercover reporting to uncover a few more racist fuzz. Granted, they were pretty nasty pieces of work and the force is better off without them. But try as it did, left-wing media organisations such as the BBC and The Guardian have failed to provide any convincing evidence that they are representative of the police as a whole.
So, getting back to our hypothetical traffic cop: if you are faced not only with armed thugs driving a stolen car dangerously but black ones to boot, would you be inclined to go after them if you could possibly avoid it?
What we need is a means of getting tough - and I mean tough - with the violent criminals who make our lives a misery, but also of doing so fairly. People who drive stolen cars at 115mph through urban streets are recklessly endangering the public and need to be stopped from doing so. I'd lock them up for several years, preferably in solitary confinement in order to stop jail becoming a sort of university for professional criminals (thereby removing one of the key objections to the use of custodial sentences often cited by the liberal left). We need to aim for a system in which, if you do this kind of thing you know that (i) you're going to be caught, and (ii) when you are caught, your life will be made extremely unpleasant for a very long time, regardless of your ethnic origin.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 01-05-2004 03:55 AM
Counterproductive. As John points out:
quote:
If people cannot be rehabilitated, what is the purpose of prison or the judicial system? If "criminals" are incorrigible, should we just execute them all, lest they commit crime again when they get out of prison? Or keep them in prison forever? In this case, should the sentence for joyriding be death (if not accidental, then execution) or life in prison for all seven youngsters, just in case they might steal another car?
While locking them up, I would pretty much force them to undergo the sort of education and/or training which experience shows is likely to lower the reoffending rate. What we absolutely don't want is a situation whereby someone jailed for the first time is put in a cell with two other criminals and nothing to do except learn from them how to be a more effective criminal when (s)he is released.
Instead, I'd put offenders in cells by themselves apart from the times they were undergoing formal education (which, if necessary, would be most of the time). For example, if they can't read or write then they should be taught to. It might also be worth investigating giving tax breaks to employers to take on ex-offenders. The flip side of that would be even longer sentences if people reoffend, with the ultimate penalty being an 'X strikes and you're out' system, i.e. locking up persistent violent offenders for life on the basis that the human rights of the people they persistently offend against have to take priority over those of the criminal.
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