Movement on the Holloway case after all this time

ORANJESTAD, Aruba (AP) - The father of Natalee Holloway, the American teenager who disappeared in Aruba in 2005, said the re-arrest of three suspects in the case has "renewed some hopes" that he might finally find out what happened to his daughter.

Three young men previously detained as suspects - Dutch student Joran van der Sloot and two Surinamese brothers, Satish and Deepak Kalpoe - were arrested Wednesday on suspicion of involvement in voluntary manslaughter and causing serious bodily harm that resulted in the death of Holloway, the Aruban public prosecutor's office said.

"It's just renewed some hopes that the police are going to find answers to this disappearance of our daughter," Dave Holloway told Associated Press Television News.

Van der Sloot's mother, however, insisted her son had not been arrested but was only detained for more questioning.

Holloway, of Mountain Brook, Ala., was last seen leaving a bar with the three men on May 30, 2005, hours before she was scheduled to board a plane home with high school classmates celebrating their graduation on the Dutch Caribbean island. She was 18 at the time.

Hundreds of volunteers, Aruban soldiers, police and FBI agents spread out across the island for the missing teen. Later efforts would include divers, Dutch F-16 jets equipped with search equipment, and specially trained dogs. No trace was ever found of her.

Van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers were previously detained on suspicion of taking part in her death, but they denied involvement and a judge released them for lack of evidence.

Van der Sloot, 20, was re-arrested in the Netherlands, where he was attending university. The Kalpoe brothers - Deepak is 24, Satish, 21 - were taken into custody in Aruba.

Authorities "ordered their renewed arrest because further investigation into the disappearance has led to new incriminating evidence," the office said in a statement.

Maybe justice delayed will not be justice denied. Let us hope that the authorities "new evidence" is compelling enough to secure a conviction. If the three young men are in fact guilty.

There is no excuse for rising crime rates

From The Washington Post:

Violent crime in the United States rose more than previously believed in 2006, continuing the most significant increase in more than a decade, according to an FBI report released yesterday.

The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program found that robberies surged by 7.2 percent and homicides rose 1.8 percent from 2005 to 2006. Violent crime overall rose 1.9 percent, substantially more than an increase of 1.3 percent estimated in a preliminary FBI report in June.

The jump was the second in two years, following a 2.3 percent rise in 2005. Taken together, the two years represent the first steady increase in violent crime since 1993, FBI records show.

The uptick presents a significant political challenge for the Bush administration, which has faced growing criticism from congressional Democrats, big-city mayors and police chiefs for presiding over cuts in federal assistance to local law enforcement agencies over the past six years.

[. . .]

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington, which studies crime trends, said the FBI report shows "a significant departure from the previous 10 years of fairly flat or declining crime numbers."

"What it underscores is what a number of communities have been seeing firsthand, and that is a spike in street-level violent crime," Wexler said. "For some cities, crime is back as a significant issue."

In addition to the overall number of violent-crime reports, the violent crime rate rose by about 1 percent, the FBI said. The rate measures the number of reported crimes based on population.

The causes of rising and falling crime rates are not mysterious. We have enough data about both to know what to do to keep crime to a minimum.

Crime rises first because there are people who regard crime as an acceptable way of life. The number one generator of such people are single mothers. Second crime rises because criminals use a cost/benefit analysis where the chance of getting caught by the police or shot by a victim is weighed against the chance of success.

The way to bring down crime is to first change our social spending priorities to discourage rather than encourage unwed motherhood. Our welfare money should go to what used to be called the deserving poor, that is intact families whose adult members are behaving responsibly by staying off drugs and alcohol, working or seriously looking for work and keeping their children in school and under control.

Next people should be not only allowed, but encouraged to arm themselves to protect themselves, their families and their neighbors from criminals. Police departments should provide basic safety and gun handling instruction at no cost to members of the community who have clean criminal histories.

Finally police need to be turned lose to enforce the law. This is the secret of how mayor Giuliani brought down crime in New York City. He instructed and allowed the police to go out on the street and aggressively seek out and arrest criminals.

Once caught criminals need to be jailed for periods long enough to provide a meaningful deterrent. Since the amount of money that a criminal out on the street committing crimes costs society is far greater than the cost of keeping that criminal locked up in jail the up-front cost of building more prisons will be more than recovered over time.

Who was there to protect them?

NEOSHO, Mo. (AP) - A gunman opened fire in the sanctuary of a southwest Missouri church Sunday, killing three people and wounding several others, authorities said.
About 25 to 50 people were briefly held hostage at the First Congregational Church until the gunman surrendered, Neosho spokeswoman Desiree Bridges said.

About four or five people were wounded, Police Chief Dave McCracken said, and several others who were injured fled the scene.

Officials removed two covered bodies from the brick-and-white trim church into a waiting funeral parlor van Sunday evening.

"This is a terrible tragedy which was made worse by the fact that it happened in a peaceful place of faith and worship," Gov. Matt Blunt said in a statement.

The shooter was being held at the Newton County Jail, but police were not releasing any information about him. Bridges said he was related to someone in the church, but declined to elaborate. No charges had been filed Sunday, McCracken said.

McCracken said the gunman had two small-caliber handguns and one 9 mm semiautomatic machine pistol with a large magazine.



Two observations. One is that the gunman being "related to someone in the church" means an estranged husband of a church member or a daughter of a church member.


Two, I'll lay any odds you want that the killer didn't have a "machine pistol". A machine pistol is a small, lightweight (handgun sized) machine gun which fires a pistol round. An example would be the Scorpion Vz 61 (shown at the right).


What the chief meant was that the killer had a semiautomatic handgun which happened to look somewhat like a machine pistol. Something like the incredibly poorly made Tec-9m for example.


As a deacon in my church I know more than the average member of the congregation what type of situations exist within the church community which could lead to this kind of tragedy. This is why I always arm myself before stepping into church.


I do not intend to allow a man or woman who was so irresponsible or insane that they forced their spouse to take the kids and flee from them for the safety of those children to enter our sanctuary and murder people I care about without a fight.

Violent crime-infested . . . Europe

Ernest Baert read Fjordman's post on rape rates in Europe and was inspired to look into international crime statistics. He posted his conclusions on The Brussels Journal today. It seems that the best data is that compiled by Interpol, however Interpol has removed its crime statistics from its website. It seems that the nations of Europe do not want their citizens (or subjects as the case may be) to know certain uncomfortable facts.

Facts like these:

In the latest published ICVS, the percentage of the population which claims a personal experience of crime (excluding murder) during the preceding twelve months is higher in all countries than official statistics would lead one to assume : ranging from 16.4% in Norway to 31.5% in the Netherlands. The US (24.2%) and Canada (25.2%) are both average.

According to ICVS, overall crime rates are the highest Commonwealth (Australia, New Zealand, England) followed by northern European protestant countries (Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, but with Norway a clear exception), whilst the “safer” countries tend to be more Catholic/Latin/Southern European, such as Austria, Italy, Belgium and, yes, Northern Ireland (as mentioned above, murders are not covered by ICVS…). Note that the bulk of these crime rates are relatively minor crime.

The US is average in terms of overall experienced crime rates (ICVS), but for the most violent crime, murder, has the highest rates in absolute terms (Interpol), 5.6 per 100,000 inhabitants per year, vs. 4.1 in France for example, although the gap is rapidly shrinking and smaller than most people think.

Overall experienced crime rates are rising in most countries, for instance with violent crimes like Assault tripling in England and doubling in France during the nineties (ICVS). The US is one of the few exceptions to this trend, In fact, Interpol statistics show sharply reduced murder rates in the US (albeit from a high level). Among the five most violent crime categories in the Interpol statistics : (i) murder, (ii) serious assault, (iii) aggravated theft, (iv) robbery and (v) car theft, France had already overtaken the US by 2002 for the last three crimes, and looked like overtaking the US by 2004 for murder and assault as well. According to Interpol, England had fewer murders, assaults and robbery than France, but was also rapidly converging with the US. (Teaser, which Interpol member states had most to hide under continued publication of Interpol comparative statistics, the US or EU countries like France ?)

A lot has been written about the large decline in US crime rates in the last 2 decades and as usual different and sometimes conflicting explanations have been given, including : (i) the declining birth rate (in part, because of high abortion rates), leading to fewer young males around, (ii) better policing methods and the so-called zero-tolerance approach (and there seems to be some indication of a correlation between different policing methods in US cities and the change in local crime rates), and (iii) the very high incarceration rates in the US (i.e. the more people you lock up, the less crime is committed outside the prison walls). If one assumes each of these three factors has had an impact on falling US crime rates, then the conclusion seems to be that for Europe, where birth rates have fallen even more than the US, but violent crime has risen fast over the last two decades, there must be something seriously amiss with policing and incarceration policies in Europe.

Reporting rates, i.e. the percentage of experienced crime actually reported to police varies significantly across borders : for instance, for Assault, more than 40% of cases are reported in the Anglo-Saxon countries - where the incidence is relatively high - and in Belgium, and less than 25% in Germany, Austria and Italy). But reporting rates varies even more depending on the type of crime : almost in all countries, more than 90% of all car thefts are reported, but reporting rates for Assault and Robbery, far more violent and unpleasant experiences are typically only half those of car thefts. For Sexual Offenses the reporting rates suggest that police reports only represent the tip of an iceberg. The fact that many car owners have theft insurance makes them obviously more likely to report a theft, because with cover there is near certainty of compensation for the victim. But the low reporting rates for other crimes may illustrate why so many ordinary people treat the conclusions of official crime statistics with a pinch of salt, despite being told by the elites that all is well and this feeling of insecurity is an imagination. New York was an unsafe city twenty years ago, but was one of the first to try the zero tolerance approach, with good results. New York threw over board its tradition of turning a blind eye to so much crime because there were no liberals left anymore : they had all been mugged (if not worse…).

You see it seems that the United States is not the crime-ridden cesspool compared to Europe that most Europeans (and US elites) believe it to be. It would seem that in most kinds of crime Europe is very close to surpassing or has already surpassed America.

Even in the category of murder, where the US still leads, the difference was never that great and the gap is rapidly closing.

Mr. Baert mentions difference in birthrates, policing philosophy and incarceration rates between the US and Europe. He discounts birthrate as a factor because Europe's is lower than ours. The difference would seem to be found in Americas embrace of zero-tolerance policing and our willingness to lock up criminals.

Another factor that Mr. Baert doesn't cover is the difference in firearms ownership rates and the different legal philosophy regarding firearms in the US and Europe. Sarah Brady and her crowd would have us believe that the comparatively easy access to guns and the high rate of civilian firearms ownership in the US contribute to the violence of our society. Yet it seems that in some ways we are less violent than Europe and that even in the areas where we lead them they are catching up quickly.

This is despite the fact that firearms have recently become even more accessible with the sunsetting of the Brady Law and the rapid spread of "shall issue" concealed carry laws across the nation.

In fact a good argument could be made that Americans' access to firearms (the most efficient means of self defense) are a factor in the very good showing we make in this international comparison.

Of course this will have no affect on the Brady Bunch. What motivates them is not a desire to control crime. What animates the gun control activists (almost all of them left-liberals) is a pure hatred toward and fear of people who like guns.