John Roman for the Urban Institute: The #GamerGate movement’s self-proclaimed predication is the idea that journalistic ethics have been compromised by close relationships between those who review video games and those who create video games. Those supporting #GamerGate believe their whole culture is at risk from threats of censorship.
But from the outside, the #GamerGate movement appears to be about a fear that violent video games with oversexualized female characters will be banished in the name of political correctness. And in the name of #GamerGate, journalists and game developers, mainly women, have faced unrelenting online harassment. … People have been driven from their homes by threats of rape and homicide. Events have been cancelled by threats of mass murder.
This is clearly criminal behavior and many individuals have therefore been victims of a crime. Regardless of where you stand on #GamerGate, online threats of rape and murder are all federal crimes. Several events associated with #GamerGate are likely felonious, potentially punishable by long prison terms in federal penitentiaries.
So, why have there been no prosecutions? A big part of the answer, I suspect, is that no victims have reported the crimes they have experienced.
The United States does a lousy job recording crime statistics. The two main national sources of crime data, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which asks a representative sample of Americans about their experiences with crime, and the Uniform Crime Report (UCR), which tallies local law enforcement reports about the number of crimes reported each month, are both deeply flawed. (Aside: They are flawed because of local resistance to better data collection rather than federal malfeasance.)
But what we do know is that the NCVS victimization survey records about three times as many violent crimes as the UCR data collected from police. That means three times as many Americans are willing to report in a survey that they were victimized than are willing to report those crimes to the police.
Why don’t people report their victimization? In many cases the answer is fear: fear of reprisal, fear of new victimization, fear of the wolf pack.
But there is a solution. If you are threatened or harassed by #GamerGaters or others, you need to report it to the FBI, not your local law enforcement, which has few resources to investigate and prosecute such matters.
OBAMA’S TRANSPORTATION LEGACY MIGHT BE WRITTEN BY THE STATES
Rebecca Strauss for the Council on Foreign Relations: Now that we are nearly six years deep into the Obama administration, it is becoming clearer that Obama’s transportation legacy is sizing up to be a disappointment. His initiatives have fallen flat or were obstructed by Congress, and he (along with Congress) has done little to solve the fundamental problem of federal transportation policy — finding the revenue to pay for all the infrastructure investment he’s calling for. …
Obama’s transportation legacy may actually be that the process of devolution started under his watch — or, in other words, that transportation decisions began passing from the federal government to states. Amidst federal paralysis, at least 30 states have launched serious initiatives to increase transportation-dedicated funding since 2013. Most major metro areas are expanding commuter rail networks, projects which are financed mostly by local taxpayers. Maybe local is the better way to go, since the vast majority of Americans only use infrastructure in their own county. Local ballot referenda for transportation bonds have a stellar success rate.
But this is more the result of federal inaction than deliberate policy. And it probably is not the legacy Obama was hoping for.
FEWER CELLS, MORE DESKS
Michael Mitchell for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: The huge growth in state prison populations in recent decades has created mounting budget challenges for states, our new report explains. State economies would be much stronger over time if states invested more in education and other areas that can boost long-term economic growth and less in maintaining extremely high prison populations.
If states were still spending on corrections what they spent in the mid-1980s, adjusted for inflation, they would have about $28 billion more each year that they could spend on more productive investments or a mix of investments and tax reductions.
Most states’ prison populations are at historic highs; in 36 states, the prison population has more than tripled as a share of state population since 1978. This growth, which continued even after crime rates fell substantially in the 1990s, has been costly. Corrections spending rose in every state between 1986 and 2013, after adjusting for inflation, climbing from $20 billion nationally to over $47 billion. Corrections spending is now the third-largest category of spending in most states, behind education and healthcare.
At the same time, states are underinvesting in educating children and young adults, especially those in high-poverty neighborhoods. At least 30 states are providing less general funding per student this year for K-12 schools than before the recession, after adjusting for inflation; in 14 states, the reduction exceeds 10 percent.
