TWO OF MY FAVORITE DAMES ARE ON TODAY The Wine Yogi is coming in to talk holiday celebrating and has great suggestions for your charcuterie plates and wines to suggest. She's going to be joined by my friend and urban farmer and cheese maker Kelly Maher, who is bringing some goat cheese she made from her own little farm. Find all the wines we taste today here on the The Wine Yogi's blog, and find Kelly's website about her homegrown year here and her excellent Substack on goat farming and regular farming here.
ABOUT THE RISING CRIME RATES IN COLORADO I talked about the fact that the Governor, in an interview with a national website, blamed our rising crime rates on the rise of white supremacy. Well a police detective in the metro area begs to differ and sent me this email you should read:
Hi Mandy. I am a police detective who works in the metro area and I wanted to share my response to Polis’ statements about rising crime. It’s good that he is acknowledging the crime spike problem and trying to get more resources for state law enforcement. However the vast majority of enforcement comes from local law enforcement. An issue here is where he places the blame. I haven’t seen any evidence that white supremacy is any sort of a threat to any noticeable degree in CO. What is very noticeable is the problem created by “bail reform” which is rooted in equity theory: the idea that humans are inherently good and that any anti-social behavior is a result of some external force upon someone such as oppression. The idea is that having to pay for bail furthers financial oppression and if freed from all oppression, people would become productive members of society. However, this is a misdiagnosis of human nature.
One of the most robust findings in social sciences is that the vast majority of crime is committed by a small segment of society. Therefore when offenders are released immediately with low to zero bail, most just commit new crimes. If they are held on a higher hind they obviously are not free to commit new crime. But that creates higher incarceration numbers. There are trade offs. We’re seeing this on the street where offenders are arrested for felonies but because of new bail requirements, offenders won’t even be accepted into jail where they are then just released pending charges. A warrant is then issued for that offender but because of the bail reform, they won’t be arrested on that warrant by police because they are refused by the jails based on the nature of the offense and the new bail schedules.
Offenders will flat out tell officers there’s no incentive to stop their criminal behavior because there aren’t any consequences. If they eventually are held and show up for court, the DA often times just drops the case or gives them a slap on the wrist. Sheriff’s Offices who run the jails advocate for this bail reform because it keeps fewer people in their facilities saving them manpower and costs. However, we are regularly seeing homicides where the offender was released on bond from another case and even re-arresting violent offenders as soon as a week later after bonding out on a low bond amount.
This is a very big issue that no one seems to know about. This issue, combined with other constraints on police is directly causing the crime spike. Other contributing factors are the police staffing shortage that contributes to lower police pro-activity, also caused by proactive dis-incentives created by “police accountability legislation” such as SB217 in CO.
The “defund” movement and vilification of police alleging police are upholding systemic racism has led to defunding of many departments (which cuts budgets for staffing, training, retention, equipment, and recruitment) and has created an anti-police atmosphere that discourages proactive policing, a hyper scrutiny of police, and a societal attitude of police defyance. This results in an emboldening of criminal behavior and the calls of “police accountability” result in legislation that places higher liability on police to include use of force situations. These laws also place a high financial cost on departments for compliance that cuts into training and hiring budgets. All this culminates in a historic flight of officers from the job with a limited pool of applicants to fill those positions to where departments are having to sacrifice standards just to keep their staffing heads above water. Politicians’ and activists’ remedies for police are always “more training” and “hire better people”. However, the results of their activism create the opposite result as compliance costs cut into training budgets and as an overall dis-incentive to pursue police work are burned into the public psyche.
These factors also culminate in officers scaling back responses to certain types of calls and proactivity. These accountability laws are designed to discourage proactivity. DA’s offices are also prosecuting any and every possible misstep by officers. Why would police be proactive where that proactivity leads to a heightened chance of having to use force and therefore a heightened chance of being on the news or prosecuted if anything goes wrong?
These are trade-offs that politicians and activists magically try and pretend don’t exist. They take criminal opportunity and deterrence incentives for criminal behavior for granted. They expect to lessen the visibility and enforcement of police, without a difference in response from criminal behavior. Officers in many areas of the metro area describe the streets as a “war zone”. This thinking by activists and politicians is kind of like the magical thinking in economics where they place higher costs on producers but expect production to stay the same. The focus has been on the oppression of those police contacts (offenders) but zero attention on the victims of these crimes. When crime spikes, so does the number of victims of those crimes.
Here are some stats regarding bail reform and some excerpts from the article: https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/43-of-murder-suspects-bailed-out-or-released-in-us/
Indianapolis: In 2021, 43 percent of those accused of killing people in Indianapolis were on pretrial release or serving post-conviction sentences, while a quarter of those who have been killed this year were either serving sentences outside of jail or prison, or awaiting trial.
The Yolo County (California) District Attorney’s Office says they have been tracking people who were let out on zero-dollar bail and observed that almost half have been arrested again.
Roughly half of people charged with crimes and released from jail before their trials in San Francisco in recent years failed to show up for court, and a similar share were accused of committing a new crime while free, a new study found.
The study concluded that after bail reforms were implemented in Cook County, the number of released defendants charged with new crimes increased by about 45%, and those charged with new violent crimes went up by about 33%, NBC Chicago.
One study by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and Stanford Universities, found that pretrial release increases the likelihood of rearrest prior to case disposition by more than 37 percent—and increased the likelihood of a defendant failing to appear in court by 124 percent, Princeton.EDU.
The most common understanding of prison recidivism is based on state data from the US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, stating that two-thirds (68 percent) of prisoners released were arrested for a new crime within three years of release from prison, and three-quarters (77 percent) were arrested within five years.
Thanks for your time. Hope this was helpful if you weren’t aware of some of this.
I'm grateful this person took the time to share all this. Now it's time to ask the politicians about it.
THE BOULDER DA AGREES WITH THE DETECTIVE ABOVE And said as much to our friends at CBS4. Read more here. The DA didn't comment directly on the case of a man released on a personal recognizance bond went on to kill a man two days later.
THE US SENATE VOTES BIPARTISANLY TO END BIDEN'S VACCINE MANDATE The GOP managed to scrape off TWO Democrats to pass. It's not that Republicans are anti-vaccine, they are anti-FORCED vaccines. The measure passed 52-48, with all but Jon Tester and Joe Manchin voting for totalitarianism on the Democrat side.
A BLATANT RACIST IS PROMOTED TO DEAN AT EMERSON COLLEGE But it's FINE because she's a black woman who doesn't like white people. I'm not even kidding. Read this.
SPEAKING OF RACISM ARE WHITE LIBERALS KEEPING IT ALIVE? That's kind of the point Jason Whitlock, who is black, makes in this column about the soft bigotry of low expectations in the black community. It's very powerful and addresses the question I have about black people using the n-word. Why would you talk down to yourself and your people like that? Why? Read it, it's very, very good.
HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS IN THE SOUTH And this is LEGIT. BRING WHAT YOU ARE KNOWN FOR, PEOPLE, IT'S NOT THAT HARD.
A FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH IN A PILL HELPS MICE LIVE LONGER And I know, I know, these are mice not humans but this is still cool. As scientists begin to drill down on the things that age us physically, they are looking for ways to mitigate them. Now they have created a pill using grape seed extract that seems to clear the body of old cells that don't work properly and create disease. Read more here.
DREADING WEDDING PLANNING? GET MARRIED IN THE METAVERSE INSTEAD! That's a thing now, where people can have a wedding in the entirely digital space. It's not a crazy idea and would allow ALL of your friends and family to be there, but it's still a cartoon version of you so there's that.
THE GUY ACCUSED OF SETTING FOX NEWS' CHRISTMAS TREE ON FIRE WAS RELEASE ON NO BAIL And if you read the above article about bail reform you shouldn't be surprised. He got out with no bail, declared his innocence and probably went to find another tree to burn.
REMOTE LEARNING HAS RUINED STUDENT BEHAVIOR And we're seeing this all over the country, where behavior ranges from simply talking too much in class to fights on school grounds. Why? We've kept these kids isolated for two years and then throw them back together and expect the best. Remember to thank your teachers union rep for this when you see them!
LOOKING FOR THE PERFECT GIFT FOR THE ENVIRONMENTAL WACKO IN YOUR LIFE? How about the Greta on a Shelf!
WHAT IF PEOPLE COULD TELEPORT? I'd do this too.
THIS IS A GREAT EDITORIAL ON HOW USELESS BENNET AND HICKENLOOPER ARE FOR COLORADO You should read it here, but check out this litany of failure:
With Gardner, all roads led to Colorado. He landed us the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management before Bennet and Hickenlooper stood by and let Washington reclaim it. Like Lamborn, Gardner took every occasion to lobby Trump on the merits of keeping Space Command in Colorado Springs. Gardner sponsored more successful legislation, mostly to the direct benefit of Colorado than the rest of the state’s nine-member delegation combined. By contrast, Bennelooper neglects Colorado and sycophantically promotes Biden’s fiscally irresponsible and inflationary policies.
Bennelooper made me laugh.
HEARD MY FAVORITE INAPPROPRIATE CHRISTMAS SONG THE OTHER DAY And when Brenda sings about pie, you may hear "punkin" but I swear I hear "f*ckin" and don't judge me now you'll hear it too.
"1984" IS BEING RE WRITTEN FROM THE FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE And at first I thought they were rewriting the George Orwell classic "1984" to be more politically correct, which would have been SO IRONIC, but alas this is just going to be Julia's perspective fleshed out. Who is Julia? The main character Winston Smith has an illicit affair with a fellow thought crimer and her name is Julia. This new book is being written with the approval of the Orwell family, so it could be interesting, but I'm waiting to see what they do to it first. It may still end up being very ironic.
"MAY I SEE YOUR FACE/BOARDING PASS?" Biometrics are taking over, especially in airports. We could be very close to using our faces to board planes. This is good unless you have a severe allergic reaction to something before you board. That happened to a friend of mine and TSA would not let her through.
THE WORLD'S TINIEST CAMERA COULD BE IN YOUR NEXT CELL PHONE And it's about as big as a grain of salt. Check out this super cool thing here.
WHICH OF THESE WORDS DO YOU MISPRONOUNCE? A list of the most mispronounced words of 2021 is out and most of them are new made up words so don't feel bad.