The Facts on Violence

   If anyone genuinely cares to know the truth about about American violence, which is down substantially since the early 1990's, here is an excerpt from the book:  " UNEASY PEACE- The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, And The Next War On Violence"  by Patrick Sharkey, a professor of sociology at N.Y.U.  The book describes the reality about past and present crime in all it's complexities and offers possible reasons and future scenarios.
The pic is where flight 93 was forced down in 2001, in the green field near the woods line.. a whole 'nother form of violence.

                                        These are the authors words:


“Information on police violence has never been collected in a systematic way, so it is impossible to know exactly how often police resort to force, or even how often a police officer kills a civilian. The FBI relies on police departments to report every time an officer kills a felon in a ‘justifiable homicide’, just as they are asked to report every other homicide that has occurred over the course of each year. Efforts by journalists and activists to document every person who is killed by law enforcement have shown that the official figures, reported each year by the FBI, substantially underestimate the total number of individuals killed by law enforcement. Even if these figures are substantially biased, the numbers reported by the FBI are revealing. Data from the ‘Supplemental Homicide Reports’ show that homicides occurring during robberies, drugs or gang disputes, arguments, or during the commission of other serious crimes all fell by somewhere between 40 and 80 percent since 1991. Almost every kind of homicide has become less common over time, but there is one notable exception. From the early 1990’s to the present the number of ‘justifiable homicides’ committed by police officers has been remarkably consistent. In the early 1990’s police officers usually killed about 475 people over the course of a year. Twenty years or so later, officers kill roughly 450 people each year. Pointing out the number of people killed by law enforcement tells us nothing about whether each incident was justified, whether police acted appropriately, or whether unnecessary force was used. What it does reveal however is a very consistent level of police force over time. As just about every other type of lethal violence has subsided over time, lethal violence from the police has remained constant."