Crime Wave Continues in Puerto Rico -- Homicide up!

Look no further than Puerto Rico to see a Crime Wave, homicide in 2011 is 28% higher than last year, reflecting 40 homicides more this year than in 2010 for the same period;

From the Latin American Herald Tribune;

SAN JUAN – The crime wave that is besetting Puerto Rico continued on the weekend with a triple murder in the Vega Baja district, bringing to 179 the number of murders so far in 2011, a figure that is 40 more than had been registered by the same date last year.

Police reported Monday that on Sunday three people were machine-gunned in the northern coastal town near a grocery store in the residential neighborhood of Brisas de Tortuguero.

The police report says that early on Sunday morning a man who arrived with two accomplices in an SUV opened fire on a group of people who were at the shop.

The victims may have been killed in a settling of scores linked to drug trafficking, the police said.

UK Trains delayed as theives steal copper wires from junction boxes

Here is an example of how theft of one item -- in this case copper, actually results in theft of time, and increase in safety risk. Consider the following story from the UK;

Copper thieves delay trains

RECORD numbers of UK trains are being delayed due to thieves stealing copper wires from junction boxes. The crimewave has seen 11,000 trains delayed over the last 12 month and around one million passengers made late as a consequence.

Network Rail first highlighted this problem in England’s north four years ago as a result of rising copper prices, and a taskforce was set up to address the worrying trend. Industry bosses estimate that £35m worth of copper wire has been stripped from railway lines since 2006, with £20m-worth stolen every year by 2014 if current rates continue to rise.

The problem of copper theft is particularly bad in England’s northeast which reports around 40 incidents every day. The raids became less profitable in late 2008 because of falling copper price around the world, but a recent rise has seen a resurgence of the trend to their worse levels ever.

Gangs are causing 500,000 minutes of otherwise avoidable delays every year by removing swaths of the rail network and ripping out cables attacked to trackside signals. Once rail signals lose current their lights revert to auxiliary power, immediately switching to red until engineers can arrive to fix the problem.

The Network Rail taskforce also includes train the British Transport Police (BTP) and railway operators, and focuses of securing tougher sentencing for thieves and rogue scrap dealers who act as middlemen that ‘fence’ the stolen material on.

Internet Crime Hits Record High in First Half in Japan; up 31.5%.

Internet Crime Hits Record High in First Half in Japan; up 31.5%. Police responded to a record 2,444 Internet crime cases nationwide in the first half of this year, a National Police Agency survey showed Thursday. The number, up 31.5% from a year earlier, represented a new high since the NPA started gathering statistics for Internet crimes, defined as crimes which use a computer network, on a half-yearly basis in 2004. (Source: Kyodo)

Romania prepares for crime wave with exodus

MORE than 8000 Roma have been sent back to Romania and Bulgaria from France under President Nicolas Sarkozy's crackdown - but many plan to return to the West to escape unemployment and a life without even the most basic amenities.

The Romanian countryside has little to offer those who, like Florin Chel, 24, and his family, were rounded up from a caravan site near Montpellier last week and offered E300 ($423) to make a "voluntary return" to Europe's poorest country.

Mr Sarkozy's policy has attracted criticism from the UN and some in his government for branding an entire community as criminal, despite none of those returning in recent months being convicted of a crime, according to Romanian authorities.

Mr Chel, whose shiny Dolce & Gabbana shoes seem out of place on the potholed road that leads to his family's simple concrete house, said he and his wife were told their two children would be taken into care if they did not sign an agreement to leave.

Stolen Copper Salavge Market Booming in Economic Downturn

From the West Virginia Gazette comes this story. But truly, this story could have been written from almost any jurisdiction with rural highways in the US.

"For several years, Southern West Virginia has suffered an upsurge of metal-stealing. Thieves strip utility poles, power stations, vacant mines, shutdown plants, etc. -- mostly to get valuable copper to resell to scrap dealers."

"Trying to steal power lines can be deadly. Just this year, four West Virginians have been electrocuted during alleged thefts. The robberies sometimes knock out electrical or telephone service for neighborhoods."

"Even the 400-pound Fernbank School bell was stolen from a South Hills memorial and broken up for scrap."

"Frontier Communications, which purchased Verizon's telephone network, says the Mountain State has a horrible rate of copper wire theft. Nowhere else "even comes close to what is happening in West Virginia," security chief Lynne Monaco said."

This seems like a simple problem to resolve -- yet it remains a problem. There is no market if there is no buyer. Greater control of buyer market access could control this problem; remove cash from transactions, and require an electronic trail for starters.

46 US States in Budget Deficits; forbodes more headwind to economic recovery

Recession Continues to Batter State Budgets; State Responses Could Slow Recovery

By Elizabeth McNichol, Phil Oliffand Nicholas Johnson

The worst recession since the 1930s has caused the steepest decline in state tax receipts on record. As a result, even after making very deep spending cuts over the last two years, states continue to face large budget gaps. At least 46 states struggled to close shortfalls when adopting budgets for the current fiscal year (FY 2011, which began July 1 in most states). These came on top of the large shortfalls that 48 states faced in fiscal years 2009 and 2010. States will continue to struggle to find the revenue needed to support critical public services for a number of years, threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs. States face:

• Budget problems in 2011. Fiscal year 2011 gaps — addressed with spending cuts and revenue increases by most states — totaled $121 billion, or 19 percent of budgets in 46 states.[1] This total is likely to grow over the course of the fiscal year, which started July 1 in most states. It may well exceed $140 billion and would be higher still without federal assistance. The fact that the gaps have been filled and budgets are balanced does not end the story. Families hit hard by the recession will experience the loss of vital services throughout the year, and the negative impact on the economy will continue.
• Uncertainty for the future. States’ fiscal problems will continue in the current fiscal year and likely beyond. Already 39 states have projected gaps that total $102 billion for the following year (fiscal year 2012). Once all states have prepared estimates these are likely to grow to some $120 billion.
• The effects of gaps in 2010 budgets. These new shortfalls are in addition to the gaps states closed in their fiscal year 2010 budgets. Counting both initial and mid-year shortfalls, 48 states addressed such shortfalls in their budgets for fiscal year 2010, totaling $192 billion or 29 percent of state budgets — the largest gaps on record.
• Declining federal assistance. Federal aid to states provided in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has lessened state cuts in services and tax increases. But the aid is now mostly gone; only about $40 billion remains to help with 2011 fiscal problems. The federal government could avert deep additional budget cuts that would further harm the economy by extending assistance over the period during which state fiscal distress is expected to continue rather than cutting it off before states have recovered.
• Combined gaps of $260 billion for 2011 and 2012. These numbers suggest that states are dealing with total budget shortfalls of some $260 billion for 2011 and 2012. When all is said and done, states will have closed shortfalls of more than $500 billion since the start of the recession.

Robotics foretasted to be accomplices of criminals of the future

In an article appearing in IEEE, a futurist speaks about how robots are likely to be used increasingly in crimes and terrorism.

Drug runners are already using robotic submarines to ferry illegal drugs to the USA. For example, in the photo shown, the US Coast Guard seizes $196 million of cocaine from robot submarine

crasch.livejournal.com

With accurate GPS locating devices, dead drops and stash locations are increasingly making law enforcement more difficult. Here is an article addressing the topic by a scientist familiar with the current state of technology.

"Robots will increasingly be used in crime and terrorism, with criminals hacking or copying police and military machines." So claim University of Sheffield computer scientist Professor Noel Sharkey, Interpol advisor Marc Goodman, and former Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross in an article called 'The Coming Robot Crime Wave' in the August edition of the IEEE magazine Computer.

"The growing availability of robotics knowledge and components will promote a new breed of garden shed robot criminals and terrorists," said the University. "Building robots is 80% cheaper now than 20 years ago and experts are calling for manufacturers to 'think thief' and plan against crime when they are designing machines."

Colombian drugs cartels, according to Sharkey, are already using robot submarines to deliver cocaine."Robots could assist a vast range of crime from drugs vending to murder, voyeurism and burglary. Robots can't even be detected by the passive IR alarm systems in most of our houses," he said. "More pressing though, is the danger that criminals or terrorists will hack into armed military or police robots and pose a threat to life.

Although the predicted crime might be 10 or 20 years away, Sharkey, Goodman and Ross urge scientists and engineers to be mindful of future crime prevention now, for example: building in software components that could assist forensic analysis.