Herbert W Armstrong

   Crime is not an impersonal monster. Crime is a monster in knickers. He's a kid only 13. He's a rotten little racist bigot that lives in an underprivileged neighborhood who thinks the world owes him a living and talks about cribbing, meaning beating up on some elderly 80-year-old person, which is about as easy as taking candy from a baby.

   What kind of a monster is crime? Well, I'll tell you the kind of criminal monster society is breeding. You just cannot believe some of the headlines you read, and especially the revolving door justice that allows these criminals to go free time after time.

   And as I listen to the weeping, the wailing, the hand-wringing, and the whining over this character who wants to die, practically daring the state of Utah to put him to death and can think of all the slobbering sob sisters who want him to live in spite of his own avowed intent to want to die. I just can't believe the unbelievable spectacle.

   Now, we see people living in the big cities who are in terrible fear of crime. They cry out about crime. It's a social issue, an economic issue, a political issue. It has virtually changed architecture. It is an enormous economic loss. It is a fantastic sociological phenomenon that drains unbelievable amounts of energy, of time, of manpower, and of money.

   And in spite of the fact that people are living in fear, terror, and despair of crime. You still have legislators, lawmakers who believe so firmly in the rights of these poor misunderstood hapless, rotten, filthy criminals that you can't get the laws on the books to do anything about it.

   A recent headline declared frightened by crime. San Francisco man kills mother himself. The up I release said the headlines shouting violence and crime on his own doorstep, frightened Howard Ridgeway so deeply that he shot his mother to death and then killed himself. The manager, the apartment where Mr. Ridgway Lives said the last time he saw Mr. Ridgeway, he was very upset about crime on the city streets.

   Have you been reading about the streets of San Francisco? They got idiots running around with guns up there taking potshots at people just for the fun of it. All kinds of killings and murders happening in the bright light of day, right in downtown San Francisco. Articles in local newspapers and Bay area newspapers were shouting out about this crime factor up there. It's bad enough to have killers like this crazed idiot, the Zodiac that was up there. And I think finally got caught or the slasher in Los Angeles, a kind of a modern-day Jack the ripper. But people are beginning to react in very strange ways.

   I think one of the most sickening things I've read was that terrible headline about the South Bronx double suicide. A devoted couple of immigrants to the United States who in their last days of terror decided on a suicide pact. Hans Cable aged 78 and his wife, Emma aged 76, were found dead in their apartment in a section of the Bronx. It was ruled a double suicide by officials.

   This devoted couple with their health relatively intact and with $23,000 in the bank carefully laid their burial robes on their bed before slashing their wrists and hanging themselves. Police said there was a note there that was written in German that the two were tired of living in fear. They've become despondent about rising crime in the neighborhood where they lived most of their lives like millions of other citizens, especially the elderly Hans and Emma Cable lived in constant fear of crime of being attacked, tortured or murdered by young hoodlums who have coolly singled out old people as the easiest marks in town.

   In the end, Hans and Emma Cable lived totally indoors. They couldn't go out for milk and bread in their prison apartment. The bandit still broke in and beat them and literally took away their will to live. A mugger beat the Cables but couldn't get information out of Hans because you see, he'd already been mugged a year and a half earlier in the vestibule of their apartment where his head was repeatedly smacked against the marble staircase and his mind was never the same after that.

   So, this latest mugger couldn't get much information out of old Hans. The results of the attack on Emma were still there to be seen, fresh on her body when the police found her after this suicide pact. Fresh scabs on her arm perfectly spaced, where a rotten, filthy little teenage mugger had poked a double-pronged roasting fork all the way up her arm, closer and closer until he got to her eyes. It was then that Emma told the rotten, vicious little thug where she had hidden the $200.

   So, the obsession, the fear of these attacks finally led to a double suicide by that elderly couple. Typically, it was young juveniles involved in these assaults, 12, 13, 14 years of age, in gangs strategically deployed. They nearly often always follow old-age pensioners after a trip to the bank with a social security check, and they mug them in the elevator in their own apartment before they can lock the door.

   A recent news magazine about this growing problem said the rights of juveniles are so well protected that it's next to impossible to send them away for any length of time. Knowing how weak the laws are, many elderly refuse to prosecute the attackers because they think the hoodlums will soon be back in the street. And, of course, they're going to retaliate. And so, they are afraid to even report the crime.

   Police know that only about 50% of all crime or less is reported anyway. And the monumental enormous statistics about crime are not an impersonal monster lurking around the street somewhere. It is young, rotten, filthy, vicious hoods who probably come from a home where there is a matriarchy with no father around and nearly always from, in some of these cases, ethnic minorities.

   Knowing how weak these laws are, a lot of people are afraid to do anything about it. They think the police can't do anything. They know a slap on the wrist through the revolving door, back out on the street 15 minutes later, the poor little misunderstood kid is sent home to his mother who's probably out getting the latest trick because she's probably a street walker, drug pusher, or hooker. And so, the kid goes back to his street environment of petty crooks, thieves, pimps, prostitutes, drug hustlers, and the rest and probably gets a group of kids together and goes and pays the elderly couple a call who turned him in, and they live in that kind of fear.

   Why it says in Ezekiel 7:23 in the Bible, "Make a chain for the land is full of bloody crimes and the city is full of violence." And why is that? Well, because the laws that would protect us, that would protect law-abiding citizens, that would be a strong, powerful deterrent to crime, laws which would, in the first place, begin at the cradle in the home with a strong family structure, social institutions, the school, the church, and the home, to where youngsters from the time they first toddle around in a home, learn the meaning of respect for authority, of respect for law, of respect for property and for persons, of values, of right from wrong values that are taught in the Bible and in the Ten Commandments.

   But because we have wanted to knock God out of our society, we've forgotten that such a thing as sin exists. We don't know that sin demands a penalty. Spiritually, we don't really think that physical infractions ought to demand much of a penalty, either. The wages of sin is death, according to the Bible. What about unrepentant and hard-hearted, rotten, filthy killers in our midst?

   You know, it's about time citizens across our country raise such a hue and cry for swift, just, and short punishment to criminal offenders that no legislator would dare ignore it. I'd like to see the legislators go live in a walk-up four-story South Bronx apartment for a couple of weeks. If these slobbering sob sisters would go live in the Bronx for a couple of weeks, they wouldn't be slobbering about the rights of filthy rotten criminals anymore.

   Unless laws are adopted, which are tough enough that they are a true deterrent to crime, and the situation, that inhuman, unbelievable situation that lived right outside Hans and Elma Cable's doorstep is going to continue. It's going to grow worse.

   You know, I've been to Arab Nations many times recently. In the spring, we were down there with the television cameras to interview both the president and the first lady of Egypt. And we did a special, which is out in cities around the United States, on the true status of Egypt today. In the city of Cairo, dirty, teeming, overpopulated, slum-ridden, poverty-stricken Cairo.

   You are safer at night or any other time of the day with your wallet in your pocket, your ring on your finger, and your watch on your wrist than you are in practically any city or small town in America. They say in some of the Arab countries, particularly in Saudi Arabia, that if a thief steals a loaf of bread and they catch him at it, they chop off his hand. Now, that's grizzly, that's horrible. That's inhuman. What a hand for a loaf of bread. Well, I guess a loaf of bread is pretty important to people on the border of starvation and total poverty. And I suppose some of the slobbering sob sisters and moralists would say that's cruel and inhuman. Maybe it is. I don't know, but it sure stops crime. You're safe in the streets of Cairo. And, you know, I never have noticed yet an Arab walking around the streets with both hands gone. Maybe it's cruel and inhuman. But when are the sobbing moralists going to become as interested in the victim and his feelings as they are in the vicious, rotten criminal who brutalized them, they cry out about cruel and unusual and inhuman punishment.

   Not long ago, I witnessed with a fair amount of revulsion, a television program in which one of the network interviewers was visiting a large Southern prison. He was taking the TV cameras right through the halls and corridors of the jail and right on into the death room where, in a voice fairly dripping with outrage, he showed how the seat was constructed, how the straps would be placed around the victim's head, chest, legs, and arms, how the lethal cyanide pellets would be dropped in the vat beneath the chair, and gave the grizzly statistics from doctors' reports about the many long seconds and minutes. It took this poor person to die.

   I could just hear the sobs, the cries of outrage, the slobbering quavering, tearful voices screaming out about this inhuman treatment, this cruel and unusual punishment. He didn't take his TV camera and walk slowly up those twin puncture holes in Emma Cable's arm. I wonder what they would talk about when they saw the holes next to her eyes, cruel and unusual. What about the filthy, rotten convicted killers who murdered other human beings? Well, he got around to them too. What a sad lot. My heart fairly bled for them. He was interviewing one little character sitting there on death row in a southern prison who had murdered his own wife and another relative. And this poor character as the interview, it drew him out about this terrible inhuman torture of having to live behind bars was shaking his head in disbelief. This killer and he was saying, "I, I just don't understand it. I just flat can't figure it out. It's, it's worse than death being in here. It's, it's terrible to lock up a man. I, I just don't understand it." He said, it was terrible, lock up that guy who murdered his own wife and I think a daughter or somebody. My heart is fairly bled for him.

   Now, when are lawmakers going to realize that tough punishment, swift punishment, consistent punishment, exactly measured and tailored to fit the crime, is in fact, an effective deterrent to crime. You know, a word on gun control. It goes back and forth and up and down. The NRA and its vast lobby, accused by the gun controllers, you know, the ones who would take your guns away from you and so on, of being a powerful lobby. And we see it in state after state being defeated and the poor slobbering people who really want to take away all the guns and look upon the guns, the source of the crime. They've never suggested taking away twin-pronged meat forks from kitchens.

   They've never suggested doing away with baseball bats, brass knuckles, kitchen utensils, and appliances, maybe sprockets and chains from bicycles and pieces of lead pipe. But then they, they say the gun is the thing. Well, fine, there, there, there, perhaps, you know, there is merit in the idea that guns do kill people, so do matches and so do knives. But if laws were passed, you see, which carried a mandatory sentence, there wouldn't be any judge. I don't care how senile or how intelligent there wouldn't be any judge. I don't care what his political point of view or, or how he got elected or appointed to the bench. There wouldn't be a judge in the United States of America from the tip of Alaska, from Prudhoe Beta Miami who would be able to do anything about it because it would be a federally enforced national law which carried a mandatory sentence of 20 years in a can for the commission of any crime in which a gun is involved.

   The guy is committing a crime. There's a gun in his pocket or in his hand. Boom, 20 years, further, it's an automatic death penalty were to be automatically. I'm not talking about a, uh, you know, some kind of a court scene now where here's a guy standing there in the midst of a police shootout. It happened in Los Angeles the other day, two people were standing there, they caught them later I guess, there was a shootout in a, in a shoe store in a shopping mall and a filthy young crook, I guess, got what he deserved because, and I always sort of think, well, at least that saved the state a lot of money and me, a lot of wretched reading and a lot of dragging it out in the newspapers because the poor cop who, at the present time as I speak to you, is still lying in very critical, yet, I understand stable condition with five bullet holes in him, several in his abdomen and his legs, at least while they're shooting it out managed to kill the vicious young criminal who was trying to kill him.

   So, I haven't seen any TV interviews yet about the policeman's family. Maybe they will come along. But the other two people, the father of this crook and apparently a girlfriend were both captured or the girlfriend turned herself in. Now there's going to be a long-drawn-out trial, no doubt. But what if an automatic death penalty were inflicted in the case of injury or death occurring by the use of a gun during a crime? What if 20 years were given automatically for the commission of any crime in which a gun were used? And in case persons were injured or killed by the use of that gun, automatic death sentence.

   I, I wonder, I wonder what you would be reading about armed robbery statistics and crimes where guns were involved in the next few years if such laws were passed. Now, I don't, I don't kid myself. Laws like that are going to be passed. Am I kidding? What am I talking about? As long as we've got these slobbering, irrational do-gooder sob sisters, quavering about the terrible inhuman cruel punishment inflicted by society on killers, rapists, kidnappers, and their ilk, and the law-abiding families of the United States are going to continue to live in fear.

   I once proposed that all wars ought to be fought in the nude, because it would seem so ludicrous to be standing there with a gun and a helmet looking at another fellow human being standing there stark, staring naked out in the middle of a rainstorm only to kill a guy. I've also proposed that I think all peace parley should be conducted by the legislators and the international advisers and the foreign ministers and all those dignitaries sitting on the grass in the midst of a military graveyard.

   I also think legislators who write our laws about the punishment for crime ought to live in the fourth-floor walk-up flats of the South Bronx. If you get the analogy, I, I think if people who were on the various state legislatures could only be elected to that body if they met one qualification. They had lost a very dear loved one as a result of crime, their wife, their daughter, their son had been murdered. We should elect to the bodies who make the laws about crime. Only the relatives of victims or victims themselves who survived.

   I think then it might be different. But as long as you've got safe homes, full stomachs, and fat wallets, you can sit there and slobber and quaver and cry with your nose dripping and your eyes wet as you think about these poor misunderstood killers who are terribly in fear of dying in the gas chamber because they put some poor victim to death. Here recently in Pasadena, I was reading the grizzly, rotten, filthy account of this wretched character who kidnapped a, a pregnant housewife right out of her home. Her husband is a lawyer. Maybe he can get something done about it. I don't know.

   But what's going through his mind as he reads the newspapers about this filthy character who took his wife pregnant with their child up into the mountains and around and so on. And then finally strangled her to death with an electric cord and dumped her body out near a Pasadena golf course. I can only imagine it's quite likely that he will go free. I don't know. Do you know that people were actually speculating and they just barely stopped it, I guess. But I had even understood in earlier reports that I think were false that Richard Speck, the murderer of those eight nurses in Chicago. And of course, Hollywood long since wanted to make a grizzly movie out of that because people wanted to sit there and munch popcorn while they vicariously enjoyed the spectacle of one after another, which meant eight separate grizzly bloody butcher knife murder scenes as they reenacted and relived this famous slaying of the nurses in Chicago because that's what some rotten upside-down backward, perverse human minds want to wallow in.

   They made a movie out of it, but it was just barely stopped. I mean, he just, he just barely apparently squeaked through by, who knows what kind of a vote or Richard Speck would have been walking the streets today as a free man. Thankfully, the parole board denied the parole. And so the vicious killer is still behind bars. I wonder what is the criterion? Let me see. Is it eight? Would that be enough? Apparently not, that you can't, you can't kill a person just because he killed eight nurses, one after another with a butcher knife. Maybe it would it be 10? Come on, legislators. Let me write to me and tell me, I don't understand it. I mean, I'm kind of in the dark, tell me now, now we understood during the war that even during wartime with a uniform on and in a military post that retaliation such as uh killing X number of civilians in retaliation for some of your military men being slain, such as wiping out whole Italian villages because patriots would knock off a few German soldiers would get you the death penalty.

   If they could hunt you down. 20 years later, they talk about war crimes. And apparently some of the criteria there would be, well, if he killed 100 people or 1000 people in Eichmann's case, perhaps hundreds of thousands or millions of people, then very certainly they want you dead but 10 people. Is that enough? Eight. Now, you know, this is ridiculous. It's utterly unbelievably ridiculous.

   Americans for years have been frightened by the constant rise in crime. But hopefully, we're beginning to see along with that fear of crime, of growing anger about the way our system of criminal justice handles criminals because almost everywhere you go, you're hearing people beginning to complain a little bit that criminals arrested one day are right back in the street the very next day committing new crimes before they can even be tried for the past crimes.

   I've done program after program until I'm almost tired of it of talking about, finally, the rap sheet on some vicious young hood in the Los Angeles area. As long as your leg, about 25 convictions for everything from bicycle theft to automobile theft, to kidnapping, arson, rape, robbery, armed robbery, assaulting officers, resisting arrest, brutality, mugging, drug abuses, etc. Finally, he kills somebody and they find out he was out on parole or had broken parole or something when he did that. And so they put him away. So of course, a network TV interviewer can go along and let him shake his head and say, "I just don't understand it. It's terrible to keep a man locked up in here. It's inhuman. I don't know how they can do this to me."

   They let me back out there with my bicycle chain so I can whip some of those old ladies to death, again. I can't believe it. You know, you got it in your mind if you can picture this. Just, just think of a great big, a big block which represents 100%. That's all of crime. Now, only a small percentage of that if you draw a little block in a corner is reported. Now take that and blow it up to the, the big, you know, block again, that's reported crime. A tiny little percent down in the corner of that is ever solved. The criminals apprehended, blow that up into 100%, again. A tiny portion of those criminals apprehended are convicted for the crime. Blow that up into 100% and take a little tiny corner of that one, of those convicted only a tiny percentage ever really pay the full penalty, stay in jail or pay with their lives.

   And you got quite a picture if you were to draw that out on a piece of paper. That final little dot down there in the normal 8.5 by 11 typewriter sheet would be so tiny, you need a microscope to take a look at it, for the percentage of people who actually pay a penalty for the enormous monumental amount of crime that is committed. You know what happens in the nation's capital is typical of what happens in major cities all across the country. Two out of three persons arrested for serious crimes are not convicted of the one-third who are only a little over half, spend any time at all in jail. And if they're convicted of two separate crimes, one right after the other, the chances are their sentences will be set to run concurrently, which means really they, they commit that second crime for free.

   Six out of 10 who are arrested for felonies in Washington DC have prior criminal records. Between 1971 and 1975, a mere 7% of all of those arrested for serious crimes accounted for 24% of all such arrests. Each had been arrested at least four times in that period. Some as many as 10 times. That's quite a workload for the police who are some of the least understood most maligned individuals that thin blue line out there that exist today. But they're just a sort of a natural tendency in most people's minds to resent authority symbols like the kid who said, yeah, these cops always come through our neighborhood on these big old hogs, you know, these motorcycles, they act like they big guy, they sit there in that white helmet on. What, what do they expect? The, the policeman is supposed to come through with a push cart and a monkey. What, what do they expect? The policeman supposed to walk through barefoot with long hair and, and his clothes hanging off him without a, you know, but what we're talking about is just a normal, natural hostility and resentment toward an authority symbol.

   The badge has become a target these days setups where police are called to an alleged scene of a crime to be met by a shotgun blast at the door. Happening all too often you talk to the police, get to know a policeman, get to know his wife and family, talk to him as a human being and find out what they say. And mostly they're going to tell you about repeaters and the inability of the criminal justice system, lenient judges, courts and laws that cannot keep known criminals off the streets. They say there's not just one culprit, maybe to make some bad arrests. Sure, maybe they failed to come up with hard evidence of reliable witnesses. Yes, they're only able to make arrests usually in about one out of five serious crimes reported as a matter of fact. But the police are overworked, overburdened, undermanned and oftentimes underpaid and an awful lot of inattention is given to where the real problem is. Favorite targets of public criticism these days are some of the judges, they are accused of being too lenient. Maybe some of them are in the overall picture though really even there, the judges play a relatively small role because theirs is the problem of trying to interpret some of these unbelievably wordy laws with thousands of loopholes and trying to satisfy the legislators.

   Do, do legislators ever get mugged? I got to look into that. I gotta, I gotta conduct a study and find somebody that can dredge me up some statistics about the lives of legislators. People that write these laws have their homes been burnt, their automobiles stolen, their daughters raped their wives murdered. I'm just not sure whether legislators who make laws in all of our states have ever been victimized by crime. I wonder whether or not it wouldn't be good to ponder whether or not legislators ought to have as a primary qualification before they can be elected to such an office. The fact that they have already been the victim of a crime.

   You take a close look at the capital of the United States of America to find out whether or not the criminal justice system works and you'll find out it pretty much doesn't work at all. We find that most criminals are never caught. Only a small fraction of crimes are reported. Beginning with those who are arrested. You'll find that only 33 out of 100 will be convicted. That the attrition among the ranks of the arrestees begins very early moments after they're arrested for a variety of reasons, the prosecutor might decline to prosecute 24 out of 100 cases that the police bring in. That's statistical, an additional 40 cases out of the original 100 will be dropped by the prosecutor or dismissed by a judge, only 10 cases will ever go to trial. And about three or four of those would be acquitted and those who are convicted, only a tiny percentage will ever go to jail. Well, there you are.

   So next time you hear the sobbing, the bawling, the quavering and the irrational do-gooder sob sisters talking about poor, poor Gilmore or the poor guys in prison. They're gonna have to pay with their lives and it's cruel and human. Try to remember the old couple in the walk-up flat in the Bronx and their suicide pact. She gave the hideous little crook the money just before he reached her eyes.

   You ought to write for this booklet, Crime Can Be Stopped ...here's how! Because it deals with this problem and shows you what's happening in this country, Crime Can Be Stopped ...here's how! Dial the toll-free number 800-423-4444. That's 800-423-4444. Or you can write to me Garner Ted Armstrong Pasadena, California. It's free of charge. No price until next time, Garner Ted Armstrong saying goodbye, friend.

   You have heard the World Tomorrow with Garner Ted Armstrong sponsored by the Worldwide Church of God. For literature offered on this program, send your requests along with the call letters of this station to Garner Ted Armstrong Pasadena, California 91123. Or you may dial this toll-free number 800-423-4444.