In Memory of the 140 people murdered in Oakland so far.

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Justin24

Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2006/12/28/MNGQ8N95TB1.DTL&o=0&type=default

I teared up listening to the voices during the slide show of the children who lost there parent(s)

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/bayarea/oaklandhomicides/list
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/bayarea/oaklandhomicides/living

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Alberto Salvador Villarreal Morales

Age: 15 Date of death: 1/15/06 Occupation: Student at Berkeley High Race: Hispanic Weapon used: Handgun

"He hugged me and said, 'OK mom, I love you so much,' (and) he left" — Alberto's mother

:sad:
 
:shocked:
And this is only 1 city. :ohmy:
Last year (2005) the total for the whole of the Netherlands was 202 or so. Still, 202 too many, but it seems it's still relatively save here...

All those lifes terminated. :(
 
Well I am not making this an Execution thread, thank you very much, that was yesterday.
 
^ Exactly.

It seems a bit hypocritical to sit on the high horse and criticize someone for being pro-capital punishment, and then make jokes about murder victims.

The saddest thing is that number will likely climb between now & New Year's Day :(
 
Popmartijn said:
:shocked:
And this is only 1 city. :ohmy:
Last year (2005) the total for the whole of the Netherlands was 202 or so. Still, 202 too many, but it seems it's still relatively save here...

All those lifes terminated. :(

and the netherlands have 16.500.000 people. oakland only has 400.000.
 
Wasn't Laci Peterson's body found about ten miles or so from there?

Now that was a newsworthy story.

That story was riveting.

Something us Americans could relate to.

That Peterson guy could have been our husband, son-in-law, or brother-in-law.
 
The last year I could quickly find for the whole of Australia was 2004, and we (population 20,000,000) had 'only' 300 murders across the whole country.
 
deep said:
Wasn't Laci Peterson's body found about ten miles or so from there?

Now that was a newsworthy story.

That story was riveting.

Something us Americans could relate to.

That Peterson guy could have been our husband, son-in-law, or brother-in-law.

It was actually Richmond not Oakland were she was found.
 
Earnie Shavers said:
The last year I could quickly find for the whole of Australia was 2004, and we (population 20,000,000) had 'only' 300 murders across the whole country.

I find that 300 figure disturbing enough.

This is hard for me to comprehend. Australia, 20,000,000 people, 300 murders. The Netherlands, 16,500,000 people, 202 murders. Oakland, 400,000 people, 140+ murders. WTF? Why?

I know I'm not asking anything original, but I don't think I've ever seen a really good explanation for this kind of disparity. Anybody got one?
 
We Yanks are just more violent. Not sure why though. I'd bet the vast majority of our murders are committed with guns, are guns as common and accessible in Oz & Holland as they are here? I'd guess it's a combination of population density (US cities w/hight murder rates tend to be the more densely populated ones), ready availability of guns, and our violent nature.
 
Most murders in Oakland are gang/drug-trafficking related--not sure if that constitutes any sort of explanation or not. They've ranked very high on the national violent crime listings for quite awhile now. As if often the case with US cities with high homicide rates, the overwhelming majority of the murders occurred in specific, highly localized areas. I'm not sure what the rates of gang activity in the Netherlands or Australia are like.
 
1/70,000 people are murdered in Australia.
Netherlands is roughly 1/83,000.
Oakland is a shade under 1/3000.
The US overall clocks in at 1/18,000.

I don't know about the Netherlands, but Australia has tough gun laws and no death penalty.
 
yolland said:
Most murders in Oakland are gang/drug-trafficking related--not sure if that constitutes any sort of explanation or not. They've ranked very high on the national violent crime listings for quite awhile now. As if often the case with US cities with high homicide rates, the overwhelming majority of the murders occurred in specific, highly localized areas. I'm not sure what the rates of gang activity in the Netherlands or Australia are like.

Yes but there are innocent people who get killed too.
 
yolland said:
Most murders in Oakland are gang/drug-trafficking related--not sure if that constitutes any sort of explanation or not. They've ranked very high on the national violent crime listings for quite awhile now. As if often the case with US cities with high homicide rates, the overwhelming majority of the murders occurred in specific, highly localized areas. I'm not sure what the rates of gang activity in the Netherlands or Australia are like.

all good points

like I was saying
is this newsworthy?

It is not like what happened to Laci Peterson
or the pretty little blond girl
that took a vacation and disappeared:ohmy:

those incidents could have happened to one of us
or one of our loved ones.
 
CTU2fan said:
I'd guess it's a combination of population density (US cities w/hight murder rates tend to be the more densely populated ones), ready availability of guns, and our violent nature.

I'm not sure the population density argument holds, as I believe The Netherlands is one of the most densely populated countries on earth. The availability of guns would certainly have to be a factor though - the ready availability of guns in the US shocked me when I visited.
 
this discussion is beginning to remind me of the last scene in bowling for columbine, the interview with charlton heston.

whos gonna be the first one to say that the u.s. has had a violent history?
 
I don't think the violence in the US's history can even begin to compare to that in Europe's history.
 
Axver said:
I don't think the violence in the US's history can even begin to compare to that in Europe's history.

that was the next thing someone had to say :wink:
 
Axver said:
The availability of guns would certainly have to be a factor though - the ready availability of guns in the US shocked me when I visited.

Interesting. I've lived here my whole life and most males in my families own guns (for hunting), but I wouldn't have the slightest clue where to go if I was interested in one.

But yeah I agree that guns and gang violence are fair speculations.

Are there lots of gang problems in the Netherlands or Australia?

I live in a relatively small city (pop 200,000 w/ 1.5mil metro pop) and a decade ago it was like an all out gang war in certain parts of town. We moved because of the violence. It wasn't safe for kids to play in their own yards. It was just nuts, considering the size of the city and our location within the country. We've even got special units of the police department devoted to studying the gangs here. Just a few years ago, there were two drive-by shooting deaths (gang/drugs related) right in front of my old elementary school! I just don't get it. Gangs and guns everywhere.

I think the whole "war on drugs" and gangs and such has been too introspective. We should be looking at other countries and studying why they DON'T have as many gang problems and shooting deaths as we do here.
 
to be fair, european countries are starting to experience some of the same problems with gangs and murder that the u.s. has had. the gangs mostly consist of young, muslim men.
 
Out of curiosity, I was comparing crime level stats of other cities the same size as my hometown. Birmingham, AL had 104 murders in 2004. That's 1/2335 :ohmy:
 
There is a German website that carries some statistics and these statistics show that it's not really the weapon laws or the population density that leads to a higher homicide rate.
http://www.fwr.de/zahlen und fakten.htm
The first table is: US-State | Adults owning weapons | Homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants.

The next one is: Country | Households with weapons | Homicides with guns per 100,000 inhabitants.

The site also says that e.g. in Vermont there are more weapons, and more liberal weapon laws, but less killings compared to New York.

Also, countries like Germany or England have very strict weapon laws, but also a higher rate of illegal weapons among the people.

It seems a bit strange, but the study quoted on that site, Prof Lott, University of Illinois, More Guns, Less Crime 1998, found out that states that allow the concealed carrying usually have crimes, and the table shows the estimated reduction in crimes if the concealed carrying of weapons was allowed all over the US:
Homicide: -1,400
Rape: -3,700
robbery: -11,000
aggravated assault: -60,000

But an article from Amnesty International stated that in Australia that rate of crimes with guns decreased by 45 per cent after weapon laws became more strict.

I think a big problem is social security.
If you are facing social problems, like unemployment or some expensive operation, and you can't rely on the help of your state, and your future prospects are bad, you're more likely to become a criminal than if you get some support from your state or society.

Also, the problem with gangs that kill each other is more common in the US,
I've never heard of any gang fight here in Germany or another European country, with the exception of the "war" between the Hell's Angels and Bandidos that took place in Denmark some years ago.

Our "FBI", the Bundeskriminalamt, says there were 413 homicides in 2005 with 82.4 million inhabitants. 119 times weapons were at least present, but not always used.
But we also have a lot of cases a homicide isn't discovered (no victim or seen as accident) or is decided to be manslaughter, bodily harm with fatal consequences or something else. 95.8% of cases were solved.
 
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deep said:
like I was saying
is this newsworthy?

It is not like what happened to Laci Peterson
or the pretty little blond girl
that took a vacation and disappeared:ohmy:

those incidents could have happened to one of us
or one of our loved ones.
Well my little sister happens to live in southwest Oakland, so it's certainly newsworthy to me. I'm not, however, particularly worried about her being murdered by her nonexistent husband, nor about her vanishing on some trip to Aruba she could never afford anyhow. :shrug:
Justin24 said:
Yes but there are innocent people who get killed too.
Of course there are, I wasn't suggesting otherwise. Ordinary folks who are just trying to raise their families and eke out a living in peace live in high-crime neighborhoods too, and they can and do get caught in the crossfire just like anyone else.
Liesje said:
I've lived here my whole life and most males in my families own guns (for hunting), but I wouldn't have the slightest clue where to go if I was interested in one.

But yeah I agree that guns and gang violence are fair speculations.

I live in a relatively small city (pop 200,000 w/ 1.5mil metro pop) and a decade ago it was like an all out gang war in certain parts of town. We moved because of the violence. It wasn't safe for kids to play in their own yards. It was just nuts, considering the size of the city and our location within the country. We've even got special units of the police department devoted to studying the gangs here. Just a few years ago, there were two drive-by shooting deaths (gang/drugs related) right in front of my old elementary school! I just don't get it. Gangs and guns everywhere.
Most people where I grew up in rural Mississippi owned guns too (and plus everyone was poor, alcoholism was very common, racial tensions were high etc. etc.), yet the murder rate there was very low. Where we lived later in Brooklyn, very few people owned guns, but the murder rate was much higher. I'm not at all opposed to stricter gun control laws, however, as has been mentioned before in threads on this topic, guns in high-homicide areas tend to be acquired through illegal means anyhow.

I feel just awful for people who are financially stuck in high-crime areas and even worse for those who have to watch their own sons get drawn into that cycle. Most of the murder victims in Oakland are young men 20 to 24 years old--far too young to have had a chance to know much else in too many cases. It's not an excuse for anything, but what a thing to be responsible for having to extricate yourself from and pull yourself out of on your own.
 
Liesje said:
Interesting. I've lived here my whole life and most males in my families own guns (for hunting), but I wouldn't have the slightest clue where to go if I was interested in one.

I've only known one person in my entire life who at one point in his life owned a gun. In New Zealand, the regular police don't even carry guns, so I was shocked enough when I came to Australia and saw the police here carrying them. It made my family a bit uncomfortable initially. So I was really shocked when I went to Tennessee and saw guns for sale at regular sporting goods stores! When I walk into a shop like that, I expect to be able to buy rugby balls, treadmills, running shoes, and stuff like that, not guns too! It struck me as reckless and dangerous.

Are there lots of gang problems in the Netherlands or Australia?

By US standards, not really, but there are active gangs, especially in Melbourne and Sydney. They are mainly ethnic communities, such as Lebanese and nationalities from the former Yugoslavia. I know the gang situation in New Zealand a bit better, as there are some problems with Maori gangs such as the Mongrel Mob, especially on the south side of Auckland.
 
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