Your premises are sound. The revolving door of non-incarceration needs to stop. Glad Kim Foxx is finally gone.
"Our problem is one of an unwillingness to enforce the rule of law, and one of a deep culture of violence in this country, accelerated by the prevalence of guns, not material poverty."
I'm not sure "prevalence of guns" is causative- N.B. in the UK they just swapped guns out for knives. Here, like places in downstate Illinois, there're lots of guns, but low crime.
We did try the eliminating poverty aspect with "The Great Society" and things got worse. What needs to happen are two things IMHO:
1. criminals need to be incarcerated for a long time or take a short drop with a sudden stop- pour encourager les autres.
2. people need to be invested in their communities through employment, religion or both. It's more a cultural problem than an economic one. Bronzeville was a better place in the pre LBJ.
Gun prevalence is intersectional with location. In rural areas guns have functions such as hunting and varmint control that do not apply in dense urban areas. In these areas guns are solely for use against humans, either in the commission of a crime or in defense from the same. So a focus on guns (and other weapons) in urban areas make sense where it would not elsewhere.
When it is serious felony to have a gun/weapon on your person, only criminals will carry them. So you randomly stop and search young males, find a weapon/drugs and arrest them, charge them with a felony, then plead down to a lesser charge to get them off the street.
This is how policing works. More cops and more incarceration means more young guys get stopped searched, arrested, and locked up until they are no longer young.
But what happens when the policies become successful and crime levels fall 70, 80 percent as they did in the decades after 1990? An ever larger fraction of the young guys you slam against the wall and search have nothing on them. Each time you treat and innocent person as if they were a criminal because of how they look, young, male, black, in a bad neighborhood, you affect them. From such sentiment comes things like BLM and George Floyd protests.
To go further involves one of two general approaches. One approach favored by Bukele and Trump is to replace the metaphor of the police as an occupying force with the real thing. That is, use extreme repression to encourage inhabitants to stop acting out.
Another approach is to go back to the shareholder capitalism we had midcentury instead of the shareholder primacy we have today. The heavy police presence would remain, but now they will have locals (neighborhood associations, businessmen, church leaders etc.) with whom they can liason to get to know the neighborhood, who are bad eggs are and who are the good kids. They then can focus their harassment on those whom the locals want to either submit to neighborhood norms or be singled out for punishment.
If carrying a gun is a felony, those guys carrying in high-crime areas who are not yet criminals would become so when stopped and frisked by police. As for people carrying guns in low crime areas when people are not routinely stopped and frisked, one could probably carry without incident. I’m not worried about what guys with guns might do in a safe neighborhood (the very safety says they won’t do anything).
My comment was addressed to the issue of how to deal with violence in high crime neighborhoods in the context of broken windows policing, which evidence suggests played a significant role in falling crime in the 1990’s. In such places the last thing you need are lots of guns because the population is full of people who will use them on each other with little provocation, or gangbangers who carry for protection against other gangbangers.
"Another approach is to go back to the shareholder capitalism we had midcentury instead of the shareholder primacy we have today. The heavy police presence would remain, but now they will have locals (neighborhood associations, businessmen, church leaders etc.) with whom they can liason to get to know the neighborhood, who are bad eggs are and who are the good kids. They then can focus their harassment on those whom the locals want to either submit to neighborhood norms or be singled out for punishment."
“I'm not sure "prevalence of guns" is causative- N.B. in the UK they just swapped guns out for knives. Here, like places in downstate Illinois, there're lots of guns, but low crime.”
Hard to kill a bunch of school kids en masse with a knife.
Bro. Don’t be disingenuous. Look up stats on American gun violence versus knife violence. I know you don’t want a reason to not sleep with your plushy Heston doll, but be serious here.
Yes, lets. Your point is simplistic since “getting rid of duh bad gunz” won’t solve the violence problem. If you eliminate the 5 largest ghetto ridden cities from the stats, the US violence rate is among the lowest in the developed world- and guess where probably 80% of the privately held guns are in this country- yep. outside of the cities.
Further to same, where are firearm restrictions most strict? Right where the the gun violence is most severe. Doesn’t work so well, now does it?
Focusing on banning instrumentalities as a solution for a cultural problem is simplistic and dumb.
Claiming that “if you remove the five largest ghetto-ridden cities, the U.S. violence rate is low” is statistically meaningless. You can make any national rate look good by removing the places where most of the problem occurs. Urban violence is part of the national pattern, not an outlier error. Excluding it is an ecological fallacy, drawing national conclusions by selectively removing inconvenient subpopulations.
The idea that “evil acts are instrumentality independent” ignores basic public health data. Homicide and suicide lethality depend heavily on the weapon. A gun attack is far more likely to result in death than a knife attack. That’s why countries with fewer guns still have violence but much lower homicide rates.
Empirical studies comparing peer nations show that countries with high gun availability have much higher gun death rates even when controlling for other variables. For example: In 2015 U.S. firearm homicide death rate was 24.9 times higher than other high income countries. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ypmed.2019.02.026
Saying that areas with strict gun laws also have high gun violence doesn’t prove that the laws cause violence or that they “don’t work.” If anything causality runs the other way: stricter laws are enacted because those areas already have high violence rates. The relevant comparison would be between similar places before and after restrictions or between comparable regions with different law regimes but similar demographics, not between Chicago and rural Idaho.
Calling violence a “cultural problem” doesn’t explain why culture and lethality correlate so tightly with firearm access. Culture may influence aggression, but instrument access determines outcomes.
Who argued about getting rid of guns? Reread my op. I’m just laughing at the idea that taking actions against guns will lead to an epidemic of school kids getting stabbed to death, lol.
As for your point about cities vs rural areas - look up the concept of population density, control for it, and then get back to me with your findings.
A Japanese man has been sentenced to death for killing 19 people at a facility for disabled people.
Nine men and 10 women, ranging in age from 18 to 70, were killed, and 26 people were injured, when Satoshi Uematsu went on a stabbing spree at the care home in 2016.
It was one of Japan’s deadliest mass killings since the end of World War II.
Uematsu, now aged 30, broke in to the Tsukui Yamayuri-en facility in Sagamihara, a city west of Tokyo, where he used to work."
I have this theory that both parties are soft on crime for distinct reasons, both rooted in their respective forms of libertarianism. On the one hand, many people are total softies on guns, way more than is reasonable given the bulk of evidence on the links between guns and crime as well as being anti-tax which puts a ceiling on what is even achievable through public policy.
On the other hand, the left-wing term for libertarianism is just anarchism, which basically means that the government causes crime in the form of dubious causal analyses that suggest that police in fact increase crime, basically getting the causation backwards.
I suggest to liberals something of a norquist-pledge: Liberalism implies a huge role of the government in daily life, and I reject any and all forms of libertarianism. Crime should be taken as seriously as poverty is.
I think I basically agree with this. The one additional thing I’ll add is that this instinct also shows up in downplaying violence created by crime and upselling violence from the state such as police ect. It gives a weird popular impression for where violence is actually occurring.
The reason guns don't reduce crime more is laws that create uncertainty about when it is legal to defend yourself with them. Executions after trials and appeals are expensive. A car owner filling someone who tried to carjack him with holes is cheap.
Great essay Peter — though I actually don’t think it’s nearly as controversial as you suggest.
In Seattle I’m fond of reminding people that they just CAN call the police when they see e.g. open air drug use. Did so today on my commute home when I rode my bike past about a dozen addicts smoking fentanyl.
It is possible to simultaneously believe that our criminal, addicted, or unhoused neighbors are sacred and deserve care while ALSO believing that care means lowering our tolerance for disorder. One interesting finding in the criminology literature is that the more folks believe in environmental causes of criminality, the more likely they are to justify or exempt their own criminal actions. It’s another example of a place where the desire to address crime through “root causes” ends up not only incapable of delivering on its desired outcomes, but actively backfiring.
Kevin Dahlgren does excellent reporting on this in Oregon.
If you see no one else caring about where you live, you're more likely to adopt that feeling especially if you haven't lived in an area where people actually do care.
The fact that addicts congregate in publicly visible groups should tell you the police don't do anything when you call them to report drug use. What are they supposed to do?
First off, great handle. Second, they should work with DA's to enforce the laws on the books. The challenge is when DA's don't prosecute the cases referred to them. When they don't, police stop referring the cases. As citizens we have to put pressure on the DA's and police simultaneously to enforce our misdemeanor possession laws.
My thinking on drugs evolved upon seeing what cocaine did to people. I am told there are many high-functioning cocaine users. I wish it were so because I would try it instead of beer. But all the users I knew burned through their families, their jobs and their money and disappeared with the exception of one person who maintains steady employment but is not capable of healthy relationships. Everything revolves around access to the drug.
Later I boiled it down to, if a highly intelligent, financially and socially secure individual like Philip Seymour Hoffman can't handle drugs how can the average schlep.
I'm high on coffee so one more paragraph. I read an interview with Jane Curtin reminiscing about John Belushi. She said in the beginning he was this incredibly funny, big huggy- bear guy and they were all devoted to the craft. Nobody cared about the money; they took care of their art and their art took care of them. Then he became all about, we've got to be funny so they pay us the money so I can buy the drugs. The personality of drug users becomes just the drug or what can I do to get the drug.
I appreciate your willingness to discuss a problem that, through the discomfort it engenders, is all too often ignored or addressed only by those seeking to exploit the problem of crime and the racial biases that accompany many American’s views on the issue. I am still working through the piece now so can’t say whether I agree or disagree with it, but wanted to share that.
Relating to your personal stories, I have my own. I live in Detroit now. Crime is not something I have yet experienced here, though I am sure it will eventually come. I have heard some, very frankly, horrific stories, and murders have occurred on my block before (I only learned of this via geographic crime statistics, much later).
When I lived in New York, a man threatened to kill me and everyone in the train car I was on, started quoting from the Quran, listing out all the crimes we had committed, and then came upon a man and his son and threatened them both specifically. The man dared not move or fight back, not having a weapon and not knowing whether this man, who had threatened us all with death with religious zeal, did. We all ended up leaving the train car at the next stop and to my knowledge, no one on the train car was harmed. It was, however, a startlingly unpleasant experience now seared into my mind.
I agree with you that these things matter. They do not deter me, perhaps that is what it means to be a city-dweller, but they ought not occur at all. Too many people adjusted to living in American cities fail to recognize this.
This is a really good article but I'm not sure I agree with all your conclusions (and I also lived in a relatively high-crime part of New Haven and currently live in Los Angeles in a neighborhood with a large unhoused population, so I have some firsthand experience as well). First, I do think there is a role for combatting poverty and specifically for a stronger social safety net. The US is unusual in not having universal healthcare, and mental health care & addiction treatments are very hard to access. Iryna Zarutska's killer was floridly psychotic and needed to be medicated or in an inpatient ward. After Reagan closed all the institutions, the mentally ill went onto the streets; the vision was to build a network for community mental healthcare clinics but the funding never arrived. We have invested in incarceration rather than treatment + prevention. It's more expensive to put someone in prison than to get them into treatment. I think the 'defund the police' movement has been widely misunderstood and I blame the activists, frankly, for coming up with a terrible slogan. The goal wasn't to get rid of police officers, but rather to allow them to focus more on dangerous crime than civic disorder and to supplement their efforts with social workers and case workers. Otherwise there is a revolving door of the police getting called to deal with folks who are high or mentally ill and those folks getting dumped right back on the street a few hours or days later. We don't have the resources to permanently imprison every meth user and schizophrenic person forever. You don't see these problems with homelessness, mental illness, and addiction in countries that have socialized medicine and better redistributive, anti-poverty policies.
Scott Alexander discussed this at length one time.
Fundamentally, a lot of the mentally ill need to be *involuntarily* committed. Yeah, that’s basically jail. If it’s voluntary a lot of these people will choose drugs and street life over treatment.
People watched One Flew Over The Cuckou’s nest and decided it meant these places had to close. Kind of like how they watch Shawshank Redemption and decide criminals are swell. They’re movies people, not real life.
I part ways with some of my left-leaning friends on this issue, because I do agree that some mandated commitment is necessary. I’ll be interested to see how Newsom’s care court policy plays out. However, I would disagree with you that Reagan closed the institutions solely because of the movies. They were genuinely horrible and inhumane places, with a lot of abuse, and relatively sane people could get locked up for years because of a vengeful ex or a custody dispute or a parent who didn’t want to deal with them. It’s good that they closed, but we needed a real alternative in place.
Also, the “just lock them up forever” strategy doesn’t really work, besides the obvious civil liberties issues. It’s staggeringly expensive for one thing, and jails don’t do much to improve people’s behavior or mental health
We could greatly reduce the cost of imprisonment by overturning some of the court rulings on the minimum rights prisoners have. Tents with a barbed-wire fence wrapped around them aren't especially expensive. (Not advocating this, just pointing out it is a possibility.)
This strikes me as a really counterproductive and terrible idea, especially in the context of the prison population being disproportionately high in mental illness to start out with. Tents with barbed wire fences seem unsafe (how will you contain riots and prisoner violence?). Unless the plan is to incarcerate people _permanently_, at some point they will be released to rejoin society - do we really want people who are even more disturbed after living in horrendous and traumatizing conditions? IMO the goal of prison should be to reduce recidivism, which is costly to taxpayers and to society. So educational and therapeutic programs may be cost effective if they can reduce the likelihood that folks will re-offend.
When I lived in Baltimore I walked out to my driveway and found a homeless guy's backpack abandoned. Scatted around were >50 hypodermic needles from a pack of harm reduction materials provided by the DPH. My wife was 6 months pregnant with our first child.
My thought was "who do the people who allow and promote this situation not want me to vote for? That's who I'm voting for."
Dam Peter, great article. Fantastic way of interlacing PhD data with your personal narrative. You went through some horrific shit in Chicago, man, and hope you are seeking solace in your suburban life
Restrictions on criminal records aren’t that unusual for apartment buildings. Have you ever heard of a city placing strict limits on applicants to new subsidized housing, eg not even misdemeanors?
First congrats for surviving Chicago!! The Bears suck and don’t get me started on the Sox .., please 🙏 But you also need to put things in per capital not absolute numbers. I think a lot of ghettos exist because of redlining and white flight. I should know because I was brought up in one of the original white flight suburbs…. Des Plaines. But the key to being a city resident as opposed to being a suburbanite is getting to know the town. New York is turning the corner on crime and I think Chicago will too. Don’t underestimate gentrification as a way to eliminate ghettos!
Well- this was well-said, and perfectly sets up the essay I will be submitting for the Boyd Institute essay contest on how urban disorder is related to Medicaid funding issues.
“It accomplished this transformation through a no-nonsense, tough on crime approach, and the result yielded a city that continues to attract hundreds of thousands of newcomers per year.”
This assumption has been debated extensively though - there actually is no one, unified consensus as to why crime dropped in the ‘90s. Everything from an improving economy to legalized abortion has been proposed. In fact, the Broken windows policy itself you insinuate as the reason may have done little to nothing:
Several times you have stats about “between 1950 and 1980 or 90 such and such city lost so many residents” but no mention of where they went (the suburbs), who was allowed to move to the suburbs (white people) or how the suburbs got built (with enormous federal subsidy). This is a very important part of the story you are trying to tell. In the 50s and 60s the federal government basically gave white people millions of dollars and built them brand new neighborhoods.
If they had given this money in a race blind way, the suburbs and the cities would both be more integrated today.
Or if they had given the money to city governments and to city dwellers, the cities wouldn’t have emptied out or become disinvested.
Amen. This essay is weird. The whole premise is that there’s actually a lot of cheap housing just wasting away in ghettos no one will live in bc crime. Maybe true in Chicago, which doesn’t have a housing price crunch, but even the poorest parts of SF have $1+ million houses. Run down house built in 1938 in Oakland’s most run-down neighborhoods? $500k+ is lower end of market. The coastal areas with the highest housing prices have very expensive housing even in their lower-cost neighborhoods!
Yes we need to control disorder in cities. Urban residents deserve safe, thriving communities. We also need to properly index the sources of urban disorder and identify solutions, which the article just doesn’t do
Housing in the worst places in Oakland is relatively cheap for the region. Quite attainable if you can combine households and take into account housing assistance ( sec 8, et al. ).
Be careful with pricing. A lot of the cost of housing by those poorer, those with bad credit, is born not so much in the difference in the sticker price, let's say $2350 / mo for a 2 bedroom rather than $2700 / mo but in the lack of quality and features of the unit. Smaller size, no off street parking, broken dishwasher that landlord doesn't fix cuz it terns out lease doesn't cover it, mold, et al.
There’s a big issue with the police in big cities, too. They generally have a strong sense of what is and isn’t their job, and the BLM protests made them even more passive, demoralized and understaffed. How do you turn this around?
I remember Bill Clinton boasting about putting more police on the street and it feels like a lost era.
Your premises are sound. The revolving door of non-incarceration needs to stop. Glad Kim Foxx is finally gone.
"Our problem is one of an unwillingness to enforce the rule of law, and one of a deep culture of violence in this country, accelerated by the prevalence of guns, not material poverty."
I'm not sure "prevalence of guns" is causative- N.B. in the UK they just swapped guns out for knives. Here, like places in downstate Illinois, there're lots of guns, but low crime.
We did try the eliminating poverty aspect with "The Great Society" and things got worse. What needs to happen are two things IMHO:
1. criminals need to be incarcerated for a long time or take a short drop with a sudden stop- pour encourager les autres.
2. people need to be invested in their communities through employment, religion or both. It's more a cultural problem than an economic one. Bronzeville was a better place in the pre LBJ.
Thank you for reading and I’m glad you agree with the main premise!
I also agree with the main premise, but the article is littered with left-wing shibboleths that make it cringeworthy beyond that.
You would know. Cringe-worthy is what keeps all 350 of your subscribers coming back for more.
Gun prevalence is intersectional with location. In rural areas guns have functions such as hunting and varmint control that do not apply in dense urban areas. In these areas guns are solely for use against humans, either in the commission of a crime or in defense from the same. So a focus on guns (and other weapons) in urban areas make sense where it would not elsewhere.
When it is serious felony to have a gun/weapon on your person, only criminals will carry them. So you randomly stop and search young males, find a weapon/drugs and arrest them, charge them with a felony, then plead down to a lesser charge to get them off the street.
This is how policing works. More cops and more incarceration means more young guys get stopped searched, arrested, and locked up until they are no longer young.
But what happens when the policies become successful and crime levels fall 70, 80 percent as they did in the decades after 1990? An ever larger fraction of the young guys you slam against the wall and search have nothing on them. Each time you treat and innocent person as if they were a criminal because of how they look, young, male, black, in a bad neighborhood, you affect them. From such sentiment comes things like BLM and George Floyd protests.
To go further involves one of two general approaches. One approach favored by Bukele and Trump is to replace the metaphor of the police as an occupying force with the real thing. That is, use extreme repression to encourage inhabitants to stop acting out.
Another approach is to go back to the shareholder capitalism we had midcentury instead of the shareholder primacy we have today. The heavy police presence would remain, but now they will have locals (neighborhood associations, businessmen, church leaders etc.) with whom they can liason to get to know the neighborhood, who are bad eggs are and who are the good kids. They then can focus their harassment on those whom the locals want to either submit to neighborhood norms or be singled out for punishment.
"
When it is serious felony to have a gun/weapon on your person, only criminals will carry them
"
If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
If carrying a gun is a felony, those guys carrying in high-crime areas who are not yet criminals would become so when stopped and frisked by police. As for people carrying guns in low crime areas when people are not routinely stopped and frisked, one could probably carry without incident. I’m not worried about what guys with guns might do in a safe neighborhood (the very safety says they won’t do anything).
My comment was addressed to the issue of how to deal with violence in high crime neighborhoods in the context of broken windows policing, which evidence suggests played a significant role in falling crime in the 1990’s. In such places the last thing you need are lots of guns because the population is full of people who will use them on each other with little provocation, or gangbangers who carry for protection against other gangbangers.
Bingo! 👍
"Another approach is to go back to the shareholder capitalism we had midcentury instead of the shareholder primacy we have today. The heavy police presence would remain, but now they will have locals (neighborhood associations, businessmen, church leaders etc.) with whom they can liason to get to know the neighborhood, who are bad eggs are and who are the good kids. They then can focus their harassment on those whom the locals want to either submit to neighborhood norms or be singled out for punishment."
“I'm not sure "prevalence of guns" is causative- N.B. in the UK they just swapped guns out for knives. Here, like places in downstate Illinois, there're lots of guns, but low crime.”
Hard to kill a bunch of school kids en masse with a knife.
That type of attack is a pretty small fraction of gun homicides overall.
Note the knife attack in, IIRC, Japan with multiple dead or injured or the car attack in Waukesha, etc. Evil acts are instrumentality independent.
Bro. Don’t be disingenuous. Look up stats on American gun violence versus knife violence. I know you don’t want a reason to not sleep with your plushy Heston doll, but be serious here.
Yes, lets. Your point is simplistic since “getting rid of duh bad gunz” won’t solve the violence problem. If you eliminate the 5 largest ghetto ridden cities from the stats, the US violence rate is among the lowest in the developed world- and guess where probably 80% of the privately held guns are in this country- yep. outside of the cities.
Further to same, where are firearm restrictions most strict? Right where the the gun violence is most severe. Doesn’t work so well, now does it?
Focusing on banning instrumentalities as a solution for a cultural problem is simplistic and dumb.
Claiming that “if you remove the five largest ghetto-ridden cities, the U.S. violence rate is low” is statistically meaningless. You can make any national rate look good by removing the places where most of the problem occurs. Urban violence is part of the national pattern, not an outlier error. Excluding it is an ecological fallacy, drawing national conclusions by selectively removing inconvenient subpopulations.
The idea that “evil acts are instrumentality independent” ignores basic public health data. Homicide and suicide lethality depend heavily on the weapon. A gun attack is far more likely to result in death than a knife attack. That’s why countries with fewer guns still have violence but much lower homicide rates.
Empirical studies comparing peer nations show that countries with high gun availability have much higher gun death rates even when controlling for other variables. For example: In 2015 U.S. firearm homicide death rate was 24.9 times higher than other high income countries. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ypmed.2019.02.026
Saying that areas with strict gun laws also have high gun violence doesn’t prove that the laws cause violence or that they “don’t work.” If anything causality runs the other way: stricter laws are enacted because those areas already have high violence rates. The relevant comparison would be between similar places before and after restrictions or between comparable regions with different law regimes but similar demographics, not between Chicago and rural Idaho.
Calling violence a “cultural problem” doesn’t explain why culture and lethality correlate so tightly with firearm access. Culture may influence aggression, but instrument access determines outcomes.
Who argued about getting rid of guns? Reread my op. I’m just laughing at the idea that taking actions against guns will lead to an epidemic of school kids getting stabbed to death, lol.
As for your point about cities vs rural areas - look up the concept of population density, control for it, and then get back to me with your findings.
So then what is your point? This is turning into a ramble.
Hmm. 🤔
"
A Japanese man has been sentenced to death for killing 19 people at a facility for disabled people.
Nine men and 10 women, ranging in age from 18 to 70, were killed, and 26 people were injured, when Satoshi Uematsu went on a stabbing spree at the care home in 2016.
It was one of Japan’s deadliest mass killings since the end of World War II.
Uematsu, now aged 30, broke in to the Tsukui Yamayuri-en facility in Sagamihara, a city west of Tokyo, where he used to work."
How often does this is happen? Ask the kids in Newtown.
I have this theory that both parties are soft on crime for distinct reasons, both rooted in their respective forms of libertarianism. On the one hand, many people are total softies on guns, way more than is reasonable given the bulk of evidence on the links between guns and crime as well as being anti-tax which puts a ceiling on what is even achievable through public policy.
On the other hand, the left-wing term for libertarianism is just anarchism, which basically means that the government causes crime in the form of dubious causal analyses that suggest that police in fact increase crime, basically getting the causation backwards.
I suggest to liberals something of a norquist-pledge: Liberalism implies a huge role of the government in daily life, and I reject any and all forms of libertarianism. Crime should be taken as seriously as poverty is.
I think I basically agree with this. The one additional thing I’ll add is that this instinct also shows up in downplaying violence created by crime and upselling violence from the state such as police ect. It gives a weird popular impression for where violence is actually occurring.
The reason guns don't reduce crime more is laws that create uncertainty about when it is legal to defend yourself with them. Executions after trials and appeals are expensive. A car owner filling someone who tried to carjack him with holes is cheap.
Great essay Peter — though I actually don’t think it’s nearly as controversial as you suggest.
In Seattle I’m fond of reminding people that they just CAN call the police when they see e.g. open air drug use. Did so today on my commute home when I rode my bike past about a dozen addicts smoking fentanyl.
It is possible to simultaneously believe that our criminal, addicted, or unhoused neighbors are sacred and deserve care while ALSO believing that care means lowering our tolerance for disorder. One interesting finding in the criminology literature is that the more folks believe in environmental causes of criminality, the more likely they are to justify or exempt their own criminal actions. It’s another example of a place where the desire to address crime through “root causes” ends up not only incapable of delivering on its desired outcomes, but actively backfiring.
Kevin Dahlgren does excellent reporting on this in Oregon.
I had no idea about the belief in environmental factors leading to people justifying their own bad behavior but it makes sense
If you see no one else caring about where you live, you're more likely to adopt that feeling especially if you haven't lived in an area where people actually do care.
The fact that addicts congregate in publicly visible groups should tell you the police don't do anything when you call them to report drug use. What are they supposed to do?
First off, great handle. Second, they should work with DA's to enforce the laws on the books. The challenge is when DA's don't prosecute the cases referred to them. When they don't, police stop referring the cases. As citizens we have to put pressure on the DA's and police simultaneously to enforce our misdemeanor possession laws.
Kudos for "recovering philosopher" as well. 👍
My thinking on drugs evolved upon seeing what cocaine did to people. I am told there are many high-functioning cocaine users. I wish it were so because I would try it instead of beer. But all the users I knew burned through their families, their jobs and their money and disappeared with the exception of one person who maintains steady employment but is not capable of healthy relationships. Everything revolves around access to the drug.
Later I boiled it down to, if a highly intelligent, financially and socially secure individual like Philip Seymour Hoffman can't handle drugs how can the average schlep.
I'm high on coffee so one more paragraph. I read an interview with Jane Curtin reminiscing about John Belushi. She said in the beginning he was this incredibly funny, big huggy- bear guy and they were all devoted to the craft. Nobody cared about the money; they took care of their art and their art took care of them. Then he became all about, we've got to be funny so they pay us the money so I can buy the drugs. The personality of drug users becomes just the drug or what can I do to get the drug.
I appreciate your willingness to discuss a problem that, through the discomfort it engenders, is all too often ignored or addressed only by those seeking to exploit the problem of crime and the racial biases that accompany many American’s views on the issue. I am still working through the piece now so can’t say whether I agree or disagree with it, but wanted to share that.
Relating to your personal stories, I have my own. I live in Detroit now. Crime is not something I have yet experienced here, though I am sure it will eventually come. I have heard some, very frankly, horrific stories, and murders have occurred on my block before (I only learned of this via geographic crime statistics, much later).
When I lived in New York, a man threatened to kill me and everyone in the train car I was on, started quoting from the Quran, listing out all the crimes we had committed, and then came upon a man and his son and threatened them both specifically. The man dared not move or fight back, not having a weapon and not knowing whether this man, who had threatened us all with death with religious zeal, did. We all ended up leaving the train car at the next stop and to my knowledge, no one on the train car was harmed. It was, however, a startlingly unpleasant experience now seared into my mind.
I agree with you that these things matter. They do not deter me, perhaps that is what it means to be a city-dweller, but they ought not occur at all. Too many people adjusted to living in American cities fail to recognize this.
Thank you for reading and sharing your perspective!
Blacks are 4 - 7 times more likely than whites to engage in criminal behavior. That's why white neighbors are so expensive.
This is a really good article but I'm not sure I agree with all your conclusions (and I also lived in a relatively high-crime part of New Haven and currently live in Los Angeles in a neighborhood with a large unhoused population, so I have some firsthand experience as well). First, I do think there is a role for combatting poverty and specifically for a stronger social safety net. The US is unusual in not having universal healthcare, and mental health care & addiction treatments are very hard to access. Iryna Zarutska's killer was floridly psychotic and needed to be medicated or in an inpatient ward. After Reagan closed all the institutions, the mentally ill went onto the streets; the vision was to build a network for community mental healthcare clinics but the funding never arrived. We have invested in incarceration rather than treatment + prevention. It's more expensive to put someone in prison than to get them into treatment. I think the 'defund the police' movement has been widely misunderstood and I blame the activists, frankly, for coming up with a terrible slogan. The goal wasn't to get rid of police officers, but rather to allow them to focus more on dangerous crime than civic disorder and to supplement their efforts with social workers and case workers. Otherwise there is a revolving door of the police getting called to deal with folks who are high or mentally ill and those folks getting dumped right back on the street a few hours or days later. We don't have the resources to permanently imprison every meth user and schizophrenic person forever. You don't see these problems with homelessness, mental illness, and addiction in countries that have socialized medicine and better redistributive, anti-poverty policies.
Scott Alexander discussed this at length one time.
Fundamentally, a lot of the mentally ill need to be *involuntarily* committed. Yeah, that’s basically jail. If it’s voluntary a lot of these people will choose drugs and street life over treatment.
People watched One Flew Over The Cuckou’s nest and decided it meant these places had to close. Kind of like how they watch Shawshank Redemption and decide criminals are swell. They’re movies people, not real life.
I part ways with some of my left-leaning friends on this issue, because I do agree that some mandated commitment is necessary. I’ll be interested to see how Newsom’s care court policy plays out. However, I would disagree with you that Reagan closed the institutions solely because of the movies. They were genuinely horrible and inhumane places, with a lot of abuse, and relatively sane people could get locked up for years because of a vengeful ex or a custody dispute or a parent who didn’t want to deal with them. It’s good that they closed, but we needed a real alternative in place.
Yeah there were several nationwide scandals about institutions at that time. Geraldo Rivera made his name breaking one of them.
Also, the “just lock them up forever” strategy doesn’t really work, besides the obvious civil liberties issues. It’s staggeringly expensive for one thing, and jails don’t do much to improve people’s behavior or mental health
We could greatly reduce the cost of imprisonment by overturning some of the court rulings on the minimum rights prisoners have. Tents with a barbed-wire fence wrapped around them aren't especially expensive. (Not advocating this, just pointing out it is a possibility.)
This strikes me as a really counterproductive and terrible idea, especially in the context of the prison population being disproportionately high in mental illness to start out with. Tents with barbed wire fences seem unsafe (how will you contain riots and prisoner violence?). Unless the plan is to incarcerate people _permanently_, at some point they will be released to rejoin society - do we really want people who are even more disturbed after living in horrendous and traumatizing conditions? IMO the goal of prison should be to reduce recidivism, which is costly to taxpayers and to society. So educational and therapeutic programs may be cost effective if they can reduce the likelihood that folks will re-offend.
Also public schools need to improve in cities other wise families move out once they have school aged children
Lots to be said about education.
A better path is school vouchers. You need to decouple education from real estate entirely.
We don't need traditional public schooling anymore. Everything can be done through algorithmic tutorials.
When I lived in Baltimore I walked out to my driveway and found a homeless guy's backpack abandoned. Scatted around were >50 hypodermic needles from a pack of harm reduction materials provided by the DPH. My wife was 6 months pregnant with our first child.
My thought was "who do the people who allow and promote this situation not want me to vote for? That's who I'm voting for."
Dam Peter, great article. Fantastic way of interlacing PhD data with your personal narrative. You went through some horrific shit in Chicago, man, and hope you are seeking solace in your suburban life
I appreciate it and I’m glad found the article good! The personal stuff was definitely difficult to write, in a good way.
Restrictions on criminal records aren’t that unusual for apartment buildings. Have you ever heard of a city placing strict limits on applicants to new subsidized housing, eg not even misdemeanors?
I haven’t looked into that before. It would be interesting to know though, I wonder if it is illegal?
Great article. Can confirm that Anthony is still there.
Does he still have the same hat?
I think so
First congrats for surviving Chicago!! The Bears suck and don’t get me started on the Sox .., please 🙏 But you also need to put things in per capital not absolute numbers. I think a lot of ghettos exist because of redlining and white flight. I should know because I was brought up in one of the original white flight suburbs…. Des Plaines. But the key to being a city resident as opposed to being a suburbanite is getting to know the town. New York is turning the corner on crime and I think Chicago will too. Don’t underestimate gentrification as a way to eliminate ghettos!
Well- this was well-said, and perfectly sets up the essay I will be submitting for the Boyd Institute essay contest on how urban disorder is related to Medicaid funding issues.
“It accomplished this transformation through a no-nonsense, tough on crime approach, and the result yielded a city that continues to attract hundreds of thousands of newcomers per year.”
This assumption has been debated extensively though - there actually is no one, unified consensus as to why crime dropped in the ‘90s. Everything from an improving economy to legalized abortion has been proposed. In fact, the Broken windows policy itself you insinuate as the reason may have done little to nothing:
https://cssh.northeastern.edu/sccj/2019/05/21/researchers-debunk-broken-windows-theory-after-35-years/
Several times you have stats about “between 1950 and 1980 or 90 such and such city lost so many residents” but no mention of where they went (the suburbs), who was allowed to move to the suburbs (white people) or how the suburbs got built (with enormous federal subsidy). This is a very important part of the story you are trying to tell. In the 50s and 60s the federal government basically gave white people millions of dollars and built them brand new neighborhoods.
If they had given this money in a race blind way, the suburbs and the cities would both be more integrated today.
Or if they had given the money to city governments and to city dwellers, the cities wouldn’t have emptied out or become disinvested.
I don’t think El Salvador is safe, because the government can kidnap you or your family members and there is no recourse.
Amen. This essay is weird. The whole premise is that there’s actually a lot of cheap housing just wasting away in ghettos no one will live in bc crime. Maybe true in Chicago, which doesn’t have a housing price crunch, but even the poorest parts of SF have $1+ million houses. Run down house built in 1938 in Oakland’s most run-down neighborhoods? $500k+ is lower end of market. The coastal areas with the highest housing prices have very expensive housing even in their lower-cost neighborhoods!
Yes we need to control disorder in cities. Urban residents deserve safe, thriving communities. We also need to properly index the sources of urban disorder and identify solutions, which the article just doesn’t do
Housing in the worst places in Oakland is relatively cheap for the region. Quite attainable if you can combine households and take into account housing assistance ( sec 8, et al. ).
Be careful with pricing. A lot of the cost of housing by those poorer, those with bad credit, is born not so much in the difference in the sticker price, let's say $2350 / mo for a 2 bedroom rather than $2700 / mo but in the lack of quality and features of the unit. Smaller size, no off street parking, broken dishwasher that landlord doesn't fix cuz it terns out lease doesn't cover it, mold, et al.
There’s a big issue with the police in big cities, too. They generally have a strong sense of what is and isn’t their job, and the BLM protests made them even more passive, demoralized and understaffed. How do you turn this around?
I remember Bill Clinton boasting about putting more police on the street and it feels like a lost era.