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Emily's avatar

In DC, it was reported that one of the children who murdered the Uber driver had recently also been caught committing another carjacking. I haven't done the statistical analysis on this, but that's something I see a fair amount in violent crimes here - that the perpetrator has recently been caught for illegal gun possession, assault, etc., and they're out on the streets again quickly (in some cases, immediately and while awaiting trial, in some cases after getting a deal involving no or very little jail time.) I don't know to what extent that's a national or merely local phenomenon. That seems bad. Like, extremely bad, both because murder is terrible but also because the government seems to me to be more responsible for a murder committed by someone they just saw for another violent crime and decided to let go. As for doing monitoring instead, that requires a level of competence that may not exist.

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dysphemistic treadmill's avatar

I have been intrigued by several recent popular press articles about detectives settling murder cold-cases via DNA, sometimes through reconstructing family trees in order to reduce the number of leads to a manageable size.

I think that's a great way to clear cases. Here's an even better one:

Put a few billion dollars into testing and banking every rape kit in the country. There are thousands of them lying around, untested. That right there is a fast clearance-method, lying to hand.

"But rapes are hard to prosecute and convict!" you say. And so they are, which is a topic for another post (it's a toxic stew of misogyny and patriarchy, and the fault lies with jurors as much as prosecutors).

But serial rapes are relatively easy to get convictions on. And I am not alone in suspecting that serial rape is fairly common, and would be revealed to be so by a national inventory of the DNA from rape kits.

This would be an excellent use of time and money by the Biden administration. Making people less likely to get raped makes them less afraid to work and travel freely. Looks like smart infrastructure spending to me.

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