Study Calls Craigslist 'a Cesspool of Crime'

Bala4361 writes "Classifieds site Craigslist has been linked with 330 crimes, 12 murders and 105 robberies or assaults in the United States last year due to anonymous interactions on the site, says a new study. The report calls Craigslist 'a cesspool of crime,' citing murders, rapes, robberies, assault and rental rip-offs as some of the examples." Among the many Reefer Madness-style quotable stretchers from the originating consultancy: "The unfortunate fact is that Craigslist has become almost synonymous with crime." Update: 02/25 17:05 GMT by S : Craigslist has posted a response.

Comments

So let see

[geekoid]

100's of million can access it, and there has been less then 400 crimes.

Yeah, thats a regular hive of scum and villainy ~

Re:Streets

[Nethemas the Great]

We must rid ourselves of streets or at least require license to use them.

Re:misunderstandings

[einstein4pres]

Don't drink and craigslist!

It's not as bad now...

[ChangeOnInstall]

...since they removed the jobs/hired goons section. It's a shame too, as the local one had excellent goons.

So Craigslist is Mos Eisley then?

[GPLDAN]

Luke: You know, I think that R2 unit we bought may have been stolen.
Uncle Owen: What makes you think that?
Luke: Well, I stumbled across a recording while I was cleaning him. He says that he belongs to someone named Obi-Wan Kenobi. I thought he might have meant old Ben. Do you know what he's talking about?
Uncle Owen: Just a fucking Craigslist thing, you know how it is.
Luke: I wonder if he's related to Ben.
Uncle Owen: That wizard is just a crazy old internet pervert. Now, tomorrow I want you to take that R2 unit to Anchorhead and have it's memory erased. That'll be the end of it. It belongs to us now.

Re:Which is ridiculous.....

[bunratty]

The amount of crime in a city has always been highly correlated with the size of the classified section of the local newspaper. Coincidence? I think not!

Re:Streets

[roc97007]

Yes, I wouldn't wear a giant neon sign with someone else's name, because that would be illegal...

Total Perspective Vortex

[dazedNconfuzed]

The Total Perspective Votex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.
To explain--since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation--every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula--for that was his name--was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex--just to show her.

And into one end, he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other, he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain, but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

-- The HitchHiker's Guide

Re:Streets

[Black Gold Alchemist]

I got an idea to prevent crime. Let's make it illegal to do something illegal. That would prevent most if not all types of crime!

Re:misunderstandings

[thisnamestoolong]

Dihydrogen monoxide? That stuff ought to be banned! It can cause death if it is inhaled, and is the chief component of acid rain!

Re:misunderstandings

[Anonymous Coward]

I grew up on a farm, and we were constantly spraying that stuff on plants. It would radically change the way they grew, so you could clearly see a line in a field where it had been applied, and where it hadn't. We even had tanks of it in places, and animals like squirrels and mice would regularly get into it and die, and I'd have to clean out their little corpses as one of my chores. God knows if you tested my body today I'm probably still full of the stuff. Crazy what we used to do before organic farming came along.