All Rights Reserved © 2003 Thomas W. Day
If we ever needed to be comforted that "things are going to be ok," it's
probably now. The nation's cities are overpopulated, over-crowded,
under-managed, and more dangerous than they've been since the turn of the last
century. People are afraid that they're going to be raped, robbed, murdered,
and/or squashed by falling 747s piloted by Islamic terrorists. We are turning
timid as quickly as our social environment is growing aggressive. The solution
is . . . television.
In 2001, the National Crime Information Center reported 840,279 missing
persons (of which 85-90% are children) and the fraction of those returned is so
unpredictable that I was unable to find a meaningful statistic regarding the
nation's unsolved missing persons resolution rate. The fact that the missing
persons statistics are not delineated into categories makes it difficult to
isolate kidnappings that were investigated from the other categories of missing
persons. Regardless, with those huge numbers of missing persons, in 1985, the
NCIC entered only 14,816 cases in its involuntary missing files and the FBI only
chose to investigate 867 cases, some of those were adult victims. Out of that
tiny fraction of the nation's missing persons, an even more discouraging number
were "found," most commonly dead.
This ought to be especially discouraging
because it's obvious that the Feebs are cherry picking the cases to select ones
that they expect to solve and they're still not getting the job done.
An imaginary 63% of U.S. committed murders resulted in prosecution in 2000
(down from 79% in 1976). I'll explain in a few sentences, why I classify that
statistic as "imaginary." While crime goes unsolved and we become more isolated
in our homes and communities, television's CSI Miami and Vegas are
wrapping up every vagrant's death as neatly as Xmas packages.
Missing,
the television myth that glorifies the FBI's never-before-sighted exercise
of human compassion, actually cares if taxpayers miss an appointment. The
ultimate television hoax, X Files, portrayed an FBI agency that went out
of its way to read case files.
I admit that I'm a little jaded about television's fairy tales.
Twenty years
ago, my stockbroker was an ex-Atlanta detective. He'd quit and restarted his
career when he found himself unable to carry on normal conversations with
friends or family. He was beginning to view everyone as scum floating at the
top of the pond. When he decided to leave the policing business, standard
operating procedures were changing in the nation's cop squads that made him feel
his occupation was even more pointless.
In the early 80s, urban police
departments began to imitate the FBI's long held habit of "ganging" crimes on to
the sheet of whatever high profile "most wanted" criminal they'd recently
stumbled upon.
What this means is if Mulder and Scully tripped over a serial murderer and
someone handed them enough evidence to securely lock that person up for life,
what's the harm in sticking a few dozen unrelated homicides on that bad guy to
clean up the paperwork? After all, how often are our sluggish government
bureaucrats likely to trip over another Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, or even
someone as dangerous as Married with Children's Al Bundy?
You gotta do what you wanta do and they do.
So, if the federal cops claim
that they have a 63% resolution rate on murder, I figure they're probably
batting somewhere below .200. The difference between imaginary crime fighting
and reality are on television almost every evening.
I drive by the real guys most every morning on the way to work and, if that
group of civil servants could chase down a donut, it would only be after a
waitress has corralled it on a plate for them. After they satiate their
compulsion to "protect and serve" themselves, they are too fat to actually chase
criminals.
A guy I worked with a decade ago, is more the kind of person I'd expect would
excel with the FBI. He was a failed medical student, turned MBA-adorned middle
executive in charge of covering up our employer's antics with a collection of
unreliable and hazardous medical products. He was being actively recruited by
the FBI because he was, obviously, their kind of guy. His motivation for
attending to the task of joining the FBI was "they have a great pension plan"
and "I can retire when I'm fifty and consult for the companies I've
investigated." It's good to have high moral standards and lofty goals when
you're heading off to protect the public.
The now famous Elizabeth Smart story ought to tell us everything we need to
know about crime fighting's capacities. A girl obviously kidnapped and held,
practically in plain sight, a few blocks from her home by a vagrant her parents
had hired to do grunt work only a few days before the kidnapping. If the FBI
and local cops could solve any crime quickly, this should have been the one. As
happens far too rarely, a half-year after the kidnapping, a citizen recognized
the kidnapper based on an artist's sketch of the suspect and called it in to the
cops who managed to drag themselves away from donuts long enough to rescue the
girl. The FBI and all their mythical resources were useless and it was only
the competent work of a beat cop that saved Ms. Smart from spending another year
as a hostage in her own neighborhood. Remember that her kidnapper was a
transient who'd done maintenance work for the Smart family only a few weeks
before the kidnapping.
Can you say "obvious suspect?"
Maybe this heartwarming story makes you feel comfortable about your "police
protection," but I'm not that simpleminded. John Walsh and his television
program have made it clear to anyone capable of rational thought that the only
way to rescue our loved ones from the worst people on earth is to drop our
lives, sell everything we own, hire private investigators and spend all of our
waking hours in pursuit of these criminals. The police, the FBI, and all of the
King's men are useless. They're too worried about parking violations, speeding
ticket quotas, pension plans, and outsourcing donuts to be distracted by our
problems.
But not on television.
The worst (most corrupt, least courageous, most
self-serving) police force in the nation, New York's tubby-blue
constantly-shifting line, are practically competent on television. One of the
most notoriously gangland related cities in the world, Las Vegas, has CSI
uncovering killer DNA on every carpet fabric in Nevada. The FBI finds missing
vagrants, children, lawyers, and other otherwise ignored citizens in hours,
often before the victims miss a single dose of some equally mythical life saving
medication. Pretty soon, I expect we'll see a series on how loving and helpful
LA cops are to minority citizens. Why not? It wouldn't be less believable than
picturing FBI agents in motion. How about a show illustrating the SEC's
relentless pursuit of corporate criminals? That would be as believable as
Spiderman, but no less so than Missing or "NYPD Blue.
December 2003
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