National Security Cabinet Stays to Learn More

Usually the District of Columbia police department collides with international politics only when there is a scandal. But Honduran President Porfirio Lobo made the city’s cops a special focus of his visit to the capital this week as he seeks solutions for the murder rampage in his own country.

During discussions with Attorney General Eric Holder, Lobo embraced the D.C. cops and their successful campaign to reduce the city’s murder rate as a potential model.

“We addressed something in particular, our interest in order to follow the Washington, D.C., experience in order to be able to reduce the crime rate from 500 murders a year all the way to 100 murders a year,” Lobo said in an exclusive interview.

Holder has some experience dealing with D.C. crime. Between 1993 and 1997, when violent crime was at its peak, he was the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. In 1993 there were 454 homicides in the district. By 2009, the latest year for the statistic to be published, that number had dropped to 143.

By contrast, the murder rate in Honduras has nearly doubled in recent years. In 2004, the murder rate in Honduras was 30.7 murders per 100,000 people. In 2010 that number jumped to 77.5 murders per 100,000 people. Honduras is a corridor in Central America for gunrunners and drug traffickers, the main cause of the high murder rate.

So impressed was Lobo with Holder’s presentation on Washington crime prevention that he told his national security cabinet, which was traveling with him, to stay on an extra day in Washington to meet with top D.C. law-enforcement officials.

Continue with President Lobo article here.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/10/06/porfirio-lobo-interview-president-lauds-d-c-fix-for-honduras-murders.html


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