Life, generally speaking, is nothing like the comics or movies when it comes to criminal activity. Whether it is Batman or Spiderman or any other hero, criminals are ultimately fairly traceable and every crime can be solved — and criminals have simple patterns that can be traced and analyzed. In real life, it is a lot more difficult to recognize the patterns, if there are any, and crimes often are abandoned by the police.
We are in the crest of a crime spree in New York City and I’m wondering why this is happening now. Is the economy finally so poor and far-reaching that the forgotten and misbegotten are now finally rising up from the streets to take back what was lost in this economic downturn?
A 400 percent increase in murders in tony Williamsburg; a 400 percent increase in rapes in Sheepshead Bay and a 250 percent increase in killings in Washington Heights are all troublesome statistics that have Mayor Michael Bloomberg and police officials concerned.
“We worry every day about trying to make this city safer,” Mayor Bloomberg said Monday.
A crime is committed. The police are called in on it or discover it in some other way. They are going to pursue it until they discover the person or people behind the crime — or so would have been my understanding of how the police works. I knew that the police abandoned certain cases that were just impossible to solve for whatever reason — perhaps the criminal involved covered their traces too well. What I was not aware of was exactly the extent to which the police simply give up on cases. In the UK that number is shockingly high — and even higher in London — as many as half of the cases, according to an article in the Daily Mail:
On May 12, 2008, I wrote — Violent Imagination Shaping Brain Reality — and the argument for that article was that we are formed and influenced by every experience, be it real or virtual, and that is why we must not seek out violence in our entertainment and pastime memes because the aftereffects are too dwelling in our real lives:
One can no longer argue gory movies, neighborhood killings and violent video games do not re-shape the brain in bad and terrifying ways.
One need not kill in order to perceive the effects of murder on the body by the brain — and that is a harsh and bitter reality for us to accept when so willfully immerse our children in a culture of violence and celebrated bad behavior.
Continue reading → Strengthening the Binding Between Virtual Violence and Real Aggressiveness
Celebrities often seem to get behind people they perceive as being wrongfully imprisoned. Take, for example, the West Memphis Three. They were accused in 1993 of murder and have been in prison since then — their case is now being re-opened due to new DNA evidence but for years, celebrities such as Eddie Vedder and Johnny Depp have stood behind them and proclaimed their innocence.
Continue reading → Do the Imprisoned Benefit from Celebrity Support?
Let us consider the following scenario. Next week, after hundreds of years of relative easy rest, William Shakespeare’s good name is disturbed when someone discovers that he spent much of his life sleeping with married women and occasionally burning down the homes of the men whose wives he wished to bed. Do we need to really ask what sort of impact this would have on our perception of the works of Shakespeare? Would people stop producing the plays or going to productions of the plays?
Continue reading → The Personal Lives of Celebrities Must Not Detract From their Artistry
Imagine the following scenario: A pair of men walk into a police station. They have bruises all over, each has a black eye, and they are limping. They limp over to the front desk where a police officer is busy with paperwork.
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