Stories for Summer: Safety issue, by Peter Robinson

In the fourth of six stories for summer, Peter Robinson follows the investigation of a brutal, apparently senseless murder.

* * * * *

“This is usually such a quiet neighbourhood,” mused Detective Sergeant Stephen Banco. “The worst you get is a few local high-school kids cutting loose on a Friday night after too many Mike’s Hard Lemonades. But an old lady, beaten to death in her home.…” He shook his head.

“Times are changing,” said the first officer on the scene.

Banco sighed. He was standing on a typical Toronto porch in a typical upmarket street. Inside the house, Mrs. Eleanor McClelland, widow, lay dead in her kitchen.

A parking enforcement car pulled up across the street. The driver got out and walked over to the porch. One of the police constables at the end of the path tried to stop him, but Banco waved him through. In his experience, parking officers could be useful sources of information.

The man strutted up the path, chest puffed out. He was short, Banco noticed, balding, and a little pudgy. “Can I be of any assistance?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said Banco. “Can you?”

“My name’s Officer Whateley. Richard Whateley.” He thrust out his hand. “Call me Dick.”

We’ll see about that, Banco thought. He shook Whateley’s hand. Dead fish. “Seen anything unusual around here lately, Officer?”

Whateley scratched his head. “Just a lot of people parking where they shouldn’t when they shouldn’t. Come to think of it, though, I did spot a beat-up old Honda. A dirty yellow one. Most of the cars around here are in good condition, so you tend to notice things like that. Do you think it might have been someone casing the joint? Burglary, is it?”

“Murder,” said Banco. “This yellow Honda, I don’t suppose you got the number?”

Whateley smiled. “As a matter of fact, I did.” He touched his nose. “You get an instinct for these things in my job. I saw it parked around here a couple of times and thought it might be someone up to no good.”

“Can you give me the number?”

Whateley opened his notebook – not official issue, Banco noticed – and read out the number.

*******

The Honda belonged to a Marvin Sloane. Banco recognized the Scarborough address – high-rise, high-density city housing – and it turned out that Mr. Sloane had a criminal record for aggravated assault.

When the police tracked down the Honda, it was speeding east along the 401. The patrol car pursued it until the officers were certain it belonged to their man, then they pulled it over, annoyed at being denied a high-speed chase with the siren blaring and lights flashing. Inside, they found one black male and one tattooed white male. The cloud of marijuana smoke that hit them when the driver rolled down the window almost had them seeing visions of the Elysian Fields.

“Geez, officers. Was I driving too fast?”

*******

After two days of interrogation, Banco was close to 100-per-cent certain that Marvin Sloane and Chester Lyons were not his men. For a start, they would have stood out like penguins at a picnic in Eleanor McClelland’s neighbourhood, and nobody had reported seeing them. Also, they swore blind that they had been in Montreal on the dates in question, and their alibis checked out. Banco suspected they had been in Quebec doing a drug deal, but that wasn’t his business. He passed his suspicions on to the drug squad and cut the two loose. Short of a marijuana-possession charge, and numerous driving offences, they were guilty of nothing. The days of making sure the suspect fit the crime, and vice versa, were long gone, so it was back to the drawing board.

*******

When Banco dropped by Mrs. McClelland’s local division to do a bit of asking around, he mentioned the lead he had got from Whateley, and a couple of the cops snickered.

“What’s so funny?” Banco asked.

“This Whateley,” said one of the officers. “He’s a wannabe.”

“Wannabe?” said the other. “He thinks he’s already one of us.”

“In fact,” the divisional sergeant added, “you might say that Officer Whateley is a pain in the butt.”

“Why’s that?” Banco asked.

“He’s overzealous,” the sergeant said. “I mean, it’s one thing enforcing the parking regulations, but quite another looking for obscure ones. It’s not even as if he puts in such a huge quota, either. He tends to be a bit more specific in his targets.”

“What do you mean?”

“We get complaints. A lot them.”

“Mind if I have a look at some of these complaints?”

“Be my guest,” said the sergeant.

*******

It started with a brief exchange when Mrs. McClelland had been unloading some heavy cartons from her car outside her house, and Whateley had screeched to a halt, strutted over and told her she had five minutes or he’d tag her. Safety issue, he’d added. When she started to apologize and explain, he told her he had her number, and that was that.

Three tickets within 24 hours for being parked less than nine metres from the intersection. Banco had been a cop for 20 years, and he didn’t know you had to park more than nine metres from the intersection. He had even been to the street in question and checked; there were no signs. Three tickets for being parked in the same spot – with a legal permit – for more than seven days. This was when Mrs. McClelland had gone on a three-week cruise a couple of months ago. Banco hadn’t heard of that one, either.

Intimidation. Obsession. Harassment. Banco had come across people like Whateley before, abusers of power who got out of hand and were arrogant enough to think they could get away with it. They often did; that was the trouble. Put some people in a uniform and it warps their brains. Cross them once too often, and woe betide you.

Banco checked and found, as he suspected, that Mrs. McClelland’s complaint was the most recent of many, made only a week before her murder. Apparently, it was the last straw. Whateley had been called on the carpet in his supervisor’s office and given a dressing down of gargantuan proportions. His transfer to that area of Scarborough where Marvin Sloane and Chester Lyons lived was imminent. Afterward, he had raged to anyone who would listen about his supervisor and the miserable old bat who had dared to complain.

*******

Mrs. McClelland’s house was still a crime scene. Officer Whateley was out on his rounds, but Banco was patient. He sat in the old lady’s Muskoka chair on her deck, enjoying the afternoon sunshine, the dappled light through the trees. He knew he wouldn’t have long to wait. Sure enough, he hadn’t been there more than half an hour when the parking-enforcement car pulled up across the street and Whateley walked toward him.

“Detective,” he said. “Good to see you again. I was just wondering if you got anywhere with that lead I gave you?”

Banco stood up slowly, walked over and put his hand on the smaller man’s shoulder. “Yes,” he said. “In fact, I’ve been wanting to talk to you.” It wouldn’t have been at all difficult, he knew, for a parking enforcement officer like Whateley to drive around until he spotted a decrepit old car driven by a black man and use this to play on police prejudices. What on earth did he think Banco would do? Beat a confession out of Sloane?

Banco started walking down the path to his car, hand still firmly gripping Whateley’s shoulder. “Maybe we could go down to the station and have a nice little chat about it all, hey, Dick?”

Peter Robinson’s new novel, Before the Poison, will be published in October.

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Safety in Diversity: Why Crime Is Down in America's Cities

Richard Florida - Richard Florida is Senior Editor at The Atlantic and Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. More

By Richard Florida Jul 2 2011, 8:30 AM ET

Abortion, drug laws, reduced poverty--none of these factors is the main reason our metro areas are getting safer

Yesterday, the Financial Times ran an op ed piece of mine about the mysterious downward trend in crime. While this drop is a welcome development -- and very possibly a bellwether of even more positive changes in our society -- it poses a vexing challenge to professional explainers. What follows is a longer, more detailed, and more statistics-laden exploration of why crime rates are falling.

Almost three years into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, with massive unemployment and pessimism rife, America's crime rates are falling and no one--not our pundits, policemen, or politicians, our professors or city planners--can tell us why. As I wrote about here, there were 5.5 percent fewer murders, forcible rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults reported in 2010 than in 2009, according to the most recent edition of the FBI's Uniform Crime Report; property crimes fell by 2.8 percent over the same period and reported arsons dropped by 8.3 percent. 

And the drop was steepest in America's biggest cities--which are still popularly believed to be cauldrons of criminality. "While cities and suburbs alike are much safer today than in 1990," notes a recent report by the Brookings Institution, "central cities--the big cities that make up the hubs of the 100 largest metro areas--benefitted the most from declining crime rates. Among suburban communities, older higher-density suburbs saw crime drop at a faster pace than newer, lower-density emerging and exurban communities on the metropolitan fringe."

An essay in The Economist featured a graphic which charts the arc of American crime rates since the 1960s. Its caption poses the question that is on everyone's lips:

Some explanations evoke Sherlock Holmes' "dog that didn't bark." When crime rates first began to fall in the 1990s, Steven Levitt and John Donohue III argued that legalized abortion was responsible, since unwanted children would have been more likely to grow up to be criminals - a finding that was not only wildly controversial but has been met with substantial challenge. Research by economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes find attributes a significant proportion of the decline in violent crime to children's reduced exposure to lead.

Others suggest that America's astronomical incarceration rate--the highest in the world--is responsible, though that begs the question why countries that don't incarcerate their citizens at anything like the same rate suffer from less crime than the US does. It's disquieting to think that what would seem to be an unalloyed social good--less crime--might have been brought about in part by what many believe to be a social disaster: America's draconian, unequally enforced drug laws.  Law enforcement must be given its due; many big city police departments have developed statistically-driven methodologies for targeting crime hot-spots, with conspicuously successful results. And we as individuals have changed our behavior as well--from taking elementary precautions like locking our doors, to investing in crime-stopping technology like burglar alarms for our homes and LoJack for our cars.

Still, it is confounding that crime would decline as economic conditions worsen. My own analysis, conducted with my Martin Prosperity Institute colleague Charlotta Mellander, turns up no statistical associations between crime and either the level or the change in the level of unemployment across metros, or between crime and the level of income inequality. There does seem to be a modest relationship between the absolute poverty rate and crime. Our analysis turned up an association of .19 between crime and the percent of population below the poverty line. But it has weakened substantially over the past two or three decades, according to the Brookings study.

So too has the relationship between crime and race. From evening news headlines to crime shows on TV, popular culture underlines the propinquity between crime and race Our analysis turned up modest correlation (.37) between crime and the share of population that is black. But again, Brookings Institute report assembles powerful evidence to show that the relationship has been weakening. "The association between crime and community characteristics--like the proportion of the population that is black, Hispanic, poor, or foreign-born--diminished considerably over time," notes the study. "The strength of the relationship between the share of black residents and property crime decreased by half between 1990 and 2008, while the association between the share of Hispanic residents and violent crime all but disappeared."

In the popular imagination, crime is frequently associated with big, densely populated cities. Here again, we can separate fact from myth.  Primary cities and older high-density suburbs exhibited the largest decreases in crime between 1990 and 2008, according to the Brookings study. And the gap between city and suburban violent crime narrowed in two-thirds of the nation's 100 largest metro areas. Our own analysis turns up no association whatsoever between metro size or metro density and the overall level of crime, though we do find a modest correlation (.25) between density and violent crime.

In a thoughtful essay in the Wall Street Journal, the distinguished political scientist and urban crime expert James Q. Wilson hit hard at strictly economistic explanations, suggesting that deeper changes in American culture can better account for the mystery. "The cultural argument" he writes, can help explain not only the current drop in crime, but also "the Great Depression's fall in crime and the explosion of crime during the sixties. In the first period, on this view, people took self-control seriously; in the second, self-expression--at society's cost--became more prevalent." My former Carnegie Mellon University colleague, the distinguished criminologist Alfred Blumstein, proposes an "Obama effect," in which young black males' increased optimism about their futures makes them more likely to refrain from violence.

But the key factor, as it turns out, lies in the growing racial, ethnic, and demographic diversity of our cities and metro areas. Our analysis found that the Hispanic share of the population is negatively associated with urban crime. Crime also fell as the percentage of the population that is non-white and the percentage that is gay increased. And of all the variables in our analysis, the one that is most consistently negatively associated with crime is a place's percentage of foreign-born residents. Not only did we find a negative correlation (-.36) between foreign-born share and crime in general, the pattern held across all of the many, various types of crime - from murder and arson to burglary and car theft. 

The Brookings study also finds evidence of a substantial shift in the connection between foreign-born residents and crime. While foreign-born share was positively associated with crime in 1990 and 2000, that relationship had disappeared by 2008. The foreign-born share of population now shows no relationship to property crime, and a negative relationship to violent crime. The pattern is most pronounced for primary cities and inner-ring suburbs, the Brookings study found, but not for lower-density suburbs and ex-urbs.

It might be hard to wrap your mind around this--especially with all the demagoguery about immigration. But the numbers tell a different story than our alarmist pundits and politicians do. "Since 1990, all types of communities within the country's largest metro areas have become more diverse," Elizabeth Kneebone, one of the authors of the Brookings report, wrote in The New Republic. "Crime fell fastest in big cities and high-density suburbs that were poorer, more minority, and had higher crime rates to begin with. At the same time, all kinds of suburbs saw their share of poor, minority, and foreign-born residents increase. As suburbia diversified, crime rates fell." Along with their entrepreneurial energy and their zeal to succeed, immigrants are good neighbors--cultural and economic factors that militate against criminal behavior, and not just in their own enclaves but in surrounding communities as well.

One additional factor bears on this. Our analysis also turns up a consistent negative correlation between crime and the overall level of city happiness. It makes intuitive sense that a low-crime city would be a happy city; still, it's worth pointing out that the happiness measure (which comes from Gallup surveys) is associated not just with overall crime but with almost every type of crime across the board. 

This is somewhat striking in an analysis where associations between crime and key social and economic variables are hard to find. More to the point, the Gallup research identifies openness to diversity as being one of the two most important factors that shape city happiness and community satisfaction across the board.

America's declining crime rates are cause for celebration, even if we can't completely explain the phenomenon. The fact that diversity appears to play such a signal role in the trend--something that most Americans regard as a moral and economic good in its own right-- makes it all-the-more satisfying.

Image Credit: Flickr / dsb nola

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Crime Prevention, Safety, and Self-Defense - It's Time We Start Fighting Back!

We should always stay alert to the potential of crime and unwanted violent attacks. It is a violent world we live in today. Many crimes are "at random" crimes and can happen to anyone at any time. The very nature of some of these crimes today is very horrific and just seems to keep getting worse. No one is immune to crime. One way of preventing crime as a whole is for each and every one of us to do their own part individually to protect themselves against crime. My goal is to try and put some form of non-lethal self-defense weapons in the hands of as many people as I possibly can. I am hoping that more people will be willing to play an active roll in crime prevention. And one of the best ways to stop crime from happening is to carry a non-lethal, incapacitating form of self-defense with you wherever you go and keep it very close at hand in case an emergency situation should arise and you need to use your self-defense.

There are many non-lethal types of self-defense available to carry that will allow you to incapacitate an assailant temporarily and not permanently. You can have the advantage of stopping an attacker without actually taking their life. And when you stop an assailant from violently attacking or robbing you, you have also helped to lower the overall crime statistics in our whole society. This means that you are also doing your part to help prevent crime. And at the same time you may be saving your own life or at least saving yourself against great bodily harm, assault, robbery, aggravated battery, rape, abduction, etc. Lowering the overall crime statistics in our society sounds like something that everyone might want to get in on.

I know that I would really appreciate seeing a cut down in the outrageously high number of crimes, missing persons, kidnappings, abductions, amber alerts, assaults, aggravated batteries, robberies, home invasions, etc. You can easily look up some of the numbers in crime statistics reports such as the FBI crime statistics reports. The numbers of crimes each year in America alone is staggering. It would be nice to never become a crime statistic. If everyone would at least try to protect themselves by carrying some self-defense in case of an emergency situation then that in itself should help to cut down on crime. Every life is so very important and effects the lives of so many others. Our society is like one great big network and every single person is a very important part of that network, not to mention how important everyone is to their loved ones whether they realize it or not. You can take preventative measures against crime to prevent yourself from becoming another crime statistic.

It is my hope that you will help do what you can to defend yourself, your loved ones, your employees, your co-workers, and your friends. You can put the odds in your favor and surprise the criminals with a little civil justice. Now is a good time to choose your means of self-defense. Knowing that we all do our part to prevent crime will help everyone to rest a little bit easier. I know I feel more secure and comfortable when I know my loved ones are safe and secure. Let's all do our part to help prevent crime and also try to prevent excessive numbers of missing persons reports and amber alerts. Let's fight back against crime and keep a watch out. I tend to wonder that if many of the past missing persons and victims of crime could have fared a whole lot better if they had only had some type of self-defense weapon with them at the time of their emergency, abduction, attack, assault, etc. - We can't change the past although we can help to put the odds in our favor in the future!)...Your life effects so many others. I hope you choose to protect and defend it. Non-lethal self-defense weapons may not be completely guaranteed for every instance, but they will certainly help to put the odds in your favor in case you are attacked.

With Crime Statistics as they are it is due time everyone carries some type of non-lethal self-defense weapon and do what they can to help fight back against crime. No matter who you are you should "Get Tough as a Tiger with TASERS-STUNS!". I welcome you at http://www.tasers-stuns.com to help you find just the right self-defense. TASERS-STUNS offers discount tasers, stun guns, pepper sprays, and a huge selection of very discounted hidden cameras, discount security cameras, discount security alarms, discount surveillance equipment and much more. TASERS-STUNS also has crime news, crime statistics, stun gun laws, taser faqs, stun gun faqs, pepper spray faqs, and plenty more helpful information about self-defense and surveillance to help you stop crime in its tracks. If you happen to stop by, please sign into the guest book and say "Hi" or if you like you are welcome to offer and share some of your own crime prevention ideas on the comments page. That's TASERS-STUNS at http://www.tasers-stuns.com so come on by ya'll.

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