Environmental Causes to Lower Crime Rates

One of the recession's biggest surprises is the continued drop in violent crime. Via Drum, it seems likely that one major reason is that children no longer suffer from lead poisoning:

....There may also be a medical reason for the decline in crime. For decades, doctors have known that children with lots of lead in their blood are much more likely to be aggressive, violent and delinquent. In 1974, the Environmental Protection Agency required oil companies to stop putting lead in gasoline....A 2007 study by the economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes contended that the reduction in gasoline lead produced more than half of the decline in violent crime during the 1990s in the U.S. and might bring about greater declines in the future.

While not the only reason suggested, it is quite telling. The larger lesson is that environmental regulations that supposedly cause business money almost always pay for themselves in the long run. And as Republicans want to tear down each and every one of these regulations to return to the Gilded Age, I for one expect this period of time to be a sort of high point in protecting our children from environmental hazards. Future generations of Americans may suffer from the hellish hazards of lead poisoning as workers do in China today (global capitalism--it's all benefits!!!) and as Chris Sellers has explored in his superb work on the rise of environmental health science and the suffering of white lead victims in the Progressive Era, Hazards of the Job.

The Baltimore Police Commissioner Versus David Simon

The Baltimore Police Commissioner got cranky over how The Wire supposedly gave the city a bad image:

At the Jan. 8 Amplify Baltimore event, Bealefeld told audience members that the show was the "most unfair use of literary license that we've borne witness to," according to video posted on YouTube.

"I heard all this stuff about, 'Well there's crime shows about L.A., about New York, about Miami,'" Bealefeld said. "You know what Miami gets in their crime show? They get detectives that look like models, and they drive around in sports cars. And you know what New York gets, they get these incredibly tough prosecutors, competant cops that solve the most crazy, complicated cases."

"What Baltimore gets is this reinforced notion that it's a city full of hopelessness, despair and dysfunction. There was very little effort - beyond self-serving - to highlight the great and wonderful things happening here, and to indict the whole population, the criminal justice system, the school system."

It's always a bad idea to attack people who are not only smarter and more creative than you are, but who are also right. David Simon, creator of The Wire responds:

It is my understanding that Commissioner Bealefeld - by finally choosing to emphasize the quality, rather than the quantity of arrest - has been able to reduce the homicide rate somewhat in our city. If true, this is not only commendable, it is a long time coming. Too long, in fact.
Interestingly, the newspaper that covered his department began making the argument to do exactly that as early as 1994, in a series of articles entitled "Crisis In Blue" (Ed. note: part two can be found here) that carefully articulated the disconnect between the Baltimore department's aggressive street-level prosecution of the drug war and the root causes of violence in the city. The arguments were furthered in a book entitled "The Corner" that was published three years later. After a new election cycle, however, those arguments were ignored in favor of years of "zero tolerance" of minor street crimes and an obsession with street-level drug enforcement that actually de-emphasized quality police work and led to marked declines in arrest rates for major felonies.  

Later, when a mayor sought to become governor using public safety as an issue, the same police department went further down the path, emphasizing widespread street arrests of dubious quality and legality. This did not reduce crime so much as it violated the civil rights of many city residents and led to the widespread alienation of our jury pool, with many city jurors no longer willing to trust the integrity of testifying officers - a problem that will plague Baltimore law enforcement for years.

Furthermore, on behalf of Mr. O'Malley's political aspirations, many supervisors in many police districts were engaged in a prolonged campaign to improperly downgrade U.C.R. felonies to misdemeanors so as to further the political claim that crime was under control. This was common knowledge throughout the department and was much remarked upon privately by respected veteran supervisors and investigators, themselves frustrated at the practice. Nonetheless, aggravated assaults became common assaults. Armed robberies became larcenies. Rapes were unfounded.

I do not recall that Commissioner Bealefeld - when he was rising through the ranks during those years - made strenuous public objection to the department's misdirection, to its statistical flummery, or to the decline in arrest rates that resulted as quality police work was de-emphasized in favor of juked stats.  Perhaps he did so in private, to little avail. And perhaps now that he is in a position to act, he is taking a better path. Again, as a resident of Baltimore, he has my wholehearted support if this is the case.

But publicly, let me state that The Wire owes no apologies -- at least not for its depiction of those portions of Baltimore where we set our story, for its address of economic and political priorities and urban poverty, for its discussion of the drug war and the damage done from that misguided prohibition, or for its attention to the cover-your-ass institutional dynamic that leads, say, big-city police commissioners to perceive a fictional narrative, rather than actual, complex urban problems as a cause for righteous concern. As citizens using a fictional narrative as a means of arguing different priorities or policies, those who created and worked on The Wire have dissented.

 

Commissioner Bealefeld may not be comfortable with public dissent, or even a public critique of his agency. He may even believe that the recent decline in crime entitles him to denigrate as "stupid" or "slander" all prior dissent, as if the previous two decades of mismanagement in the Baltimore department had not happened and should not have been addressed by any act of storytelling, given that Baltimore is no longer among the most violent American cities, but merely a very violent one.

Others might reasonably argue, however that it is not sixty hours of The Wire that will require decades for our city to overcome, as the commissioner claims. A more lingering problem might be two decades of bad performance by a police agency more obsessed with statistics than substance, with appeasing political leadership rather than seriously addressing the roots of city violence, with shifting blame rather than taking responsibility.  That is the police department we depicted in The Wire, give or take our depiction of some conscientious officers and supervisors. And that is an accurate depiction of the Baltimore department for much of the last twenty years, from the late 1980s, when cocaine hit and the drug corners blossomed, until recently, when Mr. O'Malley became governor and the pressure to clear those corners without regard to legality and to make crime disappear on paper finally gave way to some normalcy and, perhaps, some police work.  Commissioner Bealefeld, who was present for much of that history, knows it as well as anyone associated with The Wire.

We made things up, true.  We have never claimed otherwise.  But respectfully, with regard to our critique, we have slandered no one.  And to the extent you can stand behind a fictional tale, we stand by ours - and more importantly, our purpose in telling that tale.

 

Respectfully,

 

David Simon

Baltimore, MD

Ouch. 

Things Just Ain't What They Used To Be...

They are much, much safer.

The fear we have instilled in our society about bad men in cities, that a man near a playground is a pedophile, and that people on the streets at night maybe had some legitimacy at one point (although that's more than a little debatable), but it's really unnecessary now. We live in a very safe country and it'd be nice if we returned to public spaces in recognition of this.

Things Just Ain't What They Used To Be...

In fact, they are far safer.

The industry of parental fear and guilt makes me sick. The idea that there are rapists and molesters and kidnappers and murders all over the place ready to kidnap our children is extraordinarily antisocial and damaging to society. That we have to protect our children from even the possibility that they might fall and scrape a knee or get scratched up by blackberry nettles or that they might hit a rock and fall off their bike if they ride down the street--this is all insane.

There was a time when we needed to worry about our kids in public spaces--the 1970s and 80s. When I was growing up, there was significantly greater danger to kids. We never wore bike helmets. There was no Amber Alert. People didn't watch over kids with the same hawkish view.

I'm not exactly saying those were good times. But the overreaction is ridiculous. And as the link shows, crime rates have plummeted from their 1970s highs, a trend holding through the recession.

Vigilantism in Mexico

A curious incident took place last month in Oaxaca. (See also here) A 17 year old kid, wasted out of his mind and probably desperate for another score, robbed a girl of her cellphone in broad daylight. He did this in one of the oldest and most stable neighborhoods of Ciudad Oaxaca, where most of the residents' families have lived for centuries. Instead of shaking their heads and watching the kid run away with the phone, residents chased him down. They then strung him upside down from a big tree, as you see above. I believe I know this very tree and the church behind it. And then they tried to figure out what to do with him. The kid was screaming, the cops came though they didn't do anything for hours, probably because they were almost as scared of the residents as the kid. Finally, they cut him down.

You never want to make too much out of a single event like this, but this incident is pretty emblematic of the increased failures of the Mexican state. Oaxaca has not suffered the same drug violence as many other parts of Mexico, but petty crime has risen significantly in the past year or so. And it's hardly surprising that residents are getting pretty sick and tired of it. Let's just quickly list how the government failed here:

1. Failed to keep kids in school
2. Failed to instill trust among its citizens in the police force
3. Failed to train its police force well enough to take charge of the situation upon arrival
4. Failed to hold crime down
5. Failed to provide any kind of options for this kid--even if he wanted to get off drugs; even if he wanted to get off drugs, treatment centers are few and far between, particularly for the poor.

It's hard to approve of vigilantism. But with the Mexican state so corrupt and incompetent, is is hardly surprising that people took the law into their own hands? Of course, they have started down a slippery slope. Will they kill the next punk they catch? Does the Mexican state, or the Oaxacan state government, have even the slightest ability to stop this from happening? Do they really even care?

Tyler Durden Says....

This macabre story has been making the rounds this weekend:

A gang in the remote Peruvian jungle has been killing people for their fat, police charged Thursday, draining it from their corpses and offering it on the black market for use in cosmetics. Medical experts expressed skepticism that a major market for fat might exist.

Three suspects have confessed to killing five people for their fat, said Col. Jorge Mejia, chief of Peru's anti-kidnapping police. He said the suspects, two of whom were arrested carrying bottles of liquid fat, told police it was worth $60,000 a gallon ($15,000 a liter).

Mejia said the suspects told police the fat was sold to intermediaries in Lima, the Peruvian capital. While police suspect the fat was sold to cosmetic companies in Europe, he could not confirm any sales.

It only gets weirder after that: 6 of the gang members are still at large; there have been 60 people gone missing in the province this year (the article highlights that the province is also home to drug-trafficking leftist rebels, but I'm not sure if kidnappings are a common practice of that group, or this is convenient scapegoating-by-association).

Really, there's not much one can say to this, though. It's just strange, disturbing, and macabre functioning of the capitalist economy and the commodification of just about everything, I guess.

Brazil's Declining Crime Rates - Signs of Hope?

A few weeks back, the Economist had an article about declining crime rates in Brazil. Murder rates in the country as a whole have declined, and they have taken a very dramatic drop in São Paulo, parts of which used to be among the most violent neighborhoods in the world.

Unlike Boz, I'm not so surprised at the decline of crime in São Paulo. Earlier this year, I commented on the police's change in tactics against drug gangs in Brazil's largest city. Unlike in Rio, where the police still go into favelas with guns blazing and then occupy the favelas for weeks or months, police in São Paulo spend a lot of time gathering intelligence on individual drug lords and their networks, and go in targeting those groups specifically, instead of anybody (including the innocent) that gets in their way. Additionally, after police go into the favelas to root out the drug networks, the state follows in, offering social programs to the innocent civilians living in the favelas. In so doing, the state in São Paulo has simultaneously been able to increase its presence in a non-violent way (compared to the non-stop presence of military police in favelas in Rio) as well as offering better social services to the favelados. That the tactic of concentrating attacks only on drug gangs joined with efforts trying to improve the living conditions within the favelas has led to a decline in violence should come as no surprise. While I think the article overstates the role of gun control somewhat, it certainly hasn't hurt, either. I don't buy the demographics argument so much, simply because São Paulo has 18 million people; just because the population is getting older in the entire city doesn't necessarily mean that it's getting older in the favelas, where levels of violence can be higher.

That said, Boz's caution that we not view these gains as the beginning of a "Paz Brasiliana" is absolutely right. Rio is still suffering from the same, stale police tactics of shooting first and calling everybody "traficantes" later. Additionally, the growing presence of paramilitary militia groups that are sometimes entering into the drug trade in Rio is a bad omen. Finally, while São Paulo's murder rates have dropped significantly, rural violence (generally between rich landowners and indigenous groups or the landless and their champions) has shown no signs of slowing down. It would be great if Rio would at least try to implement some of the changes in its tactics that São Paulo has implemented, but the issue of favelas and the police is also very different from São Paulo, due to (among other things) state and city economies, geographies, and politics. As I said, the dawn of some peaceful period in Brazilian history is still a long ways off. Nonetheless, one cannot help but be at least somewhat happy to see things improving in Brazil, even if it's incrementally.

Just Let the Man Go

Philadelphia police captured fugitive Maximo Jurado, 28 years after escaping from prison on a drug charge.

I'm sorry, but arresting a 75 year old guy for a prison escape in 1979 on what seems to have been a non-violent drug charge seems really stupid. He must have stayed out of trouble for all those years since he never got caught. He's old and clearly non-violent. Must he really spend his last days in prison?

Going to prison for 4-10 years is pretty unjust for a non-violent crime. If it was murder or rape, I'd say throw him back in prison. But for this? Totally wrong.