Clearing The Air

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

A record unprecedented number of bar & restaurant closings here in the Twin Cities may be the leading cause of an increase in crime.

Murder and violent crime in the Twin Cities has been spiraling upward since 2005. This article by The Minnesota Daily points to a record number of closed hospitality businesses as a very likely cause.

...On the other side, a brown brick building once known as the Baja Riverside Bar & Grill features boarded up windows and creeping graffiti. ... In the parking lot, tall weeds are trying hard to establish their own small patch of prairie.

The fact that Baja Riverside Bar & Grill is closed is very significant because so little is open or lit up at night near this stop along the light rail. Walking toward the campus, a pedestrian leaving the train at Cedar-Riverside is greeted by sights like an overflowing trash container decorated with graffiti and a blue short bus with some of its rear windows smashed.

If you had a knife sticking out of your chest and wanted to stagger somewhere and call 911, ........ where would you go?

It doesn't take a socio-economic scholar to realize that boarded up, closed, and abandoned buildings leads to inner city blight and higher crime rates.

Of course smoking bans would never be implicated as being the catalyst for a record number of 100+ hospitality business failings in the Twin Cities from the "enlightened" keyboards at the University of Minnesota paper of record The Minnesota Daily. So Clearing the Air will pen what many have suspected but are afraid to voice: smoking bans equal closed bars and restaurants, closed bars and restaurants equal blighted, higher crime rate inner cities.

Or to put it quite directly smoking bans equal higher crime rates.

I would invite a research institute to confirm this hypothesis, however, as the University of Minnesota and other research universities have received multi-million dollar grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation......their loyalties are firmly pro-smoking ban, as it is the pharmaceutical nicotine royalties (dependent upon tobacco nicotine smoking bans) which funded those multi-million dollar grants.

Other articles citing a link between smoking bans and higher crime rates:

http://makeaccountable.blogspot.com/2005/03/winnipeg-sun-news-butt-ban-kills.html

http://encyclopedia.smokersclub.com/4.html