Bob Herbert has a column today that I actually agree with (not the whole thing, by any means) on the growing crime issue in America. A few excerpts from the Times Select piece:

It has been almost six years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when the nation’s consciousness of terror was yanked to new heights. In those six years, nearly 100,000 people — an incredible number — have been murdered in the United States. No heightening of consciousness has accompanied this slaughter, which had nothing to do with terrorism. The news media and most politicians have hardly bothered to notice.

And…

Among those who have noticed the carnage are the nation’s police chiefs, and they are alarmed. Surges of homicides and other violent crimes in many cities and towns over the past couple of years have prompted Bill Bratton, the police chief in Los Angeles, to warn of the possibility of a “gathering storm” of criminal violence in the U.S.
“Philadelphia and Baltimore are having horrendous problems,” he said in an interview. “You just had that awful shooting in Newark. What we’d like to do is bring this issue of crime back into the national debate in this election year. What you don’t want is to let it get out of control like it did in the late ’80s and early ’90s.”

And…

Local authorities need help coping with violent crime. Huge numbers of criminals were locked up over the past 10 or 15 years, and they are leaving prison now by the hundreds of thousands each year. With few jobs or other resources available to them, a return to crime by a large portion of that population is inevitable.

Herbert goes on to blame terrorism spending, Republicans and guns. It’s interesting that Herbert also quotes Police Chief Bratton so prominently throughout the piece. It’s interesting, especially in light of Rudy Giuliani’s recent statements on Bratton:

August 13, 2007 — GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani floated an extraordinary olive branch to bitter rival William Bratton, hinting he’d consider his estranged former top cop for a high federal post.
In an interview in this week’s New Yorker magazine, Giuliani was asked whom he’d tap for Homeland Security secretary if elected to the White House.
He laughed and told the magazine whom he wouldn’t tap.
“I guess you need a Bernie Kerik without the background problems that Bernie Kerik had,” Giuliani said of his ethics-challenged former police commissioner and close friend.
The former mayor then lavished praise on his first police commissioner, Bratton, the city’s top cop from 1994 through 1996, and gave him equal credit for Gotham’s successful war on crime.
Giuliani is largely blamed for forcing Bratton, now the Los Angeles police chief, out of office in an ugly battle of egos.
“But you sort of look back on some of the things and say that was an extraordinarily productive relationship,” Giuliani told the magazine in editions that hit news stands today.