“The fear that many citizens have of being murdered by an unknown assailant is contrary to statistical evidence,” reports the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority in Trends and Issues 90. “Only 14 percent of the 989 murders reported in Illinois during 1988 involved verified situations in which the victim and offender were strangers to one another. In more than half the murders [57 percent], the victim and offender knew each other in some way…”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Tales from the burbs. Ex-Chicagoan Marti J. Sladek writes to Illinois Issues (July 1990), “When I went to register to vote in DuPage as an independent, the clerk didn’t know it was legal and didn’t know how to do it.”
Don’t jump yet, ma’am. We’re still working out the cost-benefit analysis. Bill Bolte, an activist for the rights of the disabled, in In These Times (July 4-17): “The argument that… low ‘quality of life’ makes ‘life not worth living’ [pictures] death as yet another program to help the handicapped….As a former mental-hospital administrator, I know that a 24-hour watch would be put on a patient who expressed suicidal intentions. Why is the society outside institutions doing the direct opposite for people with physical disabilities? Why is what would be interpreted as a ‘cry for help’ from an able-bodied person assumed to be a genuine desire for extermination when it comes from a disabled person?”
