Quotes of the Day
11 minutes ago
The welfare state is unsustainable economically, socially and morally.
"This is a vulnerable group ... Surely if you are saying people are unemployed for too long and malingerers, then you have to be really clear about taking steps to help them back into work. "
I did several years in social work and 'early intervention' and my pet hate is health promotion forced on this area. Lets not get real with people and say ' he/she is a looser and you can do better', 'this is how to hang out washing', 'you need to get up at seven to get your kids to school, 'lets sit down and take a look at the list of groceries you need this week', how about we take a family trip to the park/beach/pool and make some sandwiches for lunch', 'how about we look into jobs, or courses'.... instead lets take them to expo's and more agencies to address smoking??? Lets do more assessments, lets keep ticking the boxes and insisting that the babies get all their vaccinations and tick all those boxes and if they dont do it' report them to CYFS, lets give grass roots workers impossible caseloads so they end up unintentionally colluding, so the experts with more impossible caseloads can in turn, miss the warning signs of yet another otrocity and blame it on the grass roots workers blah blah. You said it well Lindsay in your blog , and until people can tackle the everyday monotonous living that they probably never experienced consistently, why would they give up what seems their only pleasure at all. Especially with all the do gooders around to bore them and stress them out more!
I'm Maori, single ma, smoke and drink, have great friends and whanau, have a great job and look after us and I enjoy life. I dont see the health promoters knocking on my door :-) GET REAL PEOPLE!!!
A Government that really wanted to reduce crime, rather than one that was simply pandering to populism to get elected, would concerntrate on the well-known and understood causes of crime – the biggest of which are unemployment-induced poverty and deprivation.
Kerre Woodham’s column in the HoS today promotes letting or even encouraging kids to take some risks.
Too often risk averse parents and schools wrap kids in cotton wool to the point where they don’t develop the power to judge risk and make their own decisions.
expat – every now and again we do a more general post to test reaction to Red Alert and the style people want. What comes through very clearly is that users want a much tighter moderation policy here than at Kiwiblog or The Standard. That includes staying on thread, language and tone. It means that lots of individuals who don’t feel safe on other blogs feel ok commenting here.
That is the end of the debate on moderation on this thread. All further off thread comments will be deleted.
If crime was a rational response to income inequality, the thinking went, government can best fight it through social services and wealth redistribution, not through arrests and incarceration. Even law enforcement officials came to embrace the root causes theory, which let them off the hook for rising lawlessness. Through the late 1980s, the FBI's annual national crime report included the disclaimer that "criminal homicide is largely a societal problem which is beyond the control of the police." Policing, it was understood, can only respond to crime after the fact; preventing it is the domain of government welfare programs.
At the start of the recession, the two police chiefs who confidently announced that their cities' crime rates would remain recession-proof were Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. As New York Police Commissioner in the mid-1990s, Mr. Bratton pioneered the intensive use of crime data to determine policing strategies and to hold precinct commanders accountable—a process known as Compstat. Commissioner Kelly has continued Mr. Bratton's revolutionary policies, leading to New York's stunning 16-year 77% crime drop. The two police leaders were true to their word. In 2009, the city of L.A. saw a 17% drop in homicides, an 8% drop in property crimes, and a 10% drop in violent crimes. In New York, homicides fell 19%, to their lowest level since reliable records were first kept in 1963.
The Compstat mentality is the opposite of root causes excuse-making; it holds that policing can and must control crime for the sake of urban economic viability. More and more police chiefs have adopted the Compstat philosophy of crime-fighting and the information-based policing techniques that it spawned. Their success in lowering crime shows that the government can control antisocial behavior and provide public safety through enforcing the rule of law. Moreover, the state has the moral right and obligation to do so, regardless of economic conditions or income inequality.