On Point: Cautious rejoicing

Published December 20, 2006 at midnight

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Crime in Denver is down this year, but let's not get giddy. It's still higher than it was before it began its steady surge at the turn of this century.

To appreciate the alarming magnitude of what has occurred since, consider this passage from a recent report by the city's "public-safety infrastructure task force":

"The aggregate increase in the number of crimes against persons and property in Denver from 2000 through 2005 was dramatic: a 44 percent increase in burglaries, 38 percent increase in auto thefts, a 28 percent increase in violent crimes, and a 90 percent increase in homicides (which was at a historic low in 2000)."

As a result, the task force said, "Denver's crime rate ranks in the top third of our nation's cities with populations over 100,000, with a higher crime rate than Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Las Vegas and New York."

Yikes!

So give credit where it's deserved for this year's reversal of the trend:

• To Mayor John Hickenlooper, who recognized the burgeoning problem and reacted by lighting a fire under the police department and by hiring New Jersey criminologist George Kelling.

• To Kelling, for being right - once again - about the value of "broken windows" policing and the importance of pouncing on localized crime trends - not to mention the need to recognize those trends through accurate data.

• And, of course, to the police brass and rank-and-file who bought into Kelling's schemes, as well as the need to intensify their overall crime-fighting efforts (by boosting the anemic arrest number, for example).

The upshot: Serious crime in Denver nose-dived by 12.4 percent during the first 10 months of this year, with big declines in robberies, burglaries, auto theft and auto break-ins.

Still, let's not forget that the overall rate remains higher than it used to be - and, for that matter, should be.

Seduced again

Neal Peirce is one of America's few widely syndicated columnists with a focus on state and local affairs, so it's too bad he's a sucker for nearly every "smart growth" shibboleth and associated schemes to enhance the power of government planning offices.

And not only local and state planners, as a recent column makes clear.

"Without being hooted out of the room," he wrote approvingly in regard to an Urban Land Institute conference, "several people asked: Isn't it time - for the first time since the Reagan political revolution - to talk of federal leadership, of setting a national framework of critical priorities in developing our cities and regions?"

No, it isn't time. National land-use planning, in whatever guise, was an atrocious idea when it was pushed in the 1970s and it remains an atrocious idea today. It will encroach on our freedom and on federalism - and probably result in new communities in no way superior to those that would have been built without guidance from the nation's omniscient capital.

It had to be 'You'

You can't really blame Time magazine for its latest gimmick: picking "You" as Person of the Year, complete with a front-page mirror to provide every reader with a better look at the self-satisfied winner. After all, the runner-up was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, and who wants to read another profile of that menacing fanatic?

Time has been naming a Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year) for eight decades, yet you can count on one hand the number of irredeemably despicable world leaders who have grabbed the title alone (Hitler once, Stalin twice and Ayatollah Khomeini once; incredibly, Mao Zedong not ever).

True, French Prime Minister Pierre Laval was chosen in 1931, but that was years before his postwar execution for treason. Yuri Andropov no doubt qualifies as a loathsome thug, but when Time chose him in 1983, it paired him with Ronald Reagan. You could also argue that Nikita Khrushchev (1957) and Deng Xiaoping (1978 and 1985) should be included on the despicable list, but each of these dictators was preferable to the monster who had reigned a few years before - and Deng at least prodded China onto the path of capitalist development.

So there was never much chance for Ahmadinejad to be singled out as Person of the Year. Thank goodness - even if Time's explanation for choosing "You" is almost as goofy as the mirror.

Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes On Point several times a week. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.

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