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CRIME STATS

To The Editor,

Regarding the crime stats story last week:

Mayor Bob Foster takes credit for the reduction in crimes of violence and in the same breath points to prison realignment as the cause for increases in property crime.  Yet, he has nothing other than another grand bow to the city bureaucracy's conformity demands of groupthink to back either up.

Foster's supporting data is absent, just as it was absent when the city pointed to marijuana dispensaries in Long Beach as "magnets of crime."

It would be nice, for once, if the city produced evidence based on best practices to support both their claims of success and the defensive finger-pointing that always accompanies their failures.

There is an astonishing body of evidence, for example, that gasoline lead may explain as much as 90% of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.  Has the city ever considered this fact when budgeting to make the city safer?

Or, rather than pointing to prison realignment as the cause of property crime increases, why has the city not studied the impact on property crime occasioned by use of massive police resources last year to drive thousands of Long Beach medical marijuana patients back into the more expensive, criminally-controlled, black market?

Realignment legislation is finally forcing "Smart on Crime" solutions to the economic, social and human costs that the "Tough on Crime" extremists, like Mayor Foster, have shoved down our throats for the past 30 years.

It is time to stop listening to their zealotry and start listening to those who are working smart to save us from the mass imprisonment, social damage and economic plunder that has made our nation's incarceration rate the highest in the world.

If we work smart and make evidence-based decisions more prisons will be closed and more schools will be opened.

Stephen Downing

Long Beach