Another Murder Occurs in Berkeley
A couple of weeks ago, Ben wrote a post commenting on the recent murder that had occurred in Berkeley. Along with noting the murder, he wondered aloud if an apparent rash of other serious crimes was a sign of an increase in the crime rate for Berkeley. Responding to his aside that he suspected there would be more murders to follow, a number of people made some rather mocking statements in the comments to that post.

The Daily Cal has the information on the latest murder, of a man named Samuel Anderson. There is no description given of the suspect in the shooting, or of a possible motive. An SFGate article mentions a comment from Tom Bates, mayor of Berkeley, saying "he hoped the killings weren't related to a spree of retaliatory violence between drug factions in North Oakland and south Berkeley that plagued those neighborhoods last summer.”

These two murders could very well be connected, but not in the sense that the people involved in one murder were then involved in the second. Last year I was considering an internship with a member of the Berkeley City Council, and I ended up going in for an interview with Kriss Worthington. He asked me what my interests were, and I mentioned crime. He told me that he suspected we would be seeing an increase in crime soon.

His explanation was that whenever our economy has a recession, you tend to almost always see that followed by an increase in crime. Two murders, as opposed to one the year before, isn't statistically significant. On the other hand, there are a number of factors that could lead a bad economy to produce an increase in crime, and it's something that very well could be occurring right now. This scenario becomes even more likely when we take into account that our current economic upswing appears to be a jobless recovery.

In the coming months it will become clearer if these murder and the other serious crimes Ben noted actually represent a trend for the Berkeley area.
Email This Post!