False Burglary charges make it really difficult on people who have been burgled

[LanternWaste]

"Police said that an investigation found that Avalos allegedly made up the burglary story in order to file an insurance claim. After an arrest warrant was issued, Avalos surrendered Saturday to police at the Central Regional Command Center in Downtown..."

https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/crime/2018/05/02/el-paso-man-lies-home-burglary-arrested-false-report/575576002/





Seems an irrelevant story to post in HoF... more a GD topic (if it even rises to that), right? Yeah, I think so too.

Imagine however, if I posted this in GD with the end-tag statement "this kind of thing hurts all burglary victims and makes all their stories a little less believable..."

I'd rightfully be mocked for making such a half-witted, fish-brained devaluation of the effects of burglary on its victims. My pretense would be called out, and the best I could do to defend writing it would be "well, it does!!!"

In fact, the only reason I can come up with for making that particular end-tag statement would be to minimize, or even trivialize the totality of the victims and what they endured via that mechanism of false concern.


Here's where an obvious disparity of numbers illustrates my point. Industrywide, false burglary alarms rates of 90 to 99 percent are common in suburban areas. In some parts of Austin, especially well-to-do residential neighborhoods, false alarms demanded more police attention than any other type of calls except traffic stops.

In 2012, Austin police responded to 21 addresses with 20 or more false alarms; one had nearly 50 (Austin-American Statesmen) (and while the city assesses fines for excessive false alarms, those penalties are comparatively lenient).

Yet this drag on first-responder time and effort is never discussed... ever. It's a non-issue on DU. Unless (and only unless) it's one of the 2.5% of rape accusations which turn out to be false, as opposed to the 90+% of false burglar alarms. Then (and only then) it gets nods of approval. Hand-claps. Concern. Respect the law, dammit!

And that hypothetical end-tag editorial of mine ( "this kind of thing hurts all burglary victims and makes all their stories a little less believable...&quot ? Well, it's not really mine. Simply replace the word burglary with the word rape, and it's a copy & paste from a DU post about rape (it was that statement actually, which set off my curiosity. And when I'm curious, I've found the search function to be quite informative)

Simply discussing race is perceived as both hostile and inherently racist in itself to particular demographics around here... I think that applies to rape as well. It hit me the other day that a handful of people open discussions about crime ONLY when the crime is committed by a minority (leading to my aforementioned curiosity).

Should it be any wonder to me then, that some people will ONLY open discussions in regards to rape when that rape is the rare false accusation? Should it be any wonder to me that there are in fact, people who WANT to minimize and trivialize rape and sexual assault? I guess it shouldn't be a surprise, yet still... reading through a few dozen 'false rape' threads I pulled up through the search function was damned surprising after a consistency began to appear over and again.

Imagine this statement of idiocy: "I don't want to be accused of burglary, so I never go to anyone's home." Again, replace burglary with rape, and 'go home' with 'go out on dates.' Yep... another cut and paste job. The thread title to this post? I did the same thing. If I supplied any more, it becomes far too obvious who the who are (and probably get a hide for holding people accountable to their own convictions).

But I think I made the point I wanted to (if anyone can read through my typing-reflexively-without-structure). If "False Burglary charges make it really difficult on people who have been burgled" seems a rather absurd statement to make, apropos of nothing, relevant to nothing, unsupported and without evidence, I'd think that would be applied consistently... unless of course, there's a narrative that must get out at all costs.

I'm guessing it's the second option.

[Squinch]

1. Great post. Thank you.