Crime Wave

If you pushed a pin into a map for every recent shooting in the killing fields, L. Tolliver's barbershop on Florence Avenue near Western would be surrounded. So naturally, the crime wave in South Los Angeles has been all the buzz. A customer named Bill Layne said he has ordered his 12-year-old son to stay indoors after dark, and everyone in the shop identified with his fear.

The police patrol had just begun when the officers jumped from their van and cornered three teenagers on a busy street in central London. A search found the boys wearing two sets of clothes--as muggers sometimes do so they can quickly alter their appearance. One of the boys had two cell phones in his pocket, and another held an unusually large amount of cash.

Re "Enron Is But a Pebble in the Wave," Commentary, Feb. 13: That "pebble in the wave" will be just the first sign of an impending avalanche if it doesn't prompt some changes in the way the me-first American economy operates these days. If James Pinkerton is correct that "the future still belongs to market forces," then we could all be in trouble. What's needed are: corporate boards and executives who will stand up to the investors who greenmail them into pursuing short-term profits at the expense of long-term growth and stability; institutional investors who stop acting like day traders in responding frantically to non-news; and CFOs who know that padding your bottom line with derivatives is a lot like expecting to win every time you walk into a Vegas casino.

The government warned police chiefs that it would intervene if they failed to halt growing lawlessness on British streets. Home Secretary David Blunkett said the government would use proposed new powers to take over local police forces that are losing the anti-crime battle. London, hit by a wave of muggings and robberies, could be one of the first forces affected. Glen Smyth, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, said Blunkett was trying to shift blame.

I'm sitting on the edge of my bed, my hands bound tightly behind my back with a shoelace. A young man sitting 6 feet away points a battered black revolver at my head and screams: "Don't talk to her! I'll shoot you! I'll shoot you!" I had merely whispered to my girlfriend, who was tied up next to me, to remain calm. He didn't shoot, and our firsthand encounter with South Africa's horrific crime wave mercifully fell into the armed-robbery category, rather than murder or assault.

Sure, Irvine is the seventh-safest large city in the nation, according to FBI figures, but don't think for a moment that it's devoid of crime. Perusing the Irvine World News' police log, I came across a couple of shocking offenses that residents reported to the local authorities. I thought of Joe Friday of TV's "Dragnet" when I read the terse language of the entries. The first, an act of vandalism, said simply: "Hair mousse left on brick driveway."

It was a winning streak that police officers from Buena Park to San Clemente pointed to with pride: For six straight years, the number of homicides in Orange County plummeted to levels not seen in decades. The streak is now history, with murders rising more than 8% last year. But officials aren't wringing their hands, and many are betting that the spike in slayings doesn't mean a return to the high-crime era of the early 1990s.

Back when he was working toward a doctorate in the philosophy of aesthetics and teaching at UC Irvine, John Langley seemed an unlikely candidate to preside over a criminal empire. Yet the producer is doing precisely that, parlaying "Cops"--the cinema verite prime-time series heading into its 13th season on Fox--into additional crime-related programming as well as an ambitious new Web site, Crime.com, which Langley has launched in conjunction with the Court TV network.

Thousands of residents of crime-hit Rio de Janeiro, many of them wearing black, joined an anti-violence march along the picturesque Ipanema beach Sunday after a bloody hostage drama that shook Brazil last week. "Mourning for peace," read a banner, carried by marchers in black. "We are prisoners of fear," read another placard. "Enough, enough, enough of violence!" was written on another.

The collection of "tough on crime" proposals that was assembled into Proposition 21 on the March 2000 ballot may not be the most draconian crime legislation in recent California history, but it is certainly the most peculiar. From "three strikes" in 1994 to "10-20-life" in 1996 to victims' rights in the 1980s, every other recent crime proposal to take center stage in California was based on a single problem and a specific strategy for addressing it.