Comment: On a recent NPR “Fresh Air Show” the host Dave Davies interviewed Los Angeles Times crime reporter Jill Leovy about her book “Ghettoside: A True Story Of Murder In America.”
We hear a lot about all those poor innocent urban youths imprisoned for nothing but minor drug offenses. Leovy made a good point about that.
DAVIES: You write that sometimes detectives who are frustrated at their inability to arrest people who they think have committed murders will arrest them for what you call proxy crimes. Explain that.
LEOVY: Yes. This is a nuance that doesn’t get talked about enough because there’s I think a general impression that the police are just arbitrarily hammering, for example, drug crimes, possession crimes, probation and parole violations – petty stuff that doesn’t do a lot of harm, and yet there’s a lot of penalties built behind them and so they must be racist. They must be just trying to give people a hard time. What you see on the ground is that there’s a tremendous amount of violence. There’s a tremendous amount of impunity, and it’s, as I say, semi-furtive. It’s well to everybody in this small enclave who’s doing stuff, who’s boasting about it, who’s dangerous. The police are part of that enclave. They’re part of that community. They hear the street rumors, too. They hear so-and-so’s a shooter and so-and-so’s a rider, and they’re frustrated because they cannot put a case on so-and-so for that assault or that homicide. So they think, well, we can get them on a drug offense. He’s in a gang. He’s selling drugs. If we can just get him on possession with intent to sell, at least that gets him off the street. And so you see certain amount of enforcement that’s shaped by a reaction to the impunity for the serious crimes.
It’s almost – when you make the prosecution of some crimes very difficult and very expensive, as we have with homicide, it almost pushes the bubble. It’s – the cops naturally gravitate towards places where they have more discretion and where it’s easier to do the work and stopping and searching and possession and probation, parole – that is low-hanging fruit. It’s easy, cheap stuff to prosecute. And so they are seeing these victims. They are seeing people who are paralyzed or in comas for the rest of their life, and they can’t make an arrest. But they know that clique from such-and-such gang has been doing this stuff, and everyone knows it. And the graffiti on the wall says it, and they can’t make a case. So if we’re going to focus a drug-enforcement project tonight somewhere, why not focus on them?
MORE COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:
* Would enormously increasing our imprisonment rate have been necessary without enforced integration?
Seems the imprisonment rate took off after the civil rights bill and enforced equality. And if you think about population differences, how could it have been otherwise?
* I’m not sure how it would be possible to account for “police incompetence” in a survey of crime rates (and missed potential for reduction), but I suspect it’s an under-appreciated factor. A good many city-level police departments are known as bureaucratic outposts of political hires – either politically-connected in some minor sense (relatives of existing officers, etc.) or affirmative-action hires.
This reduces their effectiveness at solving crime, and hence the “clearance rate” of crimes solved. It’s tough to compare non-murder crimes across jurisdictions, but looking just at murder, we can see this effect – in many major urban areas of the US (such as St. Louis), clearance rates struggle to reach the 1/4th or (if “lucky” in the sense of an unusual number of self-clearing murder-suicides) maybe 1/3rd. Chicago’s clearance rate a few years ago was reported to be as low as 15%, which caused a bit of a scandal.
In Canada – where hiring is said to be somewhat more meritocratic – clearance rates are generally in the 85-90% range. Some of that is due to catchall “cultural differences,” but you don’t get from here to there on culture alone. Part of it has to do with sheer technical competence, along with more effective investigative methods. The ability to solve murders quickly seems to lead to a virtuous cycle in which the murder rate is reduced by eliminating the need/ability of would-be murderers to exact vengeance on uncaptured ones.
Hence, the city of Toronto’s murder rate ends up being lower than the state of Minnesota for 2013, which is quite an achievement. Vancouver and Montreal’s rates are even lower, and Quebec City (pop. 500,000 or so at the time) managed to go an entire 18 months from 2006 to 2008 with ZERO murders. That’s unthinkable in America.
Canadians seem to demand a higher level of competence out of their police than Americans do, and they receive it. It’s something to consider.
* When a teenager is so brazen/stupid that he will rape a pizza delivery girl who goes to his home address on a Sunday morning (as happened in the outer suburbs of the Bay Area last weekend), he is not going to be deterred by techno-surveillance. He needs to be separated from society.
* The whole “destruction of the black (nuclear) family” thing relies on a very short, selectively-placed graph, too. On a proper graph, the black nuclear family is obviously the anomaly.
* Cops know that every day drug dealers are destroying lives, causing children to be abandoned and abused, and thousands of drug causalities on a daily basis.
Watch National Geographic ‘s show “Drugs Inc”. Drug Dealers are the worst sort of sociopaths. Our drug laws are not nearly tough enough.
If it was up to me there would be a national program to remove known drug dealers from the gene pool via Norplant and Vasagel as a condition of parole.
In short Steve, its our open borders and the flood of drugs, that is the reason why crime rates have not fallen nearly enough given the increases in incarceration rates.
* Steve, technology has made life vastly more difficult for offenders.
The UK is a leader in this respect, having suffered from an enormous crime wave back in the 80s and 90s.
CCTV is absolutely ubiquitous on every British main street. If you do anything, anything at all on a main British street, you will be filmed on multiple cameras.
Secondly, the UK was the leader in establishing a DNA database. Anyone who is arrested in the UK, has a DNA swab taken, even if they are never actually charged with anything. By this surreptitious means, most of the adult male population is now on the database. This has caught numerous offenders.
UK police forces have also pioneered facial recognition software and facial recognition cameras placed at all sorts of place. Apparently the data base of photos is around 40% of the adult population, which must mean the majority of adult British males. The photos used are police mugshots taken habitually on arrest.
* Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel “A Clockwork Orange” was strikingly prescient in predicting both a rise in crime, including home invasion (a crime that almost didn’t exist in Britain back then), and the government’s technocratic response. He didn’t get the details of the technological response quite right, but he was on the right track.
* Black Americans have attained a kind of critical mass, a nation within the nation. That’s not the case in the UK.
* Please read up on Vasalgel. It is now possible to remove young male sociopaths from the gene pool. Vasalgel provides a low cost reversible vasectomy that can be applied to young criminals as a condition of their sentencing and parole.
England in the 19th century lowered their crime rate by shipping their felons to Australia. We have Norplant and Vasalgel. In a couple of generations they would work wonders.
* It’s pretty counter-intuitive to posit you’re going to dramatically decrease the probability of punishment (per Ernest van den Haag, the probability of imprisonment consequent to an index crime declined by 80% between 1960 and 1970) without generating an increase in the frequency of crime. The converse is also counter-intuitive. Both, however, are congruent with the vocational and ideological interests of the social work and mental health trade, so they were were assumptions latent in public discussions of crime prior to 1985. New York reaped some benefit from having politicians in gatekeeper positions who were simply not invested in the social work/mental health trade world view, Messrs. Koch, Cuomo, and Giuliani to name three.
A more precise question would be how sensitive the crime rate is to various policy measures: police manpower, police tactics and strategy, sentencing rules, and statutory sentences.
