Vorige week uitgezonden door de AVRO, zelf nog niet eens beluisterd:
A Forbes-report looks at how the largest 50 cities in the U.S. rank on what’s important for working moms, including jobs, cost of living, health care, education, crime and public parks.
What works for working moms must also work for working dads, I guess.
Generally I do not support the positions of Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party. Actually, I find his party’s success in popular polls and the June 4 election for European Parliament quite nauseating. But I do not object to the Freedom Party’s request to outline the costs and benefits of immigration. It may in fact help to improve current integration policies. After all, meten is weten.
It’s not a very elegant analogy, but one reason crime rates in New York City are down so spectacularly is because the NYPD started to collect detailed statistics on the crime rates per neighborhood on a weekly basis. Maps of crime trends help the police department decide how, when and where to deploy its officers.
The bottom-line is that immigration can be beneficial to society, as long as you help immigrants to make best use of their talents. New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg calls immigrants “the lifeblood” of the City and their contribution “beyond measure”. New York’s immigrant community has very little unemployment and very low crime, particularly the undocumented (illegal) immigrants.
Mike Bloomberg knows best. After all, the mayor is a smart business man. In 1981 he founded Bloomberg LP, a 25 billion dollar financial news organization that employs more than 10,000 people in over 135 offices around the world. Bloomberg’s personal net worth is an estimated 16 billion dollar, according to the most recent Forbes 400 ranking. That makes him the richest man of New York City and the eighth-richest American.
So don’t trust my word on immigration. Trust Mike Bloomberg’s.
Crime rates in New York City keep dropping like autumn leaves despite having fewer police officers on the streets. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) will shrink to little over 34,000 officers within a year, compared to 41,000 officers a decade ago. The crime rate fell from 10,000 crimes per 100,000 people in the late eighties to 2,000 crimes per 100,000 people last year. Murders, which hit 200 on July 1, are heading toward a fresh low. In 1990 the murder rate reached its peak at more than 2,200 murders a year. If New York City were to end this year with 400 murders or less, its murder rate will be quite comparable to that of Amsterdam (which hit 35 in 2005) and Rotterdam. Much will depend on the weather, it seems. According to a recent New York Times article, the number of killings in the City rises with the heat. And there are fewer homicides on a rainy day as well.
The ever-dropping New York murder/crime rate is remarkable in a number of ways:
1. New York City has fewer police officers than Amsterdam (34,000 police officers for a population of 9,000,000 compared to 6,000 police officers for a population of 900,000);
2. One would expect an exponential rather than a linear relationship between murder rate and a city’s population size;
3. New York City is bound by the constitutional right to keep and bear arms despite every New York City mayor opposing it (including Rudi Giuliani, before he ran for president).
If the murder rate hits a record low this year, we may have to thank the crappy weather for it. Last month was the coldest and wettest June on record.