Murderous Day

Last night I went to Jane's school's basketball game to see Jane cheer. The little ones looked cute and were enthusiastic at the game with their cheering. Sigh...I wish Jane would do as well in math class as she does in cheering. Yesterday was an awful one for New Orleans. None people were shot and two killed in violence right in the midst of Mardi Gras. Tourism is already way down after the hurricane, and the bad publicity about our violence after the storm was was reinforced with national news stories about the shootings.
In the first shooting, two high school boys were murdered as they drove a passenger in their car. The suspicion is that it was a drug related murder. The second shooting involved the other 7 people hit yesterday. Someone walked into a bar and opened fire randomly, hitting the seven victims.
To add to the perception of New Orleans as America's most dangerous city (which it is), news reports also surfaced yesterday that one man was released from jail 24 hours after being booked with murder, and that he has 24 felony arrests (including several murder charges). Yet not once was he ever formally charged or brought o trial. The city has an incompetent District Attorney office that releases criminals as soon as the police arrest them. It's just another nail in the coffin of this city.
Well, I guess crime is is a problem in every society to one degree or another. I think humans have tried just about every way to decrease it, but the other day I read of a rather "unusual" method of stopping the crime of purse snatching. Malaysia's main ruling party has volunteered to help curb that and other street street crime by using the thugs themselves as detectives. They have just announced that they will offer new motorbikes to gangs of illegal street racers if they spend their time catching thieves instead. It seems that Illegal racing and bag-snatch robberies are twin scourges of Malaysian streets, with Bag-snatching by men who grab women's handbags as they race past them on motorcycles, often dragging them head-first into the pavement and sometimes killing them.
"Once they catch at least 30 snatch thieves, we will reward them with a motorcycle each as an incentive," Abdul Azeez Abdul Rahim, head of the party's junior wing, said yesterday. The United Malays National Organization party has tried to reach out to illegal racers, usually jobless or lowly paid young men and women, to persuade them to give up racing and join the party. "Instead of wasting their time, they might as well help police combat crime," Abdul Azeez said. Hmmmmmmmm Trusting criminals to police the streets by bribing them with new motorcycles...
Ha! I think Abdul is probably going to just wind up supplying the thieves with faster motorcycles for their nabbing crimes. One thing for certain, I don't want to hear his next solution when that happens.