Responses
Fuchs, Ester R.
Michael Tomasky's comment on the decline in crime rates in America's cities is a simplistic attempt to blame the left for all that has gone wrong in American politics since the 1960s. Tomasky...
...Liberals may object to increases in police brutality, to determinant sentencing, to overcrowded prisons, to punishment without rehabilitation for nonviolent offenders, but it is simply not true that liberals oppose a decline in the crime rate...
...The problem does not stem from a failure to recognize that the ideas of civic order and community interests are linked, as Tomasky suggests...
...Here are two of his most notable claims, followed by the facts: Liberals oppose reductions in the crime rate...
...Is Tomasky alluding to Frank Rizzo (Mr...
...Tomasky doesn't seem to realize that both James Q. Wilson and William J. Wilson are right...
...The intellectual dishonesty of this assertion is highlighted by Tomasky's failure to identify the liberals who purportedly object to the decline in the urban crime rate...
...During this period every major city experienced surges in crime rates, just as today every major city is experiencing declines...
...Programs that focus on crime prevention are not incompatible with policies that promote civic order—a complexity that seems to have escaped Tomasky's analysis...
...Is there any sane individual in New York City, or the rest of the country, for that matter, who objects to the decline in the crime rate...
...The inaccuracy of this contention is demonstrated by a little reality check on just who governed America's ten largest cities during the past thirty years and to what extent patterns in violent crime differed...
...But civil libertarians come from the right and the left, and certainly do not represent the mainstream of liberal opinion on criminal justice policy...
...His policy positions are largely shared by virtually every Democratic mayor of America's largest cities— Ed Rendell of Philadelphia, Richard M. Daley of Chicago, and Dennis Archer of Detroit, to name a few...
...Tomasky's real target appears to be the civil libertarians who defend individual rights above the rights of the community...
...Society needs policies that address "broken windows" and disappearing jobs...
...Law and Order and former police commissioner) of Philadelphia or Richard J. Daley of Chicago ("Shoot to kill" during the 1960s riots) when he refers to the "liberals and progressives" who ran most cities during the past thirty years...
...If we accept Tomasky's notion that liberals disagreed with Wilson and Kelling's "broken windows" theory about crime, and refused to spend the necessary dollars on policing or do the hard work to reform their police departments, then Dinkins is a conservative...
...According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, violent crime increased in San Diego, the archetypal Republican conservative city, from 222.7 reported incidents (per 100,000) in 1970 to 849.2 in 1990...
...Moreover, conservative mayors, whether they were Democrats or Republicans, did no better than their liberal colleagues in controlling the increased rate of violent crime that swept every major city between the 1960s and 1990s...
...FALL • 1997 • 93...
...Let's look at two of the most glaring examples...
...For it was Dinkins who hired three thousand more police officers, went to the state legislature in Albany so that a percentage of an increased income tax could be spent on policing, appointed the Mollen Commission to go after corruption in the police department, and, as Tomasky points out, removed homeless encampments from the city's parks...
...In fact, the crime rate in New York City began its dramatic decline during the Dinkins administration...
...For the past thirty years, when progressives and liberals governed America's cities, the crime rate increased...
...Tomasky's polemic on crime contains internal inconsistencies, factual errors, and unsubstantiated assertions...
...David Dinkins is not an anomaly...
...Accordingly, the picture is decidedly mixed, and there seems to be no relationship between party affiliation or ideology of the mayor and the crime rate of any particular city...
...Dinkins supported the creation of a civiliancontrolled review board for complaints of police misconduct and opposed the death penalty...
...We have yet to produce public policies that do both effectively...
...Is David Dinkins—the first AfricanAmerican mayor of New York City and a 92 • DISSENT Arguments champion of the civil rights movement—a liberal or a conservative...
...During that same period, Dinkins also pursued policies that attacked the "root" causes of crime, typically a liberal position...
...He increased funding for youth programs, job training, alternatives to incarceration and drug treatment for nonviolent offenders, and outreach for the homeless...
...The problem comes from an articulation of community interest that excludes the needs of particular groups in our society...
...Dinkins's "Safe Streets, Safe City" program was not ideologically inconsistent...
...Moreover, Tomasky's ideological name-calling is simplistic...
...This 281 percent increase was constant, with no respite even during the period in which Pete Wilson was mayor...
...Women in poor communities are the primary target of street criminals and support policies that produce civic order, yet no mother of a teenage boy wants to see him brutalized by the criminal justice system...
...Tomasky disingenuously espouses the notion that it was "urban liberals and progressives" who were responsible for the dramatic rise in the crime rates during the past thirty years...
Vol. 44 • September 1997 • No. 4
