Bush is wrecking everything, Part 2,793

This'll get some spin, for better and for worse:

"Violent Crime On the Rise for First Time in 5 Years, FBI Reports"

Murders, robberies and aggravated assaults in the United States increased last year, spurring an overall rise in violent crime for the first time since 2001, according to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

[...]

Criminal justice experts said the statistics reflect U.S. complacency in fighting crime, a product of dramatic declines in the 1990s and the abandonment of effective programs that emphasized prevention, putting more police officers on the street and controlling the spread of guns.

"We see that budgets for policing are being slashed and the federal government has gotten out of that business," said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston. "Funding for prevention at the federal level and many localities are down and the (National Rifle Association) has renewed strength."

Still, Fox said, "We're still far better off than we were during the double-digit crime inflation we saw in the 1970s."

Fox doesn't bat an eyelid - and neither does the reporter - over his inference that the NRA creates criminals and that budget slashing from the federal level is the equivalent of leaving the serfs to fend for themselves with pitchforks outside the castle walls. L 's comment was, "I'm surprised they didn't manage to get No Child Left Behind in there."

The main parallel I see is with the 70s: the significant political divide in the nation, focused on a war and the price of energy. I can't say what the status then was of funding police budgets, but that would be an important statistic to look at - the AP reporter doesn't include any information on these percentages, while happily assuming that they automatically rise with the amount of crime and tax money.

There's also no comment on whether the FBI has changed anything in their methodology of maintaining statistics.

Nonetheless, the writer reports that "Crime last year increased in all regions, although the 5.7 percent rise in the Midwest was at least three times any other region's."

A simple assumption is to ask (rhetorically) what else is coming into the region, the answer being very high percentages of immigrants, both legal and illegal. If not this, then what else?

What I don't expect is for the MSM to address this, unless they believe they can dispell it.

CP @ GMC.