Professor John Pfaff was quoted in Christian Science Monitor regarding crime rates in the United States.
Coming from anyone who has worked on the front lines of the violent crime epidemic of the 1980s, that point of view is understandable, says John Pfaff, a criminologist at Fordham University who has researched state prosecutors.
“They saw what the failure to respond aggressively in the ’70s led to, so they’re skittish about going to what they saw as soft approaches,” he adds.
But with violent crime only having increased for two years, and still hovering near historic lows, he thinks it is too early to declare a trend, not to mention a punitive response to it. “We shouldn’t start resorting to brute force tactics,” Professor Pfaff says. “At this point we should try to be more sophisticated and more careful in how we approach it.”
