Source: Coyote Blog
by Warren Meyer
“I could easily make reported crime in this country skyrocket tomorrow with one simple change: Imagine Congress passed a law, roughly equivalent to how things like school lunches are funded, that federal law enforcement dollars would flow to cities in proportion to the number of crimes they experience. Suddenly, at the next reporting period, it would appear that crime has skyrocketed — without any real change on the ground — as cities scramble to harvest as much money as possible to report as much crime as possible. The cities that choose not to submit data into the various FBI data bases today would suddenly be sending in full disclosures. With time, cities might even get creative by tweaking the definition of crime …. An observer in 2045 without much detailed knowledge of this dataset would write that there was an explosion in crime in 2025.” (06/25/25)