Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

The Armed Citizen Project Hopes to Fight Crime by Giving Out Free Guns

June 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Handing out guns to make everyone safer? Nope, we’re not talking about Syria. This is Texas, folks. From the Associated Press last week, a story that somehow escaped our sights: the Armed Citizen Project, a non-profit project founded by 29-year-old Kyle Coplen, is giving free shotguns to people, especially single women, living in high-crime neighborhoods. Along with the guns come free gun-safety training classes. The organization says it costs them about $300 per person, for the gun and the training, and all of that money comes from private donations. As of last week’s report, the ... Read More

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Treating Mental Illness Prevents Crime and Saves Us Money

June 14, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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How much are we willing to pay, as a society, toward preventing crime and easing the burdens on our prison systems? How much are we willing to pay to provide help to people struggling with serious mental illness, the kind of illness that makes it hard for them to cope with daily life? The results of a study out last month in Psychiatric Services might give some insight into how to think about the intersection of both of those difficult questions. A research team at North Carolina State University looked at the impact of routine outpatient treatment for adults with serious mental illness on ... Read More

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Violent Crime Is Dropping: Why Are We So Scared?

June 12, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Blame it on the media? A Pew Research Center poll released last month found that most Americans think that gun crime has increased in the past two decades—but they’re dead wrong. In the survey of 900 adults, 56 percent thought gun crime had increased, 26 percent thought it had stayed about the same, and only 12 percent thought it had gone down. Those 12 percent were right. A separate report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that the number of gun homicides decreased by 39 percent from 1993 to 2011, and that non-fatal shootings fell by 69 percent. According to the FBI’s ... Read More

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Brain-Scan Lie Detectors Just Don’t Work

June 10, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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It sounds just like something out of a sci-fi police procedural show—and not necessarily a good one. In a darkened room, a scientist in a white lab coat attaches a web of suction cups, wires, and electrodes to a crime suspect’s head. The suspect doesn’t blink as he tells the detectives interrogating him, “I didn’t do it.” The grizzled head detective bangs his fist on the table. “We know you did!” he yells. The scientist checks his machine. “Either he’s telling the truth ... or he’s actively suppressing his memories of the crime,” says the scientist. Some law ... Read More

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DNA Collection Is the New Fingerprinting

June 3, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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On Monday, the Supreme Court gave the OK to the controversial practice of cops collecting DNA samples from crime suspects under arrest. In a 5-4 ruling, the justices decided that swabbing a person’s cheek prior to their conviction of any crime did not constitute an unreasonable search—so long as the suspect was under arrest “for a serious offense” and had been brought “to the station to be detained in custody.” According to NBC News, 28 states and the federal government already adhere to this practice. This case dates back to the 2009 arrest of 26-year-old Alonzo King on assault ... Read More

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Problem Witness: A Case to Make Prosecutors Personally Accountable

June 1, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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It wasn't much of a case: Queens prosecutors wanted to prosecute a woman for having falsely reported her car stolen in a bid to collect on theft insurance. A non-violent crime. Small-time really. But the prosecutors went to unusual lengths in 2008 to try and make the case. They tracked down a person they thought had information about the alleged fraud, told her she was under arrest, and over the course of two days interrogated her in a room in the Queens District Attorney's office. The woman, Alexina Simon, was not a suspect. She was, in truth, nothing more than a potential ... Read More

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Is Drug Trafficking Worse Than Murder?

May 13, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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In Ecuador, an impoverished woman plans to sell 335 grams of a drug she cannot even identify. She’s caught. Her sentence? Eight years in prison. In Mexico, a woman finds heroin planted in her suitcase. Her punishment? Twenty-two years behind bars. In Bolivia, a man stomps coca, the first step in the process to make cocaine. His penalty? Ten years. Mexico, Bolivia, and Ecuador are nations where the minimum and maximum penalties for drug traffickers are longer than those given to murderers. For years, Latin American governments have been dishing out increasingly harsh punishments to people ... Read More

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California’s Gun Medicine

May 3, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Night after night, dressed in a black jumpsuit and a bulletproof vest, John Marsh knocks on the doors of violent felons and mentally ill people and asks them for their guns. People hand them over more often than you might expect. Last year, Marsh, a special agent with the California Bureau of Firearms, and the 33-person team he heads, confiscated 2,000 illegally-owned weapons. Marsh is the lead agent for the Armed Prohibited Persons System, a program in which state officials comb through mountains of data to find people who have lost the right to own guns, and then send Marsh’s team to ... Read More

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Why Do We Hurt Each Other?

April 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Shortly after reports started coming out—from professional journalists and citizen reporters alike—that two explosions had gone off in downtown Boston this afternoon near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the world's oldest annual marathon and one of the most high-profile road-racing events anywhere in the world, my friend and former colleague, Max Fisher, now the foreign affairs blogger for The Washington Post, tweeted out a message from his sister, a runner, that got me thinking. "I have been running long distance events for many years and every time I go by a crowd I get that ... Read More

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A Statistic From Today’s Bomb in Boston

April 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Several videos from today's bombing at the Boston marathon capture the digital clock positioned over the finish line. According to the clock, the first explosion erupts at four hours, nine minutes from the race's start. Why Do We Hurt Each Other? It is certainly too early to distinguish useful information from distraction. But it is worth noting that a finishing time from four to four and a half hours is a common benchmark for marathoners. According to RunTri, a popular marathon training website, the average runner finished last year's Boston course in four hours, 18 ... Read More

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