One of the themes of my political work over the last few years, and of my campaign for a council at large seat, has been that we Philadelphians have consistently failed to look outside the city limits to learn about innovative public policies adopted in other cities in the US and around the world.
Some recent posts by progressive on crime—including Ray Murphy’s harsh critique of Michael Nutter’s crime proposals—show that this is a problem of the left as much as the right.
Ray and others seem determined to relive the disputes of the sixties about crime. During that time the left said we need to deal with the root causes of crime—the lack of opportunity for many young men that resulted from poverty, unemployment, and racism. The right said that we needed to get tough with aggressive policing. Those of us who lived through this debate remember how badly it ended.
For a number of reasons, the left wing solutions never succeeded.
First, there was a political backlash against high crime rates and the failure of the left to offer solutions that had any prospect of reducing the crime rate in a reasonably short period of time. Root causes can’t be changed overnight. This backlash was a disaster for the left. It drove many working class and middle class whites to the right and the Republicans, it helped elect Frank Rizzo and Richard Nixon, and it undermined the political coalition necessary to left wing solutions to poverty.
Second, we liberals and progressive didn’t really understand in the sixties how to restore economic opportunity in depressed areas. Most people on the left thought the problem was primarily an individual one, that poor folks didn’t have the skills or the individual employment opportunities to succeed. (I have been recently writing about new, community based economic development strategies which understand that poverty is primarily a communal not an individual problem. Or, worse, we thought that the solution to poverty was just to give poor people more money by expanding welfare.
And, third, we didn’t really understand that crime was itself a major source of the communal distress that breeds poverty. I’ve blogged about that too
Right wing solutions in the sixties and seventies, such as those employed by Frank Rizzo in Philadelphia were, by and large, also failures. Brute force policing quite successfully violated the civil rights of people and created distrust between members of the African American community and the Philadelphia police. But by and large brute force policing did not reduce crime all that much. And we are suffering terribly from the distrust created between police and neighborhoods now in the fashionable and disastrous reluctance of many people in poor neighborhoods to “snitch” on drug dealers and other criminals.
I have to add one caveat however: almost every African American friends of my own age (51) has something good to say about Rizzo. I was shocked the first time I heard this. I’m not any more. When I ask them why, they say: “I was always scared going to and from school until Rizzo broke up the gangs.” They acknowledge that Rizzo’s methods were wrong then and would be wrong now. But they believe that some kind of strong police presence protected them then and could do so now.
This, to my mind shocking, appeal of Rizzo to many fifty year old African American men is one clue, I think, to what is behind, and what is right, about Michael Nutter’s crime proposals. I’m not talking about his state of emergency idea, which is a bit of grandstanding for his serious ideas about using some of the new crime reduction techniques that, beginning around 1988, were pioneered by the New York and Boston police forces. There is simply no question that some combination of these techniques can make a difference.
Between 1990 and 2002 the number of murders in New York dropped from 2245 to 587, a decline of 74%; The number of rapes dropped from 3,126 to 1689, a decline of 46%; the number of robberies dropped from 100,280 to 27,229, a decline of 73%.
In Boston, the number of violent crimes droped from 13,680 in 1990 to 7,360 in 2001, a decline of 45% and the number of property crimes have dropped from 54,390 in 1990 to 30,020 in 2001 a decline of 44%.
I’m working on a blog post that describes these crime reduction strategies and gives some guesses about why we haven’t used them in Philadelphia. It will be up in a few days.
In the meantime it seems to me obvious that reducing crime requires long, medium, and short term approaches and that they are all complimentary.
It will take a long time for a community based economic development strategy to create economic opportunity for the less well of in this city. But we clearly have to create more economic opportunity. It is not just a matter of reducing crime but of fundamental justice.
It will take a little less time to create new services and programs—like the Youth Violence Reduction Program, mentoring programs, and after school and other recreational programs—that keeps kids off the streets and provides special help to young people at risk. These programs seem to be effective. But we are barely using them in Philadelphia. Dwight Evan’s Blueprint for a Safer Philadelphia outlines what we need in this area.
These long and medium term programs will work much better—and the simply horrendous daily barrage of death and violence will stop much, much sooner—if we adopt the crime reduction strategies that have proven to be effective in New York and Boston. And Michael Nutter is the only public figure in this city—other than me—who has been talking about them.
I have criticized Michael before—for an economic strategy that focuses too much on tax cuts and for his vote in favor of the ban on political postering. But on this issue I suspect he is right. I can understand why his overheated idea about declaring a state of emergency might lead to an equally overheated reaction on Ray Murphy’s part. But if we progressives are serious about using innovative public policies to make Philadelphia a better place, it really would be helpful if we turn down the rhetorical heat a bit and listen, and try to evaluate ideas that are new to Philadelphia.