Crime
The third leg of the urban stool
In the two previous essays, I addressed affordable housing and quality public services. In this essay, I’ll address crime. Crime is the third leg of the urban three-legged stool. Crime keeps many people from wanting to live in cities. Not everyone has the financial wherewithal to live in an upper-middle-class and wealthy, economically “gated” part of the city. Most of the middle and lower classes can barely afford to live in cities anyway. The cost of real estate is one barrier. Taxes are another. Then, you have all the bureaucratic red tape when you are dealing with the city government. You start to wonder if what you receive in services, is commensurate with the amount of money that you fork over in fees and taxes. The middle classes have headed for the suburbs, and what you have left, is the upstairs/downstairs coalition of rich and poor. Without a large middle class tax base, cities eventually die. Crime can be the tiebreaker when it comes to wanting to live in the city.
Cities have always had crime problems. Any time you have a large group of people living in close quarters, there is going to be an element that preys on their fellow citizens. However, there was a time when you had a combination of effective policing, as well as effective self-policing, among the different racial and ethnic communities, that make up a large portion of the city population base. The local cop on the beat was probably a member of one’s ethnic or racial community. They even lived in the neighborhood they patrolled.
When it came to gaining acceptance of an ethnic immigrant population into their niche of urban society, criminal activity of any kind wasn't acceptable to that immigrant community (No, the Italian crime syndicates were not acceptable to the majority of Italian immigrant families). That community wanted to gain acceptance into society at large. It wasn’t uncommon for the local cop on the beat to handle juvenile minor crimes, in the same way that they would handle behavioral offenses committed by juvenile members of their own family. The Irish cop on the urban beat might just march the little Irish kid that stole a banana from the local grocery store into the back room of the shop, and take a belt to his or her behind. After that, the cop would march the kid to their home, where the father would continue where the cop left off. Was there any paperwork that would follow the kid for the foreseeable future, or even the rest of their life? Nope, just a good old-fashioned ass whoopin’. Things were dealt with differently back then.
By stealing that banana, that kid had brought shame and disgrace to the immigrant community that was trying to become part of the American fabric. That young boy or girl would remember that every time they tried to sit down for the next few days. There was no arrest. There was no citation. There was no court appearance. There were no lawsuits or “how dare you touch my kid,” parenting. There was only a kid with a very sore behind, who had learned a very valuable lesson.
That authority was also extended to the schools. There are many tales of tough nuns with rulers in the parochial schools, as well as tales of tough teachers and principals with paddles in the public schools. If you got spanked in school, you did everything in your power to make sure that your parents didn’t find out. Occasionally you were lucky.
A lot of times, if you deal with minor crimes in an effective manner, you will put a big dent into the commission of more serious offenses. Hence, the “Broken Windows” (BW) approach during the Giuliani administration in New York. It worked.
During the Giuliani years, crime went way down. Many of those confronted by the police for minor offenses, like jaywalking or smoking in the bathroom of a subway station, turned out to have outstanding warrants for more serious offenses. They were taken off of the street. Even Times Square had a noticeable drop in assaults and robberies. The live sex shows shut down. The porn movie houses started showing family entertainment movies, and the strip clubs went out of business. The area lost its seediness. Today, Times Square is reverting back to the old days. It doesn’t matter that part of Times Square is now a car free zone for pedestrians. Crime has increased over 30% since the beginning of the COVID lockdown. New York needs another Giuliani, not another de Blasio. All our cities need a Giuliani. Many of them need a Giuliani on steroids.
School crime is a problem too. Most of that has to do with spineless administrators and board members, who are afraid of being accused of racism. There is even talk about racial disciplinary quotas. No! There needs to be zero-tolerance policies regarding any type of criminal activity in the schools. Habitual offenders need to be placed in “other” types of alternative schools, i.e. public boarding schools that are run like military boot camps. For years, rich parents have sent their problem offspring to private military schools. It must work, because those schools are still in business.
Levels of urban crime increased dramatically, following the implementation of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society social programs. The idea was to trap urban Blacks into a cycle of never-ending government assistance in exchange for votes (Open borders anyone?). The byproduct was crime. Because you no longer had men involved in the raising of their children, you started to get an entire generation of feral youth ruling the ghetto in “Lord Of The Flies” fashion. Now, the gangs are out of control. Frankenstein’s monster?
The civil rights legislation created a whole network of what I call the “Social Justice Industrial Complex.” It is the industry that manages poverty here in the United States, and yes, it is a multi-billion dollar industry. It is most visible in our urban areas, but supposedly, statistics claim that there are more White people in our rural areas that are on public assistance than urban Black people that are on public assistance. The White poor are mostly hidden away in the hollers of Kentucky and West Virginia, along the Mississippi gulf coast, and in smaller Northern cities like Bangor, ME, while the Black poor are quite visible in our larger cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC.
There was a time when you had large White working poor, working-class, lower-middle-class, and middle-middle class populations in our cities. There are very few of those folks left. Many of them left when their jobs went away to China, Bangladesh, and Mexico. Many of them moved to the outer-ring suburbs, to avoid interaction with poor ghetto Blacks. Many Black middle-class families that had the financial means, moved to the suburbs for the same reason. Crime. That was very common in the 1950s through the early 1970s. South of the Mason Dixon Line, Blacks had a more difficult time relocating to the suburbs, because many of those suburbs had covenants. My city, College Park, MD allowed Black families to buy houses in the Lakeland area, but that was about it. The town of University Park, an upper-middle-class burb between College Park and Hyattsville, home to many University Of Maryland Faculty, even excluded Jews. Regardless, the middle-classes left. As a result, our urban areas are in a state of advanced decay. Yes, there is gentrification, with the skyrocketing real estate costs that go with gentrification.
In order for our cities to survive, we have to find a way to re-middle-classify them. Yes, middle-classification, not just gentrification. Once you are a certain age, it’s no longer cool to live in a group house. Here’s what we do: 1. Do a no hold barred, zero-tolerance crackdown on all urban crime, bringing the cities under control, and that includes the city public schools too. In other words, you clean house! 2. At the same time, you build new, you retrofit commercial office space into residential housing units, bringing the cost of housing within the range of most middle-class families. Yes, FAMILIES. 3. Now that the schools are safe again (speaking of families), you create a public school system that educates children to their best potential, keeping in mind the challenges and requirements of a 21st century economy.
Cities are the pinnacles of civilization. They always have been. They always will be. That is, they always will be, if they can start luring back the middle-classes. The former 9-5 crowd needs to become the 24/7 crowd. You turn our downtown areas into town centers, like they have built in the suburbs. Retail on the first floor, and residential/office on the other floors. You could even live on the 6th floor, and have your office on the 2nd floor. What a great commute.
We are coming out of an 18 month lockdown. This is the perfect time to start retrofitting. We need to retrofit our approach to housing. We need to retrofit our approach to education, public transportation, emergency response, and other city services. We need to retrofit our approach to crime. Notice I said retrofit. Why? Because, the infrastructure is already there. It just needs to be fixed. Some of it will need to be gutted and redone. Some of it will need to be demolished and replaced. That doesn’t mean that you can’t make the infrastructure larger either. If it improves it, you do it. Now is the time to make our move, and no, it doesn’t all need to head in the direction of Socialism. There needs to be a good solid supply of revenue from the working, middle, and upper-classes, that work in , and now live in, the cities. The fun part, is they get to take advantage of those social services, like emergency response, fire and rescue, all the different cultural events, and the use of public transit too, even if they are rock-ribbed Conservatives. So let’s get to work rebuilding our urban areas. Oh by the way, the suburbs need to be fixed too.