The left is soft on crime

...Third, unemployment among teenagers, like unemployment generally, has decreased, by 25 percent since 1991...

...We' 11 be there for a week, and then we're going to leave...

...The right, by contrast, wants more prisons, tougher sentencing laws, more applications of the death penalty, "three strikes" laws, and the like...

...People like Kelling and Bratton are obviously not leftists, but it is a terrible mistake to dismiss them as conservatives...

...Neither is it to say that the conditions that encourage crime (poverty, in a word) might not have been alleviated somewhat by more of the social spending progressives have argued for...

...The founders didn't have much of an answer for this, in any way that would have direct application to today's world...

...One hesitates to ape a Giuliani line, but he is within his rights to say that many black and Hispanic people, innocent and perhaps not so, are alive today who would not be if things hadn't changed...

...Crime decreased dramatically in New York's subways, for example, when transit cops cracked down on farebeating, because when they ran their checks on farebeaters, they often found that the miscreants had warrants for more serious offenses...

...Rather it has been a sub rosa and understood sentiment, coursing unspoken through the blood of political conversation...

...You have to pass that information up to the drug unit...

...Police brutality complaints— which shot up under Bratton's tenure in New York, but have lately begun to decline— are almost all lodged by blacks and Latinos...

...It is, nevertheless, a compelling and obvious one...

...This is not done openly...

...So it was, FALL • 1997...

...but too bad for you if you live in the Robert Taylor Houses...

...q 90 • DISSENT...

...The civil liberties union sued, but the ordinance was supported by dozens of depositions from residents of the San Jose neighborhood of Rocksprings—people who complained that gang activity had made them hostages on their own block...

...Why and how they changed is the topic of ferocious debate, and here again, Giuliani's decriers have a smidgen of a point...

...and the maintenance of order in public spaces requires that individual liberties be weighed against community interest...

...A string of corruption scandals across the country in the 1960s led police departments everywhere to withdraw police from the streets, on the theory that if officers didn't come into daily contact with the bad element, they would face less temptation to accept bribes...

...Overall violent crime—homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, and rape—fell 7 percent...

...89 Arguments he points out, that when Congress passed the crack sentencing guidelines, half the black members of Congress voted for them, and not one black member charged that the law smacked of racism at the time...

...You don't need to be Eliot Ness to understand that transfer from a system designed to hide accountability to one designed to accentuate it made things work better...

...or "No Auto Theft, No Peace...

...These measures all fit the "tough on crime" mold, but they are all nondeterrents for the simple reason that about one in twenty people who commit serious crimes actually ends up doing time, and a third of those are for nonviolent offenses (drug possession, drunk driving...

...There is a little bit of something at least to the last two of these arguments—a year or so ago, the local papers came close to producing proof of reduction inflation, if you will, in the thirty-fourth precinct in the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights, and certainly the number of brutality complaints has risen dramatically...

...The 911 system, put into widespread use in the 1970s, produced a mindset by which police often did little more than respond to calls...

...even those of us whose most heinous crime would be littering know we're more likely to search out a trash can where the sidewalk is pristine, less likely where it's already strewn...

...Certainly, difficult civil liberties issues arise in these situations, and they can't be lightly dismissed...

...Emphasis added.] The italicized words make the point clear enough, as do the standard definitions of liberty we've come to accept...

...Cops are obviously far more likely to look askance at black male teenagers than anyone else, far more likely to rough up blacks and Latinos than whites...

...Here again is an area where the left has slipped into misjudgment in recent years...

...It's difficult to deny that this sort of thing makes life better for everyone...

...the civil libertarian position and the left position are not necessarily the same thing, of 88 • DISSENT Arguments course, but in general terms, left thinking on these issues has been shaped by civil-libertarian imperatives...

...There is, in other words, at least as strong a community interest in the protection of these spaces as in the protection of private spaces—stronger, I should think, since "the public" is not an interest group with a powerful lobby and since so much private property these days is protected by private security forces and the like (if you live on Lake Shore Drive, your "interest" in community safety is pretty well safeguarded...

...There are a few commonly offered explanations that have nothing to do with policing...

...that's still perhaps five hundred more than the number of homicides society just can't do anything about (committed by people who know each other—and even here, in the cases of spouses and lovers, more could be done—and irredeemably bad eggs...

...When there seem to be no rules, in a park or on a street corner, people will naturally keep probing, just to see where the line in the sand actually is (I'd argue that we all behave this way...

...No case history has established such a right, and even the phrase "domestic tranquility," which appears in the preamble to the Constitution, has no real legal meaning...

...All these have surely played a role, but it seems awfully hard to deny the different policing strategies, instituted in several cities but nowhere more completely than in New York, their due...

...And yet, for every black teenager who gets brusque treatment from a white cop, aren't there hundreds or thousands of black people who, on balance, need that cop to be there...

...But whether we like it or not, the Constitution falls short of making the case for positive rights—the insistence, for example, on a right to shelter or health care, on a governmental obligation to the poor, or, in the present case, a duty to make the streets safe— and the courts have followed this instruction with diligence...

...And for whom especially...

...In New York, Bratton designed the COMSTAT system: weekly (or more) meetings of everyone from the commissioner, and often the mayor, on down to precinct commanders, who were held to account for the crime in their areas...

...When New York City removed dozens of homeless people from the Lower East Side's Tompkins Square Park—and this was done not by Giuliani, but by David Dinkins, and only after city officials had made strenuous outreach efforts toward the homeless people encamped there—the local civil liberties branch and some segments of the local left tried to cast the dispute as being between the homeless population and the yuppies who had recently gentrified the neighborhood...

...Finally, departmental bureaucracies, like all bureaucracies, just naturally reinvent themselves every so often to provide a new rationale for their existence...

...For thirty years, crime rates have exploded in almost every city in America...

...Finally, and most persuasively, we have simple demography— there are fewer teenagers and young adults around than there were ten years ago, and fewer teenagers and young adults means less crime (it has also produced—I swear I heard this on the radio the other day—a severe babysitter shortage...

...But shovel below the topsoil and you see a problem, I think, that is a little more complex...

...In places—parks, for example— where annoyances like public urination and camping have been tolerated, stop tolerating, and watch as the space becomes usable again...

...In Brooklyn's seventy-fifth precinct, covering the neighborhood of East New York and in recent years the city's most crimeridden precinct, homicides in 1996 numbered thirty-eight, a reduction by two-thirds over the same time period...

...It may well be the case that the police acted in behalf of the yuppies, who have political clout...

...This is not to say the explosion is the fault of urban liberalism...

...I suspect that many people whose lives are most directly affected by crime would think so...

...The crack epidemic seems to have run a natural course, having abated since its peak in the mid- to late-1980s...

...To recognize these points is in no way to give in to the right, whose "solutions" remain anathema...

...There exist, of course, certain affirmative rights such as voting, and affirmative pieces of public policy such as Social Security and collective bargaining that have come to be accepted as rights, as indeed they should...

...More than a few precinct commanders have testified about the grillings they received from police brass at these conclaves...

...What about the property of all of us...

...Seven hundred murders in New York is still seven hundred murders, after all...

...In the Chicago case, the local branch of the ACLU brought its suit in behalf of a resident whose apartment was subjected to a warrantless weapons search...

...drinking alcohol in public could be done only if the bottle was in a brown paper bag, and only off main thoroughfares...

...Discussing the differentials between sentencing for powder cocaine crimes and crack-related crimes in his new book, Race, Crime, and the Law, Randall Kennedy argues that although it's certainly true that "prohibitionists of various sorts have excited racial sentiments" in justifying things like the heavier crack sentences, it's also the case that "authorities have neglected vices that have menaced black communities, thereby depriving them of equal protection of the law" (his emphasis...

...So, you send it up your chain of command to the division commander, to your borough commander, to your chief of patrol, to your chief of the department, who then sends it down to the chief of organized crime, who then sends it down to his borough commander, down to his division commander, down to his squad commander...

...These are all remarkable accomplishments, and New York City, always America's most feared metropolis, leads the way in such cocksure fashion that it can now call itself the safest large city in the United States...

...Community policing changed this...

...Conservatives want harsh penalties...

...And their success calls into question a central tenet of liberal-left belief about crime...

...But it's also true that there are thousands of poor and working-class people on the Lower East Side—Eastern European senior citizens, Puerto Rican families-who, quite unlike the neighborhood's yuppies, can't go out to the Hamptons or up to the Berkshires for their dose of the greensward...

...it stands to reason that if everyone had a job and made at least, say, $20,000 or $30,000 a year, not many people would have much of a motive to steal anything from anyone, and a world so organized is still a world very much worth fighting for...

...Helpful, that is, to the people—poor, law-abiding, usually black and Hispanic—who live under daily threat of life and limb...

...But the question must be asked: Why is there a right to sleep in a public space or panhandle or congregate on a street corner in a way that obviously facilitates drugselling, but no right to walk down one's block unmolested...

...And that is how the NYPD worked...

...That, at least, is a start...

...California has achieved its lowest crime rate since 1968...

...But the notion of crime as a response purely to social deprivation—a notion shared by most liberals and leftists—and the concomitant notion of the street criminal as the symbolic cynosure of civil libertarian concerns has not been terribly helpful...

...Since 1993, total crime has fallen in seventeen of the country's twenty-five largest cities: by 36 percent in New York, by 25 percent in Los Angeles, by 20 percent in Boston and San Francisco, by 14 percent in Denver...

...In June, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its 1996 crime statistics...

...And, for thirty years, urban liberals and progressives, who ran most of these cities, have not done much about it...

...But it's on common property—parks, city streets and sidewalks, public housing projects—where the battle against crime is largely being fought in the era of quality-of-life policing...

...But the evidence suggests that at least some crime, as Kelling hypothesized and Bratton demonstrated, is a response to disorder...

...So demography and all the rest have something to do with the lower numbers—there are cities, such as Los Angeles, where Bratton-type methods have not been put into place with much success, and crime has still gone down—but to argue that the new strategies have not been an important factor in many cities seems to defy simple common sense...

...Ihave observed, in the course of my reporting on New York City politics in recent years, the odd phenomenon of liberal Democrats muttering in vague opposition to the fantastic decreases in the city's crime rate...

...Still, Jefferson refers above to the commission of acts against the life and property of others...

...We know what this meant on the streets: if you arrest people for committing small crimes, which police departments had spent years ignoring, you spare the citizenry commission of larger ones...

...Second, more criminals are in jail—a lot more...

...A moderate brand of liberalism argues for front-end solutions like community policing and drug rehabilitation and youth services and, more dodgily in my view—because the bad guys will always have access to any guns they want through the black market—stricter gun control...

...whether or not that's true, we can say at any rate that departments began to draft policies that led to avoidance of contact with the public, to minimize the risks of scandal and/or litigation...

...In February, the California State Supreme Court upheld a San Jose ordinance that prohibited suspected gang members from standing together on street corners and engaging in other forms of lawful activity...

...In fact it could be that to recognize the ideas of civic order and community interest is to begin that fight...

...It was, in other words, a system of near-perfect nonaccountability, as Bratton told the Hartford Courant in April: Before, if you're the precinct commander, you would get your head handed to you every week in community meetings about the drug dealing in your precinct...

...The homicide rate has fallen so dramatically that, if numbers for the first half of this year FALL • 1997 • 85 Arguments hold, the city will finish 1997 with fewer than 700 murders, down from more than 2,200 in 1990...

...In some cases, they've been right to do so—sometimes these statutes are drawn so broadly as to give police wide latitude to hassle whomever they cast a dour eye upon...

...In the South Bronx, the neighborhood of Fort Apache fame, homicides have gone from sixty-eight in 1993 to a remarkable eighteen in 1996...

...On one level, this is just politics...

...With the prison construction boom and the passage in Congress and state houses of stricter sentencing laws, the total number of people incarcerated in the United States more than doubled from 1984 to 1994, when the figure topped nine hundred thousand (this is not necessarily a development we want to applaud, of course, but it is a factor...

...Besides, the numbers were achieved by the despised Rudolph Giuliani, the current Republican mayor, and therefore must be either not real or puffed up or, most likely, won at far too high a cost to civil liberties...

...but the state of New Jersey offered Newark some extra funding for a pilot foot-patrol program...

...The two arguments, then, meet: some crime, and maybe a lot of crime, stems from disorder...

...In Hartford, Connecticut, crime fell by 20 percent in just one year, from 1995 to 1996, and has hit a ten-year low...

...in the 1970s and 1980s, this meant a trend toward specialization— drug units, sex-crime units, all manner of elite units, and none of them under the control of the precinct commander...

...They need that park...

...And it has value, I would submit, from a left perspective...

...It has not been unusual to hear a progressive activist, say, rebuke the local press for making too much of the crime reduction, or fall back on the obviously true (but certainly no more incisive for being so) cliché that crime reduction is no panacea for the city's multifarious ills...

...Thus were Kelling and Wilson led to their conclusion: that controlling the small problems, creating order, would perforce help control the larger ones...

...sitting on the stoops of stores was accepted, but not lying down...

...This dialogue has come to be known as the "front-end/back-end" debate...

...In most instances, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) or its local branch has taken these ordinances to court...

...Underlying many of these problems, of course, is race...

...The new crime-fighting strategies arrived 86 • DISSENT Arguments hand-in-hand with a debureaucratization of police departments...

...Some— conservatives, mainly—argue that Warren Court decisions on criminals' rights rendered police unable to act in many cases...

...The "broken windows" appellation derives from the analogous observation that if you place two cars side by side on a city street, one with a broken window and one pristine, the former will be stripped in a matter of hours (or minutes), while the latter may never be touched...

...Cities all over the country in recent years have passed public nuisance laws to regulate behavior in their streets and parks...

...Homicide dropped by 11 percent...

...If ideology's great pendulum is to swing back toward the left, the first step is to prise it away from the right...

...Of the various rights the Constitution conveys to us, one of them is not the right to walk down the street in safety...

...Jefferson, writing the Crimes Bill of 1779, went so far as to say: Whereas, it frequently happens that wicked and dissolute men, resigning themselves to the dominion of inordinate passions, commit violations on the lives, liberties and property of others, and the secure enjoyment of these having principally induced men to enter into society, government would be defective in its principal purpose, were it not to restrain such criminal acts, by inflicting due punishments on those who perpetrate them...

...Back then, cities had moved police off foot patrols and into cruisers...

...Instead, public safety is a mere community interest...

...no one in one party wants to give credit to a fellow from the other party for anything...

...Obviously, on its most fundamental level, street crime is a response to poverty and lack of options...

...Order, then—not as in law and order, but as in basic civic order—has some value after all...

...Before we go any further, some numbers and their likely explanations...

...And although it's obviously true that the civil rights and liberties of the accused must be defended with all seriousness, it's also reasonable to argue that a view of the situation that takes only individual rights into account, or gives them unwarranted precedence, is a view that's likely to be harmful to the community interest in some cases (to say nothing of the odd paradox inhering in the fact that it's usually the left that argues the case for community and a larger social responsibility, with respect, say, to corporate avarice, or the view expressed by some CEOs that corporations' only responsibility is to their shareholders...

...But what happens when the people most directly affected welcome the laws...

...Virtually every black man in America save maybe Michael Jordan probably knows what it's like to get the hairy eye, or worse, from a cop...

...And the squad commander sends back up and down [the message]: "We'll be there in three months...

...I refer to what we might call the standard civil libertarian line on crime and the use of public space...

...You don't need me to tell you who does, and doesn't, live in those neighborhoods...

...California's threestrikes law has locked up 2,750 felons, fully 85 percent of whom are non-violent offenders, notoriously including one man whose third strike consisted of stealing a slice of pepperoni pizza...

...bureaucratized and aloof police departments must accept a much more direct responsibility...

...Indeed, on the criminological continuum, FALL • 1997 • 87 Arguments Kelling and Bratton, and others who argue for crime-prevention strategies, are probably somewhere in the middle...

...If the prevention of "quality-of-life" offenses gets results, and it appears to be doing that, then as crime abates, it seems to me there will inevitably be less clamoring for, and pandering to, maladies like the death penalty and three-strikes laws, and it may indeed begin to swing public opinion toward seeing the efficacy of things like more money for drug treatment...

...Rights, rather, are in the main individual protections against the state, and as such are negative, that is, they are designed to prevent government intrusion into personal affairs...

...When a command has to be passed up five rungs and back down six and results in a one-week sweep three months down the road, that line exists at a point so remote as to be laughable (although people who live in neighborhoods where they had to think hard about going out after dark probably weren't laughing...

...The now-famous "broken windows" theory, first put forth in 1982 by the criminologists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson, and lately applied to the streets by the likes of former New York Police Commissioner William Bratton, had its beginnings in Kelling's Newark Foot Patrol Experiment of the mid-1970s...

...certainly no one has set up shop in City Hall Park and hoisted placards reading, "More Homicides...

...Neither is it to give up on the fight for a world in which fewer people have an incentive to commit crimes in the first place...

...In a similar case, more than five thousand residents of public housing in Chicago signed petitions supporting metal detectors at entrances, visitor sign-in requirements, and police sweeps—admittedly, warrantless—after barrages of gunfire in order to determine where shots might have originated...

...A couple of brief examples...

...Kelling strolled along with them, and found that over time citizens and officers established a "disorder threshold" with which neighborhoods were, he says, comfortable: They did not merely prohibit specific acts, such as soliciting for prostitution, but often defined the conditions and manner under which activities could be carried out: for example, panhandling was permissible, but not from people standing still or waiting at a bus stop...