Unbroken Windows: The Good News on Crime
Tucker, William
Unbroken Windows THE GOOD NEWS ON CRIME by William Tucker WO RK? p erhaps it is foolish to be optimistic, but the news on crime of late is not all that bad. First and foremost, crime is...
...The effect of this ratchet can be seen in the Louise Woodward trial...
...fame — decided to game the system...
...In some cities, patrol officers were not allowed to talk casually with civilians...
...All these reforms are obviously not going to happen at once...
...Instead of worrying about maintaining public order, city administrations had become obsessed with fears of police corruption...
...The only positive note for the long term is that welfare reform seems to be going better than anyone expected...
...Dozens of other social institutions—fire departments, ambulance corps, the police, the military, doctors and hospitals—deal with matters of life and death...
...The polymerase chain reaction—a technique that won the Nobel Prize has enabled lab scientists to reproduce a speck of DNA into millions of copies that can readily be tested for identification...
...Under the Miranda rule, a suspect does not have to give any account of himself to the police...
...As one British investigator said after a burglar was convicted by saliva on a cigarette butt discarded at the scene of the crime, "If methods continue to improve, it may become almost impossible for someone to commit a crime without leaving evidence that may be used to trace them...
...As Lott points out, "Nobody is arguing anymore that carrying permits will drive up violent crime...
...These things move in cycles," says Dan Polsby, a professor at Northwestern Law School...
...Facing a likely manslaughter conviction, Woodward's attorney—Barry Scheck of O.J...
...Murders in New York, which peaked at 2,200 in 1990, fell to 767 last year, below the 986 recorded in 1968...
...Interestingly, property crimes increased 3 percent, with burglaries up .5 percent, larceny 3 percent, and auto theft 7 percent...
...He predicts an upsurge of 3o,000 to 45,000 murders a year, with other violent offenses rising proportionately...
...In October, the FBI announced it has developed a test for mitochondrial DNA—the genetic material that lies in the tiny organelles that are the powerhouses of the cell...
...One Washington lobbying group charged that because Lott is an Olin fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, and because the Olin Corporation (which has no connection to Olin fellows) owns Winchester Ammunition, the researchers were only shilling for the gun industry...
...At first there was widespread resistance— even from patrolmen themselves, who had grown used to riding around in patrol cars and ignoring minor problems...
...In America, welfare is now the principal driving force behind crime," says Kopel...
...First and foremost, crime is finally going down...
...Crimes are committed largely by young men...
...DNA IDENTIFICATION What will encourage judges and legislators to feel more confidence in themselves are the latest developments in DNA technology, which promise a level of certainty in criminal convictions that is virtually unprecedented...
...Beyond the effects of more aggressive policing, however, the outlook dims...
...The good news about DNA identifications is that nearly as many people are being exonerated as are being convicted...
...N]o matter what efforts we now undertake, we have already assured the creation of more very violent young men than any reasonable society can tolerate...
...The trend is fairly uniform across the country, with the biggest cities recording the largest drops...
...When executions were common in the 1940's and 50's, the murder rate was much lower...
...Just as crime captured public spaces in the 1960's, leaving the streets to the perpetrators, so a "virtuous cycle" is WILLIAM TUCKER is The American Spectator's New York correspondent and a columnist for the New York Press...
...But states as diverse as California, Pennsylvania, and Delaware have now held several executions...
...It is at any rate certain that hundreds of thousands of the children so abandoned have become in turn a major cause of instability...
...The Lott and Mustard study set off a firestorm, with anti-gun groups desperately trying to discredit the findings...
...Any sensible judge would have denied Scheck his ploy...
...Criminals who commit robbery and rape are often tempted to kill their victim in order to eliminate the principal witness...
...He refused any police contacts...
...Opponents of the death penalty continue to argue that there is no deterrent to the death penalty, although it is hard to see why...
...The unchecked panhandler is, in effect, the first broken window...
...One of the most important functions of the law is to distinguish between armed robberies and rapes on the one hand, and murder on the other...
...Here identifications will be unique at the level of one in eight billion—greater than the number of people on the planet...
...People know that even though some murderer is put in prison on a "life sentence," some fill-Lire judge or parole board with no familiarity with the case will change their mind and the victims will be dragged through the ordeal all over again...
...There have been far more murders, despite a stagnant youth population...
...There were the usual attempts to "reinterpret the data," including one that The American Spectator • March 1998 eliminated 3o of 31 counties in West Virginia from the study and then argued that crime had actually increased in the state...
...One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing...
...Yet this is precisely what the public wants...
...But there will be incremental change, plus all the indecipherable factors...
...A former cardcarrying member of the ACLU, Rothwax wants to overturn Miranda (this was actually done by Congress in 1968 but never enforced), limit peremptory challenges to jurors, and allow the jury to take account when a defendant refuses to testify in his own defense...
...The crackdown produced an added bonus—nearly one in ten fare-beaters was carrying a weapon or wanted on an outstanding warrant...
...But the strategy quickly paid off...
...The death penalty, it was argued, could do nothing to prevent these and could be abolished without consequence...
...With that jury, what did it matter...
...But even judges are ultimately responsible to the people they serve...
...Today, after thirty years of virtual domestic warfare, the past may be no better predictor...
...litt 37 As HARLA N LEVY POINTS OUT, ATTORNEYS ENDED UP ACCEPTING DNA TECHNOLOGY AND ACCUSING THE POLICE OF A HUGE CONSP I RACY...
...As Jerry Snyder, a New York attorney, pointed out in a recent paper for the Cato Institute, gun permits have been traditionally granted on grounds of "good character" and other vague criteria, which usually means that only the elite of a community end up protecting themselves...
...The Col-la pse of Criminal Justice...
...The tide finally turned when Mayor Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton, who had been hired by Mayor David Dinkins, started concentrating on "quality of life" crimes...
...There is probably some connection...
...Yet the consequence has been that almost half of all homicides are now "stranger murders"—murders committed in the course of other crimes...
...One train carried the legacy of the 197o's, the children of the explosion of illegitimacy and paternal abandonment...
...In 1987, it adopted a law that said county officials were required to issue carrying permits to anyone who underwent a fingerprint and background check and who took a one-day training course in firearms...
...As crime rates have declined recently, people have become more confident about being in public...
...Fare-beating had become a major sport on the subways, rising to nearly 5o percent in stations in Harlem and Brownsville...
...Demographics may have their iron law, but until a 16year-old Dorchester youth was shot last December, there had not been a killing of a juvenile in Boston for twenty-nine months...
...Three years ago the state quietly extended the law to include the nation's fifth largest city...
...Rothwax's book may be an indication that judicial opinion is beginning to swing around...
...The buzzsaw that criminals and their attorneys have run into is biotechnology, the most rapidly advancing science on the planet...
...The only question is whether or not crime has gone down...
...Shall-issue laws may eventually find their way into the industrial belt and the Northeast...
...If the prosecution loses, the case is over...
...What we experienced from 1985 on was a conjunction of two terrible arrivals...
...They are reaching the crime-prone age right now...
...Nobody misses Ted Bundy...
...Today you can deal with specks of blood too small for the naked eye...
...The courts are a lagging indicator...
...It is often a person's alibi, and not their admission of guilt, that trips them up...
...Looking ahead in 1964, with crime in a steady decline since 1935, anyone might have predicted we were headed toward an unprecedentedly peaceful society...
...I've got five lawyers," he bragged to corrections officers...
...If a defendant is guilty, he can appeal to kingdom come...
...The investigation has now gone cold and the case is almost forgotten...
...Social disorder—in its many varieties, and with the assistance of government policies—can perhaps be said to have caused the sudden collapse of family institutions and social bonds that had survived three centuries of slavery and oppression," he wrote in the Atlantic...
...It's youth crime that is totally out of proportion...
...But this confidence may make them more vulnerable to predation...
...EVE N AT NIGHT, PUBLIC PLACES SUCH AS CENTRAL PARK AND THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE HAVE BECOME CROWDED WITH STROLLERS AND PASSE RS-BY...
...He asked the judge to eliminate the manslaughter charge and let the jury decide only between intentional murder and acquittal...
...James Fox, dean at Northeastern University, has found that from 1965 to 1985, national homicide rates tracked the proportion of 18-to-24-year-olds in the population almost perfectly...
...But because only defendants can appeal, a judge is under constant pressure to give the defendant each and every benefit of each and The American Spectator • March 1998 every doubt...
...As the Jon Benet Ramsey case has proved, with proper legal advice, it really is possible to stonewall a police investigation...
...After 1985, the lines separate...
...Simpson's attorneys, who originally planned to challenge the scientific veracity of the evidence in court, ended up accepting the technology and opting instead for a conspiracy theory that had the whole Los Angeles Police Department scurrying around trying to frame their client...
...Last October in Massachusetts, a io-year-old boy was kidnapped and murdered by two men who had courted him with gifts and were associated with pedophile organizations...
...Since Mayor Rudy Giuliani took office four years ago, violent crime has fallen an astonishing 40 percent...
...Despite 4-to-1 majorities in both houses, Democrats were forced to vote on the issue in December...
...The predicted bloodbath has not occurred...
...The good news is that capital punishment is steadily gaining ground...
...Some critics say the laws have had no impact...
...Street thugs may be smarter than they are usually given credit for," says Walinsky...
...In the sixties the Supreme Court overturned statutes against loitering and vagrancy...
...The endless hand wringing of death-penalty opponents is beginning to ring hollow...
...The question of whether an identification of one in 8 million is as convincing as one in 12 million is a problem for defense attorneys and their clients...
...Two days later, the papers reported that DNA testing had exonerated two 4-yearold boys accused of raping a 13-year-old girl...
...In 1996, John R. Lott and David B. Mustard of the University of Chicago published a longitudinal study of 3,000 counties that had been affected by these shall-issue laws...
...Three-fifths of them were born to single mothers, many of whom were drug-addicted, one in fourteen will have been raised with neither parent at home...
...If the judges and legislators lack confidence in their own decision-making, why should the public have confidence in them...
...At the top of the list is New York City, where crime has plummeted to levels that only a few years ago were unimaginable...
...THE JUSTICE SYSTEM ITSELF With forensic techniques making such fantastic strides and public opinion focusing so clearly on necessary reforms, the only real impediment to bringing crime under control remains the justice system itself...
...In Orlando last December, the papers announced that Rod Ferrell, a 17-year-old "vampire killer" charged with murdering his girlfriend's parents, had been linked to the crime by DNA identification of the victims' blood on his clothing...
...Pennsylvania exempted Philadelphia when adopting its law in 1989...
...When he reappeared a week later, he was in the company of his attorneys...
...Particularly inviting, he said, are the search-and-seizure laws, which have become more incomprehensible than the tax code...
...Search-and-seizure law is drawn so tightly that the police have to describe exactly what they are going to find before they find it...
...To be sure, there are dissenters...
...THE DEATH PENALTY It is difficult to have a serious criminal justice system without a death penalty...
...Even at night, public places such as Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge have become crowded with strollers and passers-by...
...The remedy was to prevent police interaction with the community...
...A fair hearing has to be given to those who would legitimize drugs," says Dan Hales, president of Americans for Effective Law Enforcement, an organization that includes many former police officials...
...Do we want it to be an equal contest...
...In other words, in terms of capital punishment, killing a black is cheap...
...The most powerful ratchet is that only the defendant is allowed to appeal a verdict...
...Wilson and Kelling argued that public order (what was once called "law and order") was the key to checking violent crime...
...I felt like I was indestructible or invincible—like I could just do anything," confessed John Royster, accused of killing a Park Avenue dry cleaner and attacking a Central Park jogger in a 1996 spree...
...As late as 1992, the Florida Supreme Court overturned a Tampa ordinance outlawing "loitering for prostitution" on the grounds that the police would be BECAUSE OF A RETURN TO COMMON SENSE, CRIME IS DOWN-FOR NOW...
...Dilulio got so sick of encountering these juvenile crime machines in prison settings that he quit interviewing them...
...It illustrates to what extremes they will go when the numbers don't support their arguments...
...Prosecutors and the police, so the argument goes, have almost unlimited resources in investigating and punishing crime...
...Walinsky would agree...
...You've got a whole generation of young people who have grown up without fathers...
...Others say crime has gone down but for other reasons...
...Squeegee men," subway panhandlers, public drunks, and street corner drug dealers were all subject to arrest...
...Republican governor Paul Cellucci has promised to make capital punishment the major issue in next November's legislative elections...
...36 March 1998 • The American Spectator now widely preached in law schools, is that the justice system is essentially an unequal contest that pits the lone, isolated criminal against the "awesome powers of the state...
...The truth is, nobody completely understands what causes waves of crime...
...One of the most common conceits, AT CURRENT C LEARANCE RATES, ADAM WALINSKY NOTES, THE CHANCES A ROBBER WILL GET AWAY WITH KILLING HIS VICTIM ARE BETTER THAN 80 PERC ENT...
...The lone criminal, on the other hand, is defenseless, with only his legal-aid attorney standing between him and almost certain punishment...
...he is also giving voice to a bit of folk wisdom that happens to be a correct generalization—namely, that serious crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behavior goes unchecked...
...Crack arrived on the same timetable, and unloaded at the same station...
...Says David Kopel of the Independence Institute: "The truth is, adult crime rates are now as low as they have been in the last twenty-five years...
...They're going to get me off 'cause the state has no proof—everything is going to be suppressed...
...The liberal approach to crime has always underestimated the effect of endless doubt and prevarication on the public mind...
...About 200,000 people—one in every 65 residents—is now legally armed...
...For a while, opponents of the death penalty hoped to confine it to the South and Southwest, thus characterizing it as a yokel phenomenon...
...over the last half-century...
...After agreeing to an interview with the police, the landlord suddenly vanished...
...What judges and law professors fail to acknowledge is that the system is already extremely skewed in favor of criminal defendants...
...unprecedented numbers have been subject to beatings and other abuse...
...They found that murder rates had dropped 8.5 percent, rapes 5 percent, aggravated assault 7 percent, and armed robberies 2 percent...
...As Harlan Levy points out in his book, And the Blood Cried Out, O.J...
...I think the response of gun-control groups to Lott and Mustard's study has been absolutely ridiculous," says Kopel...
...They are hardened, remorseless individuals who kill or maim on impulse without any intelligible motive...
...Wait a minute," wrote the late Judge Harold Rothwax in his 1996 book, Guilty...
...After weighing these considerations, half the states have gone ahead and passed "shall-issue" ordinances—laws that require local authorities to issue gun permits to anyone who wants one and meets reasonable qualifications...
...Only thirteen states are now without the death penalty...
...In a 1995 Atlantic Monthly article entitled "The Crisis of Public Order," Adam Walinsky, one-time aide to Bobby Kennedy and the nation's foremost advocate of a police corps, blamed this on welfare and crack...
...Liberals and conservatives alike seem to be edging toward a position that too much time is being wasted and too many prison cells occupied by people charged with possession and selling of drugs...
...All this has been a triumphant confirmation of James Q. Wilson and George Kelling's famous 1982 Atlantic Monthly article, "Broken Windows," which has become one of the principal documents of the last half of the century...
...The most extreme examples are New York and Los Angeles, where celebrities ended up with gun permits while taxi drivers and bodega owners—who suffer the highest rates of occupational homicide—had to fend for themselves unarmed...
...No one ever mentions the state also has awesome responsibilities...
...Executions in 1997 were the highest since 1972— although this was largely because of a high number in one state (Texas...
...SHALL ISSUE" LAWS Proponents of gun ownership have long contended that if ordinary people were allowed to carry concealed guns, robbers and rapists would be much more concerned about confronting armed resistance...
...What the legislators and judges fear most about capital punishment is its finality...
...If a defendant is knowledgeable about constitutional protections and gets a lawyer right at the outset, there is really very little the police can do to investigate a crime...
...Despite this suspicious behavior, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau has decided there is no "probable cause" for issuing a warrant to search either his building or his upstate residence...
...If a street cop took a sabbatical and holed himself up in a library for six months doing nothing but studying the law on search and seizure, he wouldn't know any more than he did before he started," Rothwax said...
...What concerns most observers is the demographic bubble of 15-to-3o-year-olds that lies just on the horizon...
...The judge—now interposing himself as the "level head" in the courtroom—overturned the verdict and convicted Woodward of manslaughter, which is what the jury almost certainly would have decided if allowed...
...The horror of the crime prompted an immediate effort to reinstate the death penalty...
...But Kelling is more optimistic...
...In the year z000 the black youths born in 1985 will turn fifteen...
...In many states, liberals now have their backs to the wall...
...In a recent New York City case, a couple living in a rent-controlled apartment disappeared in the midst of a dispute with their landlord...
...Violent crimes are at the lowest since 1989...
...Lott and Mustard speculated that there is a "substitution effect," with criminals turning to non-confrontational property crimes as they become concerned about meeting armed victims...
...One of the arguments against capital punishment in the 1960's was that 90 percent of murders were "crimes of pas35 A DE MOGRAPHIC B UBBLE OF 15-TO-30-YEAR-OLDS LIES JUST ON THE HORIZON...
...Five years ago, you needed a drop of blood the size of a dime to get a DNA sample...
...Do we want criminals to be as smart or smarter than the cops...
...Dilulio has called these youth "superpredators" and attributes their creation to the welfare system and single-parent families...
...The measure was about to pass both houses when one liberal Democrat changed his mind, saying he had been influenced by the Louise Woodward case...
...What is changing rapidly is the amount of genetic material needed to make an identification...
...I think the present gains can be sustained...
...They like to think of themselves as being smarter than the public — not subject to its "mindless passions" —and are loath to admit they may be following public opinion...
...What we've got now just ain't working...
...In addition, "probable cause" prevents all but the most convincing evidence from allowing police even to start an investigation...
...DNA evidence has already weathered early challenges from the defense lawyers and waded through the scientific muddle of the courts...
...If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired," they wrote in their now-famous introduction, "all the rest of the windows will soon be broken...
...Semen samples had indeed been found on the girl's clothing and she swore the two boys had assaulted her in a school bathroom...
...Studies over long periods have shown that the death penalty has been six to ten times less likely to be imposed when the victim was black...
...In New York, which has the strictest gun laws in the country, the greatest concentration of legal permits is on the Upper East Side, while the smallest concentration is in Harlem—which shows how little gun licenses have correlated with actual gun possession...
...Adam Walinsky notes that, at current clearance rates, the chances a robber will get away with killing his victim are better than 8o percent...
...When executions stopped in the 1960's, the murder rate took off and did not start coming down until just recently...
...Criminals often testify to the overpowering sense of invulnerability they feel when they attack or kill someone...
...According to FBI statistics, the overall crime index has declined u percent since 1991 and is now the lowest it has been since 1985...
...You can't just ruin a whole justice system trying to prevent people from destroying themselves," adds David Kopel...
...John Dilulio, Jr., professor of sociology at Princeton and a product of the streets of Philadelphia, is equally pessimistic, also on demographic grounds...
...All this was broadcast as an example of the "unreliability of jury verdicts," but it was precisely the opposite —a perfect example of defense attorneys gaming the system and judges allowing them to get away with it...
...Of all juveniles confined for violent offenses today, less than 30 percent grew up with both parents...
...In New York City, beat officers could not confront street corner drug dealers but had to buck the matter up to special units...
...Among them are the spreading movement to allow the average citizen to carry guns...
...Since the days of the Warren Court, judges and lawyers have tied themselves up in logical conundrums and lost sight of their purpose...
...Just as there's a vicious cycle when good people are driven off the streets by crime and disorderly behavior, so there's a virtuous cycle when they start to reappear again...
...Scheck lost his gamble...
...BUT IS THE WORST OVER...
...Wilson and Kelling stated the obvious—such prohibitions on maintaining public order are senseless and harmful: "The citizen who fears the ill-smelling drunk, the rowdy teenager, or the importunate beggar is not merely expressing his distaste for unseemly behavior...
...Nor does he believe the worst is over...
...The jury—believing that Woodward was indeed responsible for the child's death—returned the only verdict it was allowed, first-degree murder...
...These are the murders that had long been deterred by the death penalty...
...These well-meaning pedestrians have deprived criminals of their former habitat, serving as a tangible check on crime and disorderly behavior...
...Murders have declined 13 percent since 1991, rape is at its lowest level since 1989, and burglary at the lowest level in two decades...
...Another area of change, although Rothwax did not mention it, is the "war on drugs...
...But no one says the effect has been counterproductive...
...Opposition comes from people who believe the legalization of drugs would abandon whole communities to lives of certain degradation...
...A lot will depend on whether black families reform themselves...
...and the remarkable advances in DNA technology...
...Ferrell had originally confessed to the crime, then relented after meeting his legal aid attorneys...
...The case will be reviewed by more than two dozen appellate judges, all vying with each other to find nitpicking mistakes...
...now returning them to the public...
...Therefore, it should be the job of judges to equalize the contest by tilting the system—if ever so slightly—in favor of the criminals...
...Gun control advocates, on the other hand, have argued that arming everyone would create mayhem...
...Thousands of permits have been issued, frequently to store owners and cab drivers...
...According to police, there have been no untoward incidents...
...Florida started the ball rolling after a series of highly visible armed robberies and murders...
...Not surprisingly, the rate of murder victimization among blacks is five to eight times as high as among whites...
...A federal district court in California once justified this policy on the grounds that "famous persons and public figures are often subjected to threats of bodily harm...
...BUT HOW LONG CAN WE KID OURSELVES THAT THE DEATH PENALTY DOESN'T 32 March 1998 • The American Spectator unable to distinguish between prostitutes and wives greeting their husbands...
...His lawyers are challenging the admissibility of his statement...
...But tests showed that the semen belonged to someone else...
...Simple traffic accidents would quickly escalate into shoot-outs...
...Twenty-four states, most in the South and West, have since followed suit...
...They do not respond to normal stimuli, have very short time horizons, and absolutely no feeling for their fellow human beings," he says...
...No one really knows why, but everyone is keeping his fingers crossed...
...34 March 1998 • The American Spectator Other trends besides welfare reform also promise to turn the tide...
...The problem is that young men—especially minority youth —are getting far more violent...
...the steady return of the death penalty...
...That would start the cycle on the upswing again...
...By 1995, fare-beating had been reduced 90 percent...
...As ordinary patrol cars continually drove by congregations of drug dealers without taking any note, neighbors became convinced that the police were corrupt and in the pay of the drug dealers...
...The change of mood in the nation's largest city has been dramatic...
...AND REMEMBER-CRIMES ARE COMMITTED LARGELY BY VIOLENT YOUNG ME N. sion"—the result of arguments among friends or family members...
...Since the 1960's, the courts had been arguing that laws supporting public order were discriminatory and unconstitutional...
...The unfortunate custom of racial discrimination has created a controlled experiment in the U.S...
...This was before the blood samples were identified...
Vol. 31 • March 1998 • No. 3
