Friday, September 03, 2010

There's even a term of art for it: "NHI"

Impolitic as it is to admit, it is a rare murderer indeed who has their very first meeting with the police over a still-cooling corpse.

2 comments:

Steve Skubinna said...

Right.

"Oh, hi officer, I was just going to call you!"

Ed Foster said...

I suspect the 80%-70% figure quoted is about a constant in like areas. Son One often had multiple murders to investigate when he was in CSD, and they were all in "Banger" neighborhoods, predominantly in the Jamaican run clubs along North Main St. in Hartford.

Several 3 loser nights, and one 4 loser night that I can remember, all within a few months and all in a two block stretch of dives. I recall him putting in a 22 hour day during one of them.

I don't ever recall a single burglary in, at that time, very rural Killingworth CT as a kid. No cops and lots of guns, but other than a bit of poaching, zero crime.

The death rate was fairly high. Auto crashes ran neck and neck with hunting accidents, and my graduating class from high school lost 2 kids to each.

But the hunting accidents were a statistical fluke, as the area often went a decade or more with no hunting deaths. And that was before the mandatory hunter safety program we've had for many years.

But booze, cars, and twisty, heavily wooded one lane blacktop probably gave us a death rate close to the inner city. Still, it was self inflicted, at least in the case of the driver, and you had the option of staying home or not sucking on the bottle.

Today, safer cars, less drinking, and, dast I say it, somewhat duller, more pragmatic kids has made the wild n' wooly days history. A kid or two killed in an auto crash might happen every 2 or 3 years, in the entire Shoreline League area of a dozen or so towns.

What was that figure quoted a few years back concerning the murder rate in Republican counties vs. Democrat counties? I'd have to check the numbers, but I think it was something like 2 per year per 100K, as compared with 12 per 100K.

Considering that Republicans and Democrats are increasingly from entirely different cultural demographics, it's like compareing Northern Europe to a third world nation.