Orlando's murder rate rises; is the illegality of drugs to blame?

[lema_oda]

i suppose i have to give the Orlando Sentinel credit for not using the clichéd word "epidemic" to describe the rise in murders this year within the city limits--26 so far this year vs. 22 in all of 2005. Although it did indulge in another cliché: mentioning drugs in the context of violence without questioning whether that indicates that current

Comments

[lema_oda]

i don't think they're directly trying to prove a pattern, but their superficial use of sources amounts to doing that. That's why i said the drugs angle was clichéd -- because once again drugs were mentioned repeatedly as a cause of violence, but they didn't interview any public policy experts or drug groups who might be skeptical of the idea that drugs per se rather than their illegality (which creates a different set of conditions than drugs themselves) are a factor in the violence.

i think the writers assumed that if they just used Orange County people would know that they meant unincorporated Orange County, not any municipalities besides Orlando. There was a chart i didn't post that broke down murders in and out of Central Florida by county and municipal jurisdictions. (It was interesting to note that in 2005 Seminole County only had 7 murders: 2 in the unincorporated areas of the county and 5 in Sanford, which is poorer than the rest of Seminole.)

[lema_oda]

What those reporters are guilty of is taking what public officials have to say at face value and not challenging their assertions about how exactly drugs contribute to the problem, although it appears that the non-public official sources they quoted, Corzine and Schneider, may not have blamed the failure of the war on drugs to accomplish its goals for the continued violence. All in all, though, this was a pretty superficial treatment of a complex subject.

[jonchiz67]

This article sucks. It throws just a few facts out at you and attempts to prove a pattern. In the last 5 months, murders are up in Orlando but down in Orange County. (How can that be since Orlando is part of Orange County? If they mean unincorporated Orange County, which they make reference to later in the article, does that include Maitland and Winter Park and Apopka?) What's the difference between Orlando and the other areas of Orange County? Some of the murders might be related to illegal drug traffic but it doesn't say if they think legalizing the drugs will stop the murders or cracking down harder on the drugs will stop the murders. Some of the murders might be gang related. Some of them might be due to poverty. Some of them might be due to increased population or the growing popularity of carrying guns to arguments. This sampling is just way too tiny to draw any conclusions or noticeable pattern. To use a sports metaphor, it's like trying to predict which major league baseball team will win the World Series after