Tough on Crime

There's a lot to love about this story, which describes how a team of cops drove around at 95 MPH through crowded downtown streets and highways in order to arrest a man who had exposed himself to a 10 y.o. boy in a Wal-Mart, and was then working part-time at a hardware store.

I'm not soft on pedophilia. But there's pedophilia, and then there's pedophilia. I, personally, don't think it's worth risking the lives of hundreds of innocent bystanders in a cheap excuse for Officer Friendly to peel out in his Crown Vic unless the original crime involved some manner of insertion.

Be that as it may, the last paragraph kills me:

The police kept close tabs on the six different teams' arrests, an internal competition to see who could bag more wanted felons. Team Vulture beat out Team Osprey with 147 arrests to 132.

At the end of the operation, about 80 officers crowded into a large conference room and were briefed on the final results. "You prevented a lot of victims this week," Booker told them.

Law enforcement studies, he said, indicate the typical fugitive commits an average of 13 crimes while they're on the run. If that's true, more than 15,000 potential victims have been spared.

"These people can't commit crimes against other people while they're locked up," Booker said.

I'd like to invite you, the reader, to sit back and consider -- in the assumption that you, like me, are not a professional law enforcement official (or, not Police, as they say in Bodymore, Murdaland) -- the gaping Canyon of Logic that separates the reality that the original statistics describe with the Bizarro Retard Sensationalist fiction that the journalist came up with for the piece.

To wit: in the real world, a guy carrying an firearm without a permit (1) robs a liquor store (2), killing the night clerk (3) in the process. He then steals a tank full of gas (4), illegally merges back onto the highway (5), speeding (6) and crossing state lines with said illegal firearm (7). The chase, firefight in which one pursuing officer is injured (8) ends with a self-inflicted wound (9) from an illegally discharged weapon (10).

In Bizarro World, a guy exposes himself in a Wal-Mart bathroom (1) to an underage child (2). He then leaves Wal-Mart and pulls into the parking lot at Target, where he exposes himself to a series of other children (2-12) and, perhaps, shoplifts a Pokemon deck on the way out.

I fucking hate CNN.