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.
“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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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!
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."
I agree with almost everything you say here. It's not that hard of a problem to diagnose with a set of eyes and relatively normal levels of common sense. In Boston nearly all the poor dangerous but ethnically white neighborhoods are now fully gentrified and thriving communities with families, restaurants, etc. The poor black neighborhoods are full "no go" zones with housing prices orders of magnitude lower than what one would expect in Boston. Even in suburbs that had a lot of black migration have houses on the market at a fraction of the cost to neighboring towns and driving through there puts you in full "sheesh" mode. There is just a ever shortening supply of neighborhoods where people WANT to live, and those places keep getting more expensive. A third of the city's dwelling units are unlivable not because of lack of supply but crime and quality of life. And this is BOSTON!
After going through the last 10 - 15 years I'm not convinced the left wants less crime. They want better housing and communities for everyone without accounting for the causes of community decay. Sprinkling that behavior into functional neighborhoods does not dilute it, but it's more like taking a concentration of contaminated soil and putting it on fertile land. It spreads and soon that land is contaminated. I know it sounds racist when I say this but at this point it's totally based on behavior. You can't have functioning communities with high crime behavior, and the left won't address the immediate proximate cause of dysfunction, they will only talk about "root causes". We all know there is no government program that can reduce the relatively high births out of wedlock or violent crime rate in the short term. It's like trying to stop an active drug corner by investing more money in DARE.
This is a brave article and I agree that prison/proactive policing is the main solution. But people are not just concerned about crime, they are also concerned about culture—they want their neighbors to have solid middle-class ethics/sensibilities, not just be glad they won’t shoot or stab them during an altercation. For example, one of my black coworkers, who lives in a working class neighborhood in Philadelphia, complained that her African neighbors sometimes throw trash in the street. I saw this same behavior by a Pakistani (?) in London. You can lock up the worst offenders but that won’t automatically reproduce the working class neighborhoods of old. Sometimes “a culture of violence” is just a euphemism for race/ethnicity.
Edit needed? “Upon arriving in Palo Alto, the calm which so many of my classmates felt was stifling came as a relief to me, and by contrast my immediate impression of Philadelphia…”
Edit needed: “So on many occasions as I went to buy coffee from a Dunkin or ice cream from the BaskinR obbin’s (made famous by Barak and Michele’s first date),…”
Edit needed? “That same year, early in July after a lighting stick hit a substation on the Hudson River, most of the city lost power and the closest event our nation has ever experienced to The Purge unfolded.”
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.
“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.
Note the knife attack in, IIRC, Japan with multiple dead or injured or the car attack in Waukesha, etc. Evil acts are instrumentality independent.
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.
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.
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!
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
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 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
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!
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."
I agree with almost everything you say here. It's not that hard of a problem to diagnose with a set of eyes and relatively normal levels of common sense. In Boston nearly all the poor dangerous but ethnically white neighborhoods are now fully gentrified and thriving communities with families, restaurants, etc. The poor black neighborhoods are full "no go" zones with housing prices orders of magnitude lower than what one would expect in Boston. Even in suburbs that had a lot of black migration have houses on the market at a fraction of the cost to neighboring towns and driving through there puts you in full "sheesh" mode. There is just a ever shortening supply of neighborhoods where people WANT to live, and those places keep getting more expensive. A third of the city's dwelling units are unlivable not because of lack of supply but crime and quality of life. And this is BOSTON!
After going through the last 10 - 15 years I'm not convinced the left wants less crime. They want better housing and communities for everyone without accounting for the causes of community decay. Sprinkling that behavior into functional neighborhoods does not dilute it, but it's more like taking a concentration of contaminated soil and putting it on fertile land. It spreads and soon that land is contaminated. I know it sounds racist when I say this but at this point it's totally based on behavior. You can't have functioning communities with high crime behavior, and the left won't address the immediate proximate cause of dysfunction, they will only talk about "root causes". We all know there is no government program that can reduce the relatively high births out of wedlock or violent crime rate in the short term. It's like trying to stop an active drug corner by investing more money in DARE.
This is a brave article and I agree that prison/proactive policing is the main solution. But people are not just concerned about crime, they are also concerned about culture—they want their neighbors to have solid middle-class ethics/sensibilities, not just be glad they won’t shoot or stab them during an altercation. For example, one of my black coworkers, who lives in a working class neighborhood in Philadelphia, complained that her African neighbors sometimes throw trash in the street. I saw this same behavior by a Pakistani (?) in London. You can lock up the worst offenders but that won’t automatically reproduce the working class neighborhoods of old. Sometimes “a culture of violence” is just a euphemism for race/ethnicity.
Edit needed? “Upon arriving in Palo Alto, the calm which so many of my classmates felt was stifling came as a relief to me, and by contrast my immediate impression of Philadelphia…”
Edit needed: “So on many occasions as I went to buy coffee from a Dunkin or ice cream from the BaskinR obbin’s (made famous by Barak and Michele’s first date),…”
You left out the most important question. Especially as the problems you point out have been addressed at other points and have recurred.
Who benefits by this?
Edit needed? “That same year, early in July after a lighting stick hit a substation on the Hudson River, most of the city lost power and the closest event our nation has ever experienced to The Purge unfolded.”