[Simon G. Reifel]

When the FBI director selected the years to illuminate his thesis for the
* National Press Club, he compared a year when the nation's homicide rate
* was at one of its *all-time lowest* points to that of a year when the rate
* was near its *all-time high*. [extended discussion of homicides followed]
*
* Such selective use of statistics is dishonest.
*
* It is impossible to know what was going through Louis Freeh's mind as he
* delivered his distorted, exaggerated and fundamentally flawed crime speech
* to the National Press Club.
*
* We do know however, that for many decades, law enforcement officials
* across the nation have advanced their careers and promoted their
* political agendas by chanting the same Mantra of the Scary Numbers.

Louis Freeh: "The polls prove people are fed up with crime"
This book contains a DEVASTATING accounting of the manipulation
of people's perception of crime rates. [not shown!]
Fear, loathing, and somehow the public clamoring for a Police State.

* Police chiefs, prosecutors, judges, FBI directors and the politicians who
* supported their cause have long waved the bloody crime flag to rally the
* public to their various causes.
*
* During the twenty-year period that presidents from Nixon to Clinton were
* agitating the public about the national crime menace, the evidence shows
* the American people were gradually experiencing less and less crime.
*
* In a May 1994 speech to the American Law Institute Freeh made an
* IMPASSIONED plea on behalf of a controversial change in the nation's
* wiretap law that he was then trying to persuade Congress to approve.
*
* "If you think crime