Crimes and criminals must be swiftly and effectively dealt with

October 14, 2025

Society is currently coping with many problems today. One that stands out quite a bit recently is how people react to a serious, or even a horrific event. It seems there is often an automatic effort to examine the situation to see if the perpetrator is involved in some situation that excuses what he or she did, and there is little or no compassion for the victim.

Here is an example: Brian Robert Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, was shot and killed as he was minding his own business walking down the street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on December 4, 2024.

Charged with the murder is 26-year-old Luigi Mangione. Authorities believe Mangione was motivated by a perception that United Healthcare and the entire industry are “parasitic,” along with a negative opinion about corporate greed.

Murder, as we should all know and believe, is a serious crime. It quite often ends the life of a person for no good reason, and creates havoc and misery among the victim’s family, friends, and associates. It has serious and wide-spread repercussions.

Yet, while opinion polls showed that a majority of American adults find the killing unacceptable, quite a large group of younger respondents think the killing was acceptable, as they agreed with Mangione’s view of the healthcare industry. Worse than that, the polls showed that left-leaning respondents actually sympathized with Mangione, the murderer.

Victor Davis Hanson, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a widely published conservative commentator, wrote an article published in the Daily Signal addressing this situation.

In this article, Hanson discusses two murders committed by two trans shooters, and the way many people attempted to excuse them for their actions, due to their “troubled” lives. He also provided examples of how homeless people have been wholly or partially excused for their crimes, due to their being homeless.

His description of the reactions to these horrible events, and how we must react to them, instead, is right on.

“And when people act out violence, then we have to condemn it. If we don’t condemn it, we can’t deter it. And it’s no excuse that a person is transgender. None at all.”

“And so, what are we to do about this? I think all we can do is restore sanity and say: We’re not going to worry about a person’s homeless status. Once he commits violence, we’re not going to worry about their race. There’s not going to be any exemption for that. We’re not going to worry about their sexual orientation or whether they’re transitioning from one sex to another.

“All we’re worried about, if you commit an act of violence and destroy an innocent person’s life, you’re going to face swift punishment — swift punishment if you are found guilty.

“And we’re not going to consider all of the mitigating circumstances that this therapeutic society has bombed us with, and which prohibits fast and severe punishment for the guilty, who do what? They commit evil. And that’s the thing we’re worried about.”

As bad, or worse than, the “forgiveness efforts” for crimes such as killing innocent people because someone doesn’t like something about the way they live their lives is the ease with which people indulge in criminal activity. 

As reported on Al.com, “Police in two small Mississippi towns are investigating shootings during their schools’ homecoming weekend that left six people dead. Four people were killed in Leland after a high school football homecoming game there.

“The shootings happened in the downtown area of the small town where people had gathered following the game, state Sen. Derrick Simmons told The Associated Press.

“In a separate incident, two people were killed in Heidelberg during homecoming weekend Friday night, according to AP. Both were victims killed on the school campus Friday night, Heidelberg Police Chief Cornell White told The Associated Press. He declined to say whether the victims were students or provide other information about the crimes.”

We also see people interfering with federal agents who are rounding up illegal aliens in the country, most of whom are being sought due having committed other crimes in addition to being in the country illegally. 

While peacefully protesting these activities is protected speech, physically interfering with ICE agents, damaging ICE property, and physically attacking ICE agents are criminal activities.

This backwards morality is likely a result of the cultural deterioration that America has been experiencing over the last 20 or so years. Or, if not a direct result of that, it is certainly a factor.

A lack of discipline for children because of changed family structure and a weakened sense of right and wrong, changes in the curriculum of public education from which a general sense that America needs substantial changes has evolved, and are negatively and seriously affecting our culture.

As Hanson said, swift and significant punishment for crimes is a must. And the people who are charged with the responsibility of identifying criminality and seriously working for appropriate punishment must do their jobs.

Prosecutors and judges who use their political and personal feelings instead of following the laws are a menace to society, and must be replaced. 

It is time to end the foolish liberal soft-on-crime methodology

April 23, 2024

We all remember the incident back in 2020 when George Floyd was wrongly killed by a Minneapolis police officer during an arrest. What followed was a manic anti-police movement resulting in “defund the police” efforts in many places in the country, and cases where funding for police operations were reduced.

We have also seen soft-on-crime prosecutors refuse to prosecute many people charged with crimes; no-bail policies that released those accused of crimes, many with multiple previous charges, back onto the street without having to post bail; and violent protests against police departments that resulted in much damage to public and private property, but relatively few people held to account for their criminal behavior.

How police should react to various situations involving crimes was then “re-imagined,” and new ideas about dealing with crime appeared. While some advocated doing away with police altogether, another idea was that of using “soft police,” where social workers, rather than trained uniformed officers, would deal with crimes and criminals.

Mariame Kaba is described as an American activist, grassroots organizer, and educator who advocates for the abolition of prisons, and all police.

At about the time the George Floyd riots and protests began, Kaba had published an article in The New York Times in which she wrote: “As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm. People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation.”

She suggests that the problems of safety and justice can be solved by spending more taxpayer money on housing, food, and education, rather than making people pay a price for breaking the well-known and sensible laws.

In the years since this soft-on-crime approach began, crime has increased substantially across the nation, particularly in blue cities and states where this foolish philosophy exists.

One example of this was reported by the FBI. From 2019, before the soft-on-crime mentality appeared, to 2020, following the Floyd death, the national murder rate jumped by 30 percent, the largest single-year increase in history.

Many of us, likely most of us, understand that the system that has been in effect since the origins of the United States of America actually is the more sensible and successful system.

A fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Rafael Mangual, showed the fallacy of not enforcing laws in the traditional way. Police presence, he said, often is all that is needed to deter crime. But removing criminals from the street is also a needed action.

“If a police officer makes an arrest and removes an active offender from the street, if that’s someone who was committing 10, 20, 30 felonies a year,” he said, “that individual being in custody spares the community the crimes that would have otherwise been committed.” Makes sense, doesn’t it?

“In the city of Chicago, the typical homicide suspect has 12 prior arrests,” he continued. “One in five [homicide suspects], 20 prior arrests, these are not just individuals who are being locked up for the first offense and having the key thrown away.”

And he added that crime will always be with us, but removing or reducing the successful practice of having a police presence is “irresponsible.”

As for the public perception of the crime problem, a Gallup poll from last November shows that among both Democrats and Republicans, the number who believe that crime is a serious problem is at the highest point since Gallup started reporting it in 2000.

Predictably, the left responded to the perception of crime being a serious problem, saying it is just a “moral panic.”

But this “moral panic” is the result of seeing what the soft on crime idea has produced: murders, robberies, rapes, assaults, and more.

The Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald understands the fallacy of these current trends towards crime. She noted how criminals have become more brazen and the commission of many kinds of crimes exploded.

Focusing on the increase in retail crimes that the left-wing scholars ignore, she said, “Our criminal justice elites have decided that they would rather subject the property of honest businessmen to mass expropriation than to apprehend and punish looters, because doing so has a disparate impact on minority criminals.” And, she correctly said that these crimes are “not crimes of necessity, they are crimes of opportunity.”

In the criminal mind is the attitude, “if I won’t be punished, why not rob the store?”

“This is not a normal state,” she said. “It is due to a failure of will. The will to enforce the values of civilized society.”

“It is not a ‘moral panic’ to be concerned about the lawlessness that has broken out since 2020, it is realism,” MacDonald said.

After years of being horrified with what has happened, the public is finally supporting a return to sensibly dealing with crime. Perhaps things will soon begin to change. Cities like San Francisco and Washington, DC have begun to make changes. And not a moment too soon.

The debate over the death penalty in the United States begins anew

Since Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College to win the presidency, and especially since Trump was sworn in, the news has been filled with all manner of items, some of them silly, nit-picking and embarrassing for the media, and others of varying degrees of importance and interest.

Among the actual news items was the choice of the excellent Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court and the battle that ensued to confirm him; the Syrian air base strike and the MOAB bombing of an ISIS tunnel/cave installation in Afghanistan; and more recently the situation in Arkansas where the state intended to execute eight death row inmates in the 11 days remaining before the end of April when one of the drugs used in executions reached its expiration date.

This latter development produced quite a lot of comment, most of it negative from opponents of the death penalty.

The death penalty is sanctioned through the 5^th and 14^th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and each death row inmate had been convicted and had many years to appeal their sentence or conviction, so why so much controversy? Many were horrified not about the death penalty itself, but that Arkansas would conduct so many executions in such a short period.

The death penalty is a matter of long, spirited debate, notwithstanding its constitutional and Biblical validations.

The religious aspect is important in the United States, since among the volumes of things former President Barack Obama misunderstands about America is its still-strong religious nature. Of the 35,000 participants from all 50 states polled in a 2014 Pew Research Center study of Religion and Public Life, Christians accounted for 70 percent of participants, and more than 75 percent claimed some religious affiliation.

While our government is not founded on any set of religious beliefs, people with religious beliefs have been a major segment of the population since the nation’s founding, and their beliefs heavily influenced the founding principles, and that influence still exists today.

Many Christians, along with people holding other religious beliefs, and still others who do not cite religion at all, object to the death penalty on its failure of compassion. “How can religious and other compassionate people indulge in such a barbaric act?” the argument goes.

Steve Stephens, a 37-year-old black man, was having trouble with his girlfriend, so naturally he decided the solution was to randomly pick out someone to kill. After mentioning the woman’s name to 74 year-old Robert Godwin Sr., also a black man that he came upon while searching for a victim, he shot and killed the unsuspecting and totally innocent Godwin.

Stephens’ stupid and vicious murder highlights this issue. Many believe that someone who intentionally and deliberately murders another person and inflicts shock and grief on that person’s family and friends somehow is entitled to the compassion the murderer sadistically denied the victim(s).

One religious argument against executions is that it denies the criminal the opportunity to repent and even use his/her experience to try to turn others to religion and away from crime.

Others believe, however, the condemned deserves no consideration or compassion when his or her justice is rendered. “Should not that person suffer at least as much as the victim and those close to the victim?” this argument goes.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1972 allowed the resumption of the death penalty, its use has dropped off substantially. While 31 states still legally allow executions, ten of them have executed no one in the last ten years, and 26 have executed no one in the last five years.

Several reasons are cited: the possibility of executing an innocent person; botched executions; a decline in the crime rate; and the cost of fighting those opposing the imposition of the death penalty in capital cases.

There are five legal methods of execution – firing squad, gas chamber, hanging, electrocution, and lethal injection – and lethal injection is the hands-down preferred method. Much of the opposition to the other four comes down to how “unpleasant” each of those methods is to the condemned, with lethal injection normally being the least uncomfortable. However, even lethal injections sometimes cause suffering to the condemned.

There is an on-going debate over whether the United States should have a death penalty. Another debate centers on making the execution as easy on the condemned as possible.

Perhaps this represents a true expression of compassion, or maybe it is one more step toward making executions so difficult and expensive that eventually it will be abandoned, in favor of keeping vicious criminals alive and relatively comfortable in prison for the rest of their lives at a tremendous cost to taxpayers.

As long as there is a death penalty, someone who is absolutely proven guilty of committing a capital crime and sentenced to death should collect his or her just reward in a reasonable amount of time (which will be in fewer than 10 or 20 years), as efficiently as possible, and as inexpensively as possible. If it hurts a little, or a lot, too bad.

Of all factors involved, the concerns of the criminal come last.

The American immigration system, a la President Barack Obama

A common refrain about immigration is that the U.S. “is a nation of immigrants.” People coming to the colonies built what would become the United States of America, and since then millions have immigrated here.

“Most immigrant groups that had formerly come to America by choice seemed distinct, but in fact had many similarities,” as ushistory.org explains. “Most had come from Northern and Western Europe. Most had some experience with representative democracy. With the exception of the Irish, most were Protestant. Many were literate, and some possessed a fair degree of wealth.”

Most, but not all immigrants intended to become American citizens. Some, however, returned to their native land after earning money to send home. Not all were good people; some were criminals, mentally ill, anarchists, and alcoholics.

Furthermore, many Americans were not thrilled about immigration, and ushistory.org tells us, “In 1917, Congress required the passing of a literacy test to gain admission. Finally, in 1924, the door was shut to millions by placing an absolute cap on new immigrants based on ethnicity. That cap was based on the United States population of 1890 and was therefore designed to favor the previous immigrant groups.”

Throughout the decades and the problems and controversy that accompanied immigration, diversity came to the US, which had become a nation of primarily peaceful, self-reliant, hard-working people, qualities they generally passed on to the next generation.

However, the concept that America is a nation of immigrants is less and less valid. Today, the USA is a nation not so much of immigrants, but principally a nation of the descendants of people who were immigrants generations ago; a nation of Americans.

Our government has the duty to admit immigrants who want to become good American citizens, as demonstrated in the previously discussed examples of acts affecting immigration. No sensible person would allow people they cannot be virtually certain are good and honorable people into their homes; our government must be every bit as cautious.

But instead we find that the current immigration system is wholly dysfunctional, and the responsibility goes squarely on the shoulders of President Barack Obama and his administration. The idea held by many on the Left – that we are morally obligated to admit any and all who seek entry, legally or otherwise – is not just dumb, it is dangerous. And that concept has no basis in history or in the Constitution.

Nevertheless, that foolish idea has strong support, and it set the stage for what happened in a hearing of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee this past April, when Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, addressed comments to those testifying, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Sarah Soldana.

Chaffetz listed some startling facts:

** In a three-year period Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has released more than 86,000 criminal aliens into the American public. These are people who were here illegally, got caught committing a crime, were convicted of that crime, and instead of deporting them, they were released back out into the United States of America. All told they had more than 231,000 crimes of which they were convicted.

** In 2015, 196 of these people were convicted of homicide, and ICE released them back into the public, rather than deporting them.

** One hundred and twenty-four of those who were released between 2010 and 2015 went on to commit homicide.

** In 2013 ICE released 36,007 criminal aliens who were unlawfully in the United States. As of September 2014, 5,700 of those individuals went on to commit additional crimes.

** In March of 2015, the director of ICE testified before this committee that during fiscal year 2014 ICE released another 30,558 individuals with a combined 79,059 criminal convictions, instead of deporting them. Of those 30,558 criminal aliens 1,895 were charged with another crime following their release, including sex offenses, assault, burglary, robbery, and driving under the influence.

“And ICE told us that in 2015 the agency released 19,723 criminal aliens with a combined 64,197 convictions,” Chaffetz said, “including: 934 sex offenses, 804 robberies, 216 kidnappings, and 196 homicide-related convictions. And that’s on your watch.” They were here illegally, committed crimes, were caught, tried and convicted, and then turned loose to prey on the American people again.

He then displayed an aerial photo of Notre Dame football stadium filled with game watchers, and said, “You released more people that were convicted of crimes and should have been deported than you can fit into that stadium. You’d still have people waiting outside in line. Those are the criminals that you released instead of deporting.”

Government’s job is to seal the borders from illegal entry, to thoroughly vet people before letting the acceptable ones in, and to prosecute and punish criminals. Put them in jail, or at the very least deport them and keep them out.

Do these colossal government failures rise to the level of criminal offenses? Should they? Or, is such dangerous and irresponsible behavior “merely” gross malfeasance? Is there no penalty for such wrongdoing, whether criminal or not?

Not in the administration of Barack Obama, where apparently the treacherous operation of this immigration system is a matter of celebration by his supporters.

Ferguson, Missouri, is really a story of inappropriate reactions

The death of a black teenager at the hands of a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and the events before and after the shooting, have raised many questions: about race relations, about the behavior of police, about the militarization of local and state police forces, and whether and to what extent the self-serving and often-biased behavior of the national media makes things worse.

The most important thing about this episode is that no one really knows what happened, except the 18 year-old male, who is now dead, and the police officer who shot him.

Maybe the black residents of Ferguson are correct in their belief that the police officer murdered an innocent black teen.

If the police officer did indeed kill the boy without justification, or used excessive force, he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Several times this column has pointed out examples of unjustified and stupid use of force by law enforcement officials at all levels. Police must be held to account when they break the law, or injure innocent people, just like the rest of us.

But perhaps other information that shows the young black male as something other than the “gentle giant” he has been portrayed to be is correct. And if so, that also has to be taken into account.

In such emotional situations as this one, people’s initial reactions are usually based upon their existing attitudes about those involved. Perhaps they believe white police officers are biased against black residents. Or, perhaps they believe the worst of the black people involved. And, the stronger the emotions involved, the stronger the reaction to the situation is likely to be.

That seems to be precisely what happened.

The majority black population in Ferguson immediately believed the white policeman murdered the black youth, while others believed the worst about the black youngster and thought the police officer was justified in shooting him. Black residents demonstrated and protested, leading to police responses that mostly made things worse.

There are pieces of information floating around to support both the black youth and the white policeman, but what is lacking is being able to know which of all of these various pieces of information are credible and which are not. Investigating crimes frequently takes time, and first impressions about what happened are often wrong.

If they are devoted to objectively and accurately reporting events, news organizations can help settle initial emotional reactions. But if other considerations take precedence, the way news outlets handle events can stir things up further.

One issue is that of proportionality: as serious as this situation is in Ferguson, Missouri, one must ask the question of whether in the universe of important events this situation truly justifies the hundreds of hours of breathless, up-front coverage given to it by the dominant news outlets?

The Media Research Center (MRC) is a 501(c)(3) media watchdog organization, which is one of several organizations that looks and reports on the performance of the national media. Brent Bozell, MRC’s founder and president, comments: “You’ve got a hundred blacks [that] have been shot by white cops. What happened to the other 99? Why don’t they merit coverage?” And then, “You’ve got 5,000 blacks killed by blacks. Why isn’t that news?”

Both are fair questions, and important questions.

In cases such as the Ferguson shooting death, Mr. Bozell rightly says that “this is where the media, more than ever, need to be disinterested, neutral observers.”

There’s enough tragedy in this story to go around. The parents, relatives and friends of the young black man whose life is now over obviously have a tragedy to cope with. But so do the relatives, friends and co-workers of the white policeman.

If we analyze how the national broadcast and online media, and major daily newspapers operate, it is evident that news organizations often glom onto a story based not just on the news value of the story itself, but whether the story fits in with certain of the dominant media’s favored narratives. A story about a white cop shooting a young black male has greater media appeal than a story about white man killing another white man, or a black man killing another black man.

Further, too often it is a matter of who is first with something, not who gets it right. The online and cable/broadcast outlets have to furnish 24 hours of content a day, and if you ain’t first, you ain’t in the game. So any little tidbit of new information becomes a headline, or “Breaking News.” And it is not unusual for these “urgent” items to be relatively unimportant, or may be either iffy or flat out wrong.

Quite a lot of the accounts we have seen, heard and read in the news are incomplete, contain unverified elements, and sometimes are biased. The media may eventually report the unvarnished truth, or not, but the chaos that occurs in the interim stirs emotions on all sides, and obfuscates the truth, which is precisely opposite to the responsibility the news media have to serve the public.

Good journalism demands more, much more, than this.

An item from the “truth is much stranger than fiction” department

Mobile, Alabama’s hometown TV station WALA FOX10 reports the following story, which contains comments that will leave most people scratching their head in disbelief.

An unidentified man who was shopping at the local Family Dollar store in Mobile saw a masked man pointing a gun at an employee and leading the employee toward the front of the store.

When he moved closer to investigate, he found the following: “He had the gun to his head. He had him on his knees,” said the man. “I drew my gun on him and I said 'Hey, don't move.' At that point he swung around and before he had a chance to aim the gun at me, I fired. I didn’t want to shoot him,” he said.

The gunman, 18-year-old Adric White, was not killed, and was transported to a local hospital where he was treated and is now recuperating in police custody at the hospital. A second young man, 19-year-old Tavoris Moss has been arrested as an accomplice to the Family Dollar robbery, although the FOX10 story did not explain the role he is accused of playing in the incident.

Court records show that Adric White was out on bond for robbing The Original Oyster House at gunpoint a little more than a month before the Family Dollar robbery, and records show the Baldwin County District Attorney's Office has now filed to have the bond in that case revoked.

Summarizing this incident, a young man out on bond for armed robbery was holding an employee of a retail establishment at gunpoint, and was challenged by a Good Samaritan with a gun, who then shot the young man when the Good Samaritan thought he was about to be shot.

Where this story gets really strange is in the reaction of Adric White’s family. The relatives of this young man who had already been charged in one armed robbery and was wounded in a second attempt to rob a store at gunpoint might reasonably condemn the young man’s behavior and be thankful that this wayward son is still alive and in relatively good condition, and therefore might be subject to rehabilitation. But that is not how at least some of his relatives reacted.

A female family member who did not want to be identified said the 18-year-old should have never been shot to begin with.

“If his (the customer’s) life was not in danger, if no one had a gun up to him, if no one pointed a gun at him - what gives him the right to think that it's okay to just shoot someone?” said the relative. “You should have just left the store and went wherever you had to go in your car or whatever,” FOX10 reported the relative as saying.

Apparently, judging from this relative’s comments she believes the victim in this scenario is the robber holding the employee at gunpoint, not the employee being held at gunpoint. And, the person who has done wrong is not the guy holding an employee at gunpoint during a robbery, but the Good Samaritan who thwarts a robbery and saves the employee from possible harm or death at the hands of the robber.

Where does such upside-down thinking develop? Is it a feature of only a relative few troubled minds, or is it far more widespread? Is it born in a soul convinced that he/she is entitled and therefore can do no wrong, or somehow is not subject to the laws governing our behavior? Is it a product of a failing culture that has not imparted basic American and human values to more recent generations?

Interestingly, FOX10 had interviewed Adric White’s parents, but the station reports that they later called the station and demanded the video not be aired. We are left to wonder whether they share the screwy morality of the relative whose sentiments were reported above.

For the record, the police emphasize that the Good Samaritan – whose name was not released, perhaps for his own protection – who shot the alleged robber was justified and broke no laws.

“[Criminals] tend to think that they are the only ones with guns," the Good Samaritan told FOX10. "I’ve been legally carrying my firearm for a little over four years now, and thank God I’ve never had to use it until, of course, last night. It just goes to show it's good to have a concealed carry [permit]. You never know when you’re going to need it.”

This story is sure to contribute to the fierce debate over gun control. It is a point in favor of the idea held by many of those who defend the constitutional right of Americans to keep and bear arms that the best way to combat a bad guy with a gun is the presence of a good guy with a gun. It shows that there may be positive results when law-abiding citizens are armed.

Whichever side of that argument you are on, we can all acknowledge that because of the behavior of this man legally carrying a gun, a robbery was thwarted and the perpetrator did not harm anyone.

Happy New Year!

Privacy under attack? Stop-and-frisk vs. NSA surveillance

As Americans, we each have a guaranteed right to privacy. The online legal site FindLaw explains it this way: “The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects personal privacy, and every citizen's right to be free from unreasonable government intrusion into their persons, homes, businesses, and property – whether through police stops of citizens on the street, arrests, or searches of homes and businesses.”

That seems plain enough, but how one interprets the word “unreasonable” provides ample opportunity for mischief, as well as for good law enforcement.

As for good law enforcement, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has credited the City’s stop-and-frisk policy with helping drive crime to record lows since the policing policy was implemented in 1994, with the murder rate falling by an astounding 82 percent by 2009.

New York’s stop-and-frisk policy seeks to prevent crime before it happens by deploying officers with pinpoint precision to critical street segments in high-crime areas where they interact with individuals displaying suspicious behavior: they approach, question, and sometimes frisk the individuals. That practice has led to fewer people, such as members of street gangs, risking arrest by carrying a weapon on their person, and with fewer gang bangers carrying weapons, there are fewer spur-of-the-moment shootings in New York, and correspondingly fewer deaths.

You might think that, given the obvious level of success in reducing the murder rate in the Big Apple, such a policy would fall outside the Fourth Amendment’s proscription against “unreasonable” searches. But you would be wrong, according to U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin, who believes that the policy indeed does violate the Fourth Amendment protection.

Mayor Bloomberg believes that the judge's decision will cause a reduction in the use of stop-and-frisk, which would reverse crime reductions and make his city a more dangerous place. And data indicates he is correct. In 2011, guns were used in 61 percent of all homicides, but in black neighborhoods 86 percent of young black males died from gunfire. Stop-and-frisk reduced the total number of deaths by reducing the number of guns on the streets.

The challenge to the policy arose because officers stop minority residents at a rate disproportionate to their number in the general population. But those stops are not disproportionate to the minority resident population in the crime-ridden neighborhoods or disproportionate to the number of crimes minorities commit in those neighborhoods.

As we have seen recently, there is the possibility that authorities may lose perspective and become abusive in the use of policies like this one, but supervisors are charged to competently manage their operation. And due to the depths of its crime problem when the policy was implemented, New York police applied stop-and-frisk more aggressively than other cities. But whether or not the City is too aggressive ought not be decided without considering its unique circumstances and surprising rate of success in reducing murders.

An opposite approach to systematically and thoughtfully targeting areas where crimes mostly occur and populations that most often commit them like New York City is doing is the blanket, indiscriminate, suspicion-less spying on telephone, email and other private communications and activities of millions of Americans by the National Security Agency.

The government’s spying on Americans is so egregious – eavesdroppers broke privacy rules or overstepped their legal authority thousands of times every year – it’s no wonder the administration wants to arrest and try Edward Snowden for making the information about its spying public.

Where New York police might appear to have been over-aggressive in implementing stop-and-frisk, the federal government’s policy itself is over-aggressive by design. Surely, observers familiar with the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions on searches would be unable to conclude anything other than that NSA spying is precisely why there is a Fourth Amendment.

As reported in The Washington Times, “A Top Secret internal NSA audit, leaked by Mr. Snowden to freelance journalist Barton Gellman earlier this summer and published online by The Washington Post Thursday night shows that, in the 12 months prior to May 2012, there were 2,776 incidents of ‘unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications’ — those between Americans or foreigners legally in the United States.”

“Most were unintended,” according to The Post. “Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure.” Even if the problems were unintended, sloppiness certainly is no excuse: The infringements are no less wrong, no less a breach of individual privacy, and no less intolerable.

The larger the scope of a program, the greater the chance that something will go wrong, and the more opportunities there are for something to go wrong. Congressman Peter King (R-NY) defends the program, saying that the situation is being blown out of proportion, that the rate of error is miniscule.

Maybe so; however, since the NSA program seeks to find a few fake grains of sand on a beach, and involves millions upon millions of records. For every million records, ten thousand mistakes can be made, affecting the privacy of ten thousand Americans, and the success rate is 99 percent.

Even if such gargantuan programs are run efficiently and competently, they are examples of unjustified government excess, and should not be allowed.

We must take a serious look at our laws and how they are enforced

Most people are for law and order, and most obey the laws that keep society functioning. And most have great respect for the men and women who have the sometimes-dangerous job of enforcing those laws.

That said, some laws are just plain dumb and should be done away with, and what is more important, there are so many laws, rules and regulations today that no one can know all the decrees from the federal, state and local governments that affect him or her, and therefore it is impossible to obey them all. This over-regulated environment puts each of us in the position of likely being in violation of one or more of them at any given moment.

What's worse than so many decrees from so many sources, however, is what seems to be a growing tendency of law enforcement agencies at all levels to imagine that even tiny infractions warrant the most dramatic responses.

Case in point: After making a purchase at a Charlottesville, Va. grocery store one night, a 20-year-old University of Virginia student and two roommates were approached in their car by a group of six men and one woman in street clothes. "They were showing unidentifiable badges after they approached us, but we became frightened, as they were not in anything close to a uniform," she recalled in a written account of the incident.

Police say one of the group jumped on the hood of her car. The girl said one drew a gun, and they tried to break out car windows. Unsure who they were, the girl tried to flee the dark parking lot and called 911. Given the circumstances and stories of people being assaulted by phony police officers, who could blame her?

It turned out to be a squad of plainclothes state Alcoholic Beverage Control officers who suspected the girl had purchased beer in the store – she hadn’t – and was under-age. She spent the night in jail as a result.

Question: Who at the ABC thought this procedure actually made sense? Is it reasonable for a squad of plainclothes agents to approach three female college students in a dark parking lot, fail to adequately identify themselves, point a gun at them, jump on their car and try to break out the windows because they think one of them had bought beer that she might not be old enough to purchase?

Prosecutors dropped charges against the young woman, describing her as having panicked at the sight of plainclothes agents who approached her and her roommates.

Case 2: When the Leander, Texas police wanted to serve a warrant on Bradly Simpson, they sent officers to his home. When no one responded to the knock on the front door, a couple of officers walked around the side of the house toward the back yard whereupon they saw two German Shepards coming toward them. One officer pulled his gun and fired three shots. The police said the dog was growling and aggressively coming at them. Fortunately, the officer’s aim was not good and only one of the dogs was hit, but only wounded.

After that spectacle, the police were unable to serve the warrant because they were at the wrong address, and in the wrong neighborhood. Worse than that, not far from where the dog was shot the home owners’ terminally-ill six year-old grandchild was playing.

Worse, yet, the home owners said neither dog was aggressive, that they were merely curious about who was visiting their home, and had never behaved the way the police claimed. And, as it turns out, the lady of the house is a professional dog trainer, and therefore knows about dog behavior, and furthermore noted that there are routinely customers visiting her home, so strangers don’t spook her dogs.

And what heinous crime prompted the police to go to Mr. Simpson’s home to serve the warrant? He had an expired vehicle registration.

Leander police officials say what happened was "an unfortunate accident." Wrong: What happened is that the police screwed up.

The number of rogue law enforcement personnel that intentionally abuse their authority and position is surely very small. Nevertheless, instances of over-aggressive law enforcement action and plain dumb mistakes like these are indefensible and intolerable, and there appears to be a growing attitude toward over-aggressive behavior.  

To maintain the public trust and respect government and law enforcement are going to have to stop doing stupid and dangerous things like these examples, and even worse incidents that have caused serious injury and even death for innocent citizens.

Solutions? Do we really need so many law enforcement officers that seven of them can spend nights sitting around in one store parking lot waiting to catch an under-age person buying beer? Does an expired registration really justify armed police visiting the vehicle owner’s home?

What about accountability? Officials that exercise bad judgment or act rashly must be disciplined, encouraging them to carefully consider how to properly and safely do their jobs, and also demonstrating that public officials really take seriously their duty to adequately serve the people they work for.

Something must be done, and the sooner, the better.