Amerika

The Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based independent research organization made up of local and state police officials, released a survey in January showing that 44 percent of police departments reported increases in crimes they believed could be attributed to the economic crisis.

Peskin, who estimates that there are about 20,000 neighborhood watch groups nationwide, said there has been an increase in requests for information on starting groups from all over the country including urban, suburban and rural communities.

Crystal Zohner lives in a gated community in Las Vegas and said her neighbors are rallying to send a clear message that they are united against crime.

“It seems like now, since the economy has changed, [thieves] are getting a little bit more sophisticated and a little more brazen,” she said. “It’s time to get back to simpler times, when we did look out for each other.”

CNN

As crimes increase and paranoia increases, we’re watching each other like spies. Soon much of that will be delegated to CCTV, RFID and other digital means of surveillance.

Since we cannot admit obvious truths such as that America has two basic groups, the middle class and everyone else who wants to plunder them, or that different groups need separation, we get a paranoid society instead. Good thinking.

News websites and newspapers with online editions are grappling with how to handle a growing wave of controversial commentary from readers, according to panellists on CBC cultural affairs show Q.

“There’s a question in Canadian law that has yet to be resolved. We are very fuzzy on when hateful or abusive comments are posted on a blog commentary if the owner of that blog is to be held responsible for that. There are precedents on either side and we don’t quite know where Canada stands,” he said during the Q discussion.

“Other countries have said, ‘No, absolutely not. If you want to have these healthy conversations, website owners need to be free of any kind of liability for that,'” he added.

CBC

By hateful comments, they mean comments that affirm some parts of biological determinism, e.g. human evolutionary branching, gender differences and class differences.

So we either decide to face the truth, or make it taboo and, as with neighborhood crime, watch each other like spies.