By Rachel Lu
Friday, September 30, 2016
When the Ferguson riots broke out in 2014, the nation was
shocked and alarmed. The press gave the event wall-to-wall coverage for a week.
For young people this was fairly new territory, while older people had
flashbacks to the Los Angeles riots of 1992, or even (if they were old enough)
the Watts riots of 1965. These were alarming connections. Weren’t we past all
this stuff?
The Baltimore riots in 2015 were a bit less shocking.
This was a movie we’d all just seen. By the time we got to Charlotte, the
element of surprise had been completely lost. Deadly race riots are starting to
take on the banality of “same old, same old.” I’ve actually started looking
forward to winter as a less riot-friendly season. It’s pretty depressing that
we’ve reached the point where that line of thought makes sense.
Here’s the real tragedy of Ferguson, Baltimore,
Milwaukee, Charlotte, and any other cities that haven’t yet been sacked but
soon may be. Taken in themselves, the problems that drive this frustration are
reasonably soluble. Unfortunately, just about everyone seems to prefer
narrative-peddling to problem-solving. It’s easier and more fun.
As we all double down on our rightness, soluble problems
morph into massive, mangled webs of anger and angst, and American cities go on
burning.
America Is Not
Drowning in Crime
Here’s the basic reality. Crime rates in America have
gone down quite a bit since the 1980s and 1990s. Nevertheless, we still have
relatively high rates of violent crime compared to other Western nations, and
our murder rate has ticked up a bit over the past year.
Crime is again bubbling up as a domestic concern for
ordinary American voters. At the first presidential debate, Donald Trump gave a
mostly incoherent speech on crime, in which he took care to use the words “law”
and “order” repeatedly, obviously signaling that he wishes to inherit the
mantle of law-and-order conservatism. Those memes had been fading from the
conservative electoral playbook, so Trump’s ham-fisted attempts at reviving
them are worthy of comment.
Most people fail to understand that crime is quite a
localized problem in America. There are places where murder is rampant, and
places where it’s shocking and rare. That’s partly related to gangs, which are
turf-oriented such that you pretty much know where to find them.
Actual gang murders are just one piece of the puzzle,
though. In some neighborhoods, the social fabric has decayed, and bad blood
between police and residents goes back many years. Solving crimes is
challenging when residents are afraid of being labeled “snitches.” Cops get
frustrated, and some start bending the rules. Relations deteriorate further.
It’s understandable that residents of these neighborhoods
are frustrated. It’s tough to grow up in a place where you regularly feel
unsafe. It’s hard feeling that you (or your kids) are seen as suspicious every
time you wear a hoodie or have something bulky in your coat pocket.
Still, we should understand that this is not most of America. We’ve heard a lot
lately about elite “bubble dwellers” who can’t understand the problems of
ordinary people, but with respect to violent crime, it might be more accurate
to see these sorts of neighborhoods as “bubbled.” Crime is still a problem in
America, but it isn’t the sort of pervasive problem that’s driving people into
gated-community islands of safety. In most places, our police are doing a
pretty good job.
Crime Control
Problems Are Soluble
That’s the first piece of good news. The second is that
we’ve made significant advances in crime control over the past 20 years.
Research and data analysis have given us vastly improved analytics, enabling us
to direct resources to criminal hot spots. Better surveillance and
communication reduces response times. Advances are also being made in training
methods that help police to respond more appropriately to addicts, juveniles,
and the mentally ill.
In many areas, improved transparency for police departments
is also warranted. Unions and corrupt officials have enabled bad policing
practices to become entrenched especially in many urban areas that have for
decades been under near-exclusive Democratic control. In some cities (most
obviously Chicago), law enforcement needs some restructuring and rebranding.
But even in Chicago, substantial improvement should be possible, if we could
think of the problem in terms of police transparency and crime control.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to fix anything in America today,
when reform efforts are so easily hijacked by nefarious national narratives.
A Problem of
Misdiagnosis
Americans have a narrative problem. We just like our
narratives way, way too much. We’re starting to fall prey to narrative-induced
paralysis.
This problem has fairly deep historical roots, especially
for the black community. Looking at our list of American heroes, what sorts of
people do we find? In general, our most-prized moral exemplars are prophetic
figures whose main social contribution was to speak truth to power.
Martin Luther King Jr. never had much of a head for
policy, but he was a genius at making a moral point. In a similar mold, we
lavish admiration on Mahatma Ghandi, the suffragettes, and heartstring-pulling
writers like Upton Sinclair, W.E.B. DuBois, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Americans just love our awareness-raisers. We like them enough that we’re even
sometimes willing to forgive certain lapses from Ghandi’s and King’s
non-violent protest model.
In some cases, awareness-raisers really are heroic.
(Jesus Christ is my personal favorite, although Elijah was also pretty great.)
At other times, our obsession with awareness may actually blind us to the real solutions. Not every problem comes back to a
widespread deficiency of human concern.
What if most Americans already agree that “black lives
matter”? What if our policing and crime-control problems actually call for some
prudent policy adjustments, and not a nationwide lifting of hearts and minds?
High-minded but ineffective solutions can often be worse than useless insofar as they deter people from focusing on
what really needs to be done. If a friend has a headache, you offer him an
aspirin first, not a Bible.
Black Lives Matter is currently giving us a heartbreaking
tutorial in the consequences of misapplied social activism. Just a few months
ago we could argue about the reality of “the Ferguson effect,” but now we seem
to be hurtling forward to a point where every black victim of a police shooting
is potentially seen as the next Rodney King. It’s no longer necessary to wait
for the verdict, or even for basic forensic analysis. Hearsay is enough to
start the looting.
Needless to say, these developments are creating an
extreme crime control challenge for city officials. No cop wants his city to be
the next Ferguson. But how can police chiefs send cops into high-crime
neighborhoods without giving them leave to defend themselves against
potentially deadly attacks? The longer-term consequences of that kind of
undisciplined “demonstration” will be more gang-controlled neighborhoods, and
more black deaths.
Meanwhile, if Black Lives Matter goes on demonstrating
its disdain for relevant facts and procedures, more and more Americans will
lose sympathy for the cause. Can a narrative kill you? In a way, maybe it can.
Leashing Our
Unruly Narratives
I’m not trying to blame everything on liberals.
Conservatives have narrative problems too. We have a bad habit of deflecting
any criticisms of our justice system by playing the “Daniel Patrick Moynihan”
card. Rather than discuss seriously whether our police, courts, or correctional
policies would benefit from reforms, we’d prefer to talk about the collapse of
the family and how this is mostly the fault of liberals and the welfare state.
This all makes perfect sense when you understand the twin
policy arcs of the late twentieth century, along with their corresponding political
narratives. Liberals responded to poverty and social decay with a spate of
entitlement programs, while conservatives promoted aggressive law enforcement.
Both approaches had some drawbacks (not necessarily equally serious), but
naturally everybody prefers to discuss where the other guy fell short.
Moynihan’s argument that the welfare state would further
destabilize the black family, thus locking millions in a crippling cycle of
poverty and dysfunction, looks awfully prescient in hindsight. That’s somewhat
beside the point, though, for addressing immediate crime-control problems.
We’re not going to re-instill the traditional family model overnight. When
conservatives talk about Moynihan in the wake of a controversial police
shooting, liberals (understandably) read that as, “Nothing can actually be done
here, but just so you know, this is all your fault.”
Moynihan’s analysis can be mostly true without being the most relevant truth for every
circumstance. We could buy ourselves some credibility by taking an interest in
shorter-term solutions for struggling neighborhoods. It’s easier to give
lectures on family values when you’re already involved in the neighborhoods
that need to hear them.
There are times when activism and high-minded moralizing
really are effective catalysts for positive change. There are other times when
the sermonizing just wastes time and energy that could be put into building
things that work. Let’s fire the activists, and start hiring more good cops.
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