the crime report

NEW AND NOTABLE CUTTING EDGE INFORMATION

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and State Senator Jeffrey D. Klein today announced the introduction of legislation that would criminalize carrying a gun in New York while under the influence of alcohol. The proposed law would make carrying a gun with a more than 0.08 blood alcohol content a class-A misdemeanor punishable by one year in jail and a $10,000 fine, but will not apply to guns inside the home. 20 other states currently have similar legislation.

“If you are too intoxicated to drive a car, you should not be carrying a gun,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “The law would apply the same standards and tests that are now used to prevent and punish driving while intoxicated.”

Click here to read the state’s pre-legislation report.

According to a new report by the Violence Policy Institute, blacks make up 13 percent of the population and 49 percent of all homicide victims. VPI analyzed data from the FBI’s 2007 Supplemental Homicide Report and found that the homicide rate for blacks in the U.S. is five times the national average and nearly seven times greater than for whites. 86 percent of black homicide victims were male and 82 percent were killed by guns.

Click here to read the full report.

A new report from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency shows how expensive imprisonment is compared to alternative sanctions that are just as effective for low-level offenders. Focusing on prison populations in Florida, California, Texas, and New York, the report compares costs between the imprisonment route and using a mixture of different correctional routes such as; electric monitoring, drug courts  and work release programs.

Read the report here.

Use the Crime Report to find out more information on Prisons.

By Mark Pryor

Read more of Mark’s work at his blog D.A. Confidential

Gotta love California.  Not only do they produce our movies, our wackiest news stories, and some of our avocados, but they have Arnie.  And he hit the headlines Monday while talking about the state’s massive budget deficit.  His idea is that California could save a billion dollars if 20,000 illegal immigrants currently held in the state were housed across the border in Mexico.

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by Philosophical Cop

Philosophical Cop is a serving police officer in an urban city. Read his  blog here.

The US Justice Department recently accused New Jersey of using a discriminatory civil service test.  The test in question is multiple choice, covering laws and regulations and other dry, memorization – based trivia.  Candidates just fill in the bubbles.

Now, I could forcefully argue that this is not the best way to evaluate cops (I find them mind-numbing and useless), but to say it is racist is a cheap side step of the true issue at play here. More on that true issue later.

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by Mark Pryor

Mark Pryor, Assistant District Attorney in Travis County, Texas writes the blog DA Confidential. He will be blogging for The Crime Report every other Wednesday. Read his blog here.

The New York Times recently wrote about the American Law Institute’s decision to, essentially, walk away from the death penalty.  This is significant in that the ALI is the body responsible for the synthesis and (usually theoretical) standardization of our system of laws.  Thus, the ALI developed the model penal code (the “MPC”), including language providing for the death penalty.  Some states adopted the language of the MPC, some didn’t, but now the ALI has decided that, in the words of the NYT, “the system could not reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness.”

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