Mass Shootings, Imitation’s Possible Role

An insightful article by a retired prison psychiatrist from City Journal examines that.

An excerpt.

“Most people, said La Rochefoucauld, would never fall in love if they’d never heard of it. Whether or not it is true of love, it might be true of mass shootings—that is, one mass shooting encourages another, so that they seem to come in clusters, piling horror on horror. Few people will believe that the mass shooting in Dayton, in which nine people so far have lost their lives, is entirely unconnected with the shooting just hours earlier in El Paso, in which 20 people have died.

The role of imitation in the commission of acts of violence by the susceptible has been known since at least the end of the eighteenth century, when romantic young men in Europe committed suicide after the publication of Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, the eponymous hero of which killed himself for unrequited love. Even today, a suicide in a soap opera is sometimes followed by a brief spate of suicides—such that producers are now wary of depicting suicides, for fear of being accused of provoking them.

“The violence of suicide, of course, affects principally the person who commits it, but often—especially among the young—it contains a significant element of aggression toward others, wreaking vengeance upon others for injuries done, real or imagined, to the suicidal person’s self-esteem. Mass shooting, which has been interpreted as a form of suicide because so high a proportion of perpetrators end up dead, takes vengeance to a higher level altogether. The suicide’s vengeance is directed against certain people in particular; the mass shooter’s is against people, or society, in general.

“There are exceptions: the pilot who deliberately crashed a Germanwings airliner into the mountainside might have been trying to ruin his ex-girlfriend’s life forever by means of causing her an unassuageable sense of guilt; Anders Breivik killed those whom he believed would further dilute Norwegian national identity by their espousal of multiculturalism as a political ideology; and the El Paso shooter, yesterday, apparently explicitly intended to kill Hispanics. (The motives of the Dayton shooter are not yet known.) Some mass shooters have also returned to their former places of work and killed their former colleagues. More often, however, the victims and the grievance are only loosely connected—so loosely connected, in fact, that the mass killing suggests an inchoate rage against existence, against society, and against the perpetrator’s own life.

“Modern mass killing, usually though not always by shooting, seems to have started (because imitation must start somewhere) with the case of Charles Whitman, who consulted a psychiatrist about his increasing bad temper and desire to shoot people—then killed his mother and father, climbed the tower on the campus of the University of Texas, and shot and killed 16 people at random and injured 44 others. This case has intrigued doctors ever since because at postmortem, Whitman was found to have a brain tumor, which might (or might not) have caused the removal of his normal inhibition against killing. In any case, he had undergone a character change before he killed.

“Mass shooters tend to be of above-average intelligence but not high achievers. In a society in which fame, recognition, and success are of capital importance, in which lives of quiet desperation are not à la mode, they often feel deeply wounded, insulted in fact, by the supposed failure of society to take them at their own estimate, to recognize their true worth. They are rarely at ease in their personal relationships, either—but they look outward, not inward, for the source of their failures. The world for them is evil and unjust, and it will get, at their hands, what it deserves. In the process, of course, as another benefit, they will achieve their deserved fame or notoriety. They will be the subject of articles, news items, a Wikipedia entry, perhaps even of books; they will be an object of puzzlement by the learned and the famous. If they go far enough, they might even be mentioned by the president of the United States.”

Retrieved August 5, 2019 from https://www.city-journal.org/mass-shootings-el-paso-dayton

 

The Mentally Ill, Homelessness, & Violence

In this article from City Journal, the sad history of public leadership’s failure to address the three effectively is outlined.

An excerpt.

“Early last month, 29-year-old Christopher Morisette rampaged through the streets of Seattle, stabbing three pedestrians with a steel folding knife, then stripped off his clothes and ran naked across a freeway interchange, where he was arrested. In the past six months, three similar “random stabbings” occurred in Seattle’s downtown commercial district.

“Despite the police department’s repeated efforts—including a block-by-block strategy targeting open-air drug-dealing and violence—crime and anti-social behavior stubbornly persist. In 2018, just in the downtown precinct, Seattle police received 44,246 calls for service, including 7,215 reports of violence, 3,861 reports of narcotics and public intoxication, and 1,069 reports of mental health crises and suicidal behavior. Numerous eruptions of violence at one street intersection—3rd and Pine—have led residents to dub it “3rd and Crime”; they call the corner McDonald’s “McStabby’s.”

“Within this disintegrating social landscape, Christopher Morisette’s story is no longer atypical. According to news reports, he was born to a schizophrenic mother, grew up in the foster care system, developed a methamphetamine addiction, cycled in and out of jail, lived in homeless shelters for the past three years, and suffers—in the opinion of his adoptive mother—from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Morisette was certainly groomed for failure by the familial and social conditions around him. He was also deprived of the institutions that might have provided some love, care, and restraint. “You just get to the point you’re numb and you’re not surprised when things happen,” Morisette’s adoptive mother said to reporters after the attack.

“What can be done? Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan has admitted that the city government is “unable to deal with significant mental health needs” and called for new investments in mental health facilities. She’s right—the state should have the capacity to put the dangerously mentally ill into conservatorship—but the crisis runs much deeper than public administrators comprehend.

“A century ago, French sociologist Émile Durkheim formulated the concept of anomic suicide, in which a general breakdown in social conditions influences the decision of some individuals to end their lives. Today, with age-old restraints—family, religion, community, tradition—collapsing under the forces of modernity, and homelessness, addiction, and madness on the rise, many cities are seeing what might be called anomic violence: random assaults of strangers on urban streets.

“It’s not that the United States hasn’t developed institutions to deal with these problems. We have, over several generations, vastly expanded the so-called therapeutic state, to the point that federal and state governments now spend more than $2 trillion on health and welfare programs annually. We have constructed a vast technical apparatus that, despite its good intentions, has failed to reverse these social pathologies. In fact, in cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, social scientists and political leaders have abandoned the goal of restoring the social fabric and reintegrating the addicted and mentally ill into society—shifting, instead, to a model of “harm reduction.” The best we can hope for now, they appear to believe, is to contain widespread dysfunction in a downtown corridor.”

Retrieved August 2, 2019 from https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-stabbings

Mass Incarceration, Fact & Fiction

The real story behind the political trope, from City Journal.

An excerpt.

“Certain must-pass ideological litmus tests have arisen for the 25 declared candidates (so far) seeking the Democratic Party presidential nomination. Perhaps chief among them is subscription to the belief that the American criminal-justice system is racist and overly punitive. This Democratic unanimity makes sense in light of the criticism that many of the leading candidates have faced from activists, left-wing media, and other, more “woke,” presidential hopefuls for their earlier acceptance, or even endorsement, of proactive policing, quality-of-life enforcement, and incarceration as reasonable methods of combating crime.

“JOE BIDEN’S ROLE IN ’90S CRIME LAW COULD HAUNT ANY PRESIDENTIAL BID, ran a prescient 2015 New York Times headline. Doubtless sensing vulnerability, the former vice president and current Democratic front-runner made a Martin Luther King Day speech to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network this year, telling the audience that “I haven’t always been right” about criminal justice and that “white America has to admit there’s still a systematic racism, and it goes almost unnoticed by so many of us.”

“That hasn’t stopped some of Biden’s Democratic opponents (not to mention President Trump) from pushing the incarceration button. California senator Kamala Harris, one of his leading rivals, hit Biden for backing the 1994 omnibus crime bill, which, she says, contributed to “mass incarceration in this country.” Harris herself, though, has met criticism for being too tough on crime in her days as a prosecutor and as California attorney general. New Jersey senator Cory Booker—one of the most outspoken of the candidates on criminal-justice reform—has also had his reformist credentials questioned, with a recent Times story criticizing his “zero-tolerance” approach to crime when serving as Newark’s mayor from 2006 to 2013, citing ACLU complaints. But all the Democrats are striking the same chord. “More people [are] locked up for low-level offenses on marijuana than for all violent crimes in this country,” Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, another top-tier Biden challenger, declared at last year’s We the People Summit. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator known best for his left-wing economic populism, has described felon disenfranchisement as racist voter suppression. And South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg told Out that incarceration is “clearly worsening some of the patterns of racial inequality in our country.”

“Eight of the declared candidates contributed to a recent compendium published by the Brennan Center for Justice, titled Ending Mass Incarceration. The essays provide a useful summation of Democratic talking points on criminal justice. That the United States over-incarcerates is evidenced, reformers say, by the numbers: though it has about 5 percent of the global population, the U.S. houses about a quarter of the prisoners worldwide. America’s high incarceration rate, goes another assertion, is driven by the unjust enforcement of “low-level” and “nonviolent” offenses, particularly drug crimes. A further charge: the system is racist, given how much more likely blacks are to be behind bars compared with whites. Finally, they say that sentences have gotten way too long.

“True, for a subset of America’s prison population, incarceration does not serve a legitimate penological end, either because these individuals have been incarcerated for too long or because they should not have been incarcerated to begin with. Justice dictates that we identify these individuals and secure their releases with haste. But none of the above claims advanced by the presidential hopefuls is correct—and acting on any of them would be disastrous.

“Start with drugs. Contrary to the claims in Michelle Alexander’s much-discussed 2010 bestseller The New Jim Crow, drug prohibition is not driving incarceration rates. Yes, about half of federal prisoners are in on drug charges; but federal inmates constitute only 12 percent of all American prisoners—the vast majority are in state facilities. Those incarcerated primarily for drug offenses constitute less than 15 percent of state prisoners. Four times as many state inmates are behind bars for one of five very serious crimes: murder (14.2 percent), rape or sexual assault (12.8 percent), robbery (13.1 percent), aggravated or simple assault (10.5 percent), and burglary (9.4 percent). The terms served for state prisoners incarcerated primarily on drug charges typically aren’t that long, either. One in five state drug offenders serves less than six months in prison, and nearly half (45 percent) of drug offenders serve less than one year.

“That a prisoner is categorized as a drug offender, moreover, does not mean that he is nonviolent or otherwise law-abiding. Most criminal cases are disposed of through plea bargains, and, given that charges often get downgraded or dropped as part of plea negotiations, an inmate’s conviction record will usually understate the crimes he committed. The claim that drug offenders are nonviolent and pose zero threat to the public if they’re put back on the street is also undermined by a striking fact: more than three-quarters of released drug offenders are rearrested for a nondrug crime. It’s worth noting that Baltimore police identified 118 homicide suspects in 2017, and 70 percent had been previously arrested on drug charges.

“Not only are most prisoners doing time for serious, often violent, offenses; they’ve usually received (and blown) the second chance that so many reformers say they deserve. Justice Department studies from 2000 through 2009 reveal that only about 40 percent of state felony convictions result in a prison sentence. A Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) study of violent felons convicted over a 12-year period in America’s 75 largest counties shows that 56 percent of the offenders had a prior conviction record.

“Even though most state prisoners are serious and serial offenders, nearly 40 percent of inmates serve less than a year in prison, with the median time served about 16 months. Lengthy sentences tend to be reserved for the most serious violent crimes—but even 20 percent of convicted murderers and nearly 60 percent of those convicted for rape or sexual assault serve less than five years of their sentences. Nor have sentences gotten longer, as reformers contend. In his book Locked In, John Pfaff—a leader in the decarceration movement—plotted state prison admissions and releases from 1978 through 2014 on a graph. If sentence lengths had increased, the two lines would diverge as admissions outpaced releases; in fact, the lines are almost identical.

“Getting these facts straight is important, especially since reformers unfavorably contrast the U.S.’s criminal-justice system with those of other nations—Western European democracies, in particular—with significantly lower incarceration rates. Because so few American prisoners are serving time for trivial infractions, aligning America’s incarceration numbers with those of, say, England or Germany would require releasing many very serious and frequently violent offenders. Yet many in the decarceration camp have been calling for just such a mass release. The #cut50 initiative, founded by activist and CNN host Van Jones, aims to halve the prison population. Scholars at the Brennan Center have called for an immediate 40 percent reduction in the number of inmates.

“Such drastic cuts could produce significant crime increases, as communities lose the incapacitation benefits that they currently enjoy. Already, there’s no shortage of cautionary examples. In March, the New York Police Department released a montage of security-camera footage that captured ten gang members in East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood, as they hunted down and killed a man in broad daylight. The chilling images show the victim, 21-year-old Tyquan Eversley (out on bail, facing a rap for armed robbery), running, as his armed assailants give chase. Eversley gets entangled in barbed wire after jumping a fence into someone’s backyard; one of his pursuers hurls what looks like part of a cinder block over the fence at him, as another points his gun over the top and fires five fatal rounds. The rock-slinging thug, according to the NYPD, is 25-year-old Michael Reid, who has since been identified and arrested. Reid, it was subsequently reported, had been recently released from federal custody and was wearing an ankle monitor at the time of the murder.”

Retrieved July 22, 2019 from https://www.city-journal.org/mass-incarceration

Story Behind the Story

No one does it better than Ann Coulter.

An excerpt.

If the left has its way in the next few years, there won’t be anyone left in prison because, you see, they’re overflowing with innocent black men locked up for “nonviolent drug crimes.” All of them!

Over the weekend, NBC News investigative reporter Leigh Ann Caldwell appeared on MSNBC’s “Kasie DC” to tell the story of Bill Underwood, loving parent and prison mentor, who has already spent nearly 30 years in prison for a nonviolent drug crime.

Caldwell reported:

“William Underwood, now 65 years old, was sentenced to life in prison without parole for a nonviolent drug-related crime. It was his first felony, but in the middle of the tough-on-crime era, the judge showed no leniency. With no hope of ever walking free again, Underwood has made the best of his time in prison, mentoring others and staying devoted to his children and grandchildren, as (his daughter) Ebony fights for his release.”

Another black body in prison for mere possession of a joint!

Actually, no one is in prison anywhere for possession of a joint, except in the pea-brain fantasies of chubby college coeds everywhere. We don’t have the prison space.

NBC’s Caldwell interviewed Underwood, noting how “for 30 years from inside prison walls, he still tried to be a father first.” The poor man concurred, saying, “That’s all I was ever taught, you know? Children first, first, foremost. That’s what I try to emulate.”

Can it be long before Ivanka pops up, lobbying for his release?

Despite what I’m sure was an exhaustive investigation, I was suspicious of Caldwell’s characterization of Underwood’s crime. My rule is: If you’re not telling me why someone was sentenced to life in prison, there’s probably a reason you’re not telling me.

All we got from Caldwell was: Here’s this great father behind bars; He just got caught up in something, we’re really not sure what it was — and here’s his daughter, Ebony, to tell us what a terrific father he is.

Considering that she’s arguing for Underwood’s immediate release into the general public, it seems odd that Caldwell doesn’t know what he’s in prison for, nor does she have the slightest interest in finding out.

Maybe at NBC they don’t have access to the internet. But I do! I spent a full 60 seconds doing a Nexis search on William Underwood.

Here are some excerpts from a Newsday article on Underwood’s conviction, dated Jan. 10, 1990:

“A rock band manager was convicted yesterday as the head of a vicious Harlem drug gang that prosecutors said carried out six murders, including the controversial slaying of a witness in 1983.”

Caldwell didn’t bother to mention Underwood’s SIX MURDERS?

NBC: We don’t have room for everything. These stories are only so long.

“William Underwood, 36, faces up to life in prison without parole for his conviction in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on charges of racketeering and operating a continuing criminal enterprise — the so-called federal narcotics ‘kingpin’ law.”

It’s weird that Caldwell never managed to turn up the fact that he was convicted of being the kingpin of a drug empire, distributing heroin throughout Harlem in the 1980s. “Yes, your honor, I was convicted of operating a CONTINUING CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE — but it’s my first offense.”

“A federal jury found him guilty of heading the murderous and now-broken Vigilantes drug gang … known for extraordinary violence. All told, police say, it may have killed as many as 23 people.”

I feel like Caldwell may not have gone the extra mile in researching this story.

The evidence against Underwood included the testimony of 50 witnesses, undercover video-recordings and confessions of Vigilante gang members — which is especially impressive, considering that he ordered the murder of witnesses preparing to testify against him. (I guess he couldn’t kill all 50.) In addition to killing witnesses, Underwood’s outfit killed customers, members of rival drug gangs and innocent passersby.

In a 1988 article titled, “Brutal Drug Gangs Wage War of Terror in Upper Manhattan,” The New York Times reported that Underwood’s heroin operation was “considered by law-enforcement experts to be the most dangerous drug gang in Harlem.” All told, the gangs were “believed to be responsible for as many as 523 slayings in upper Manhattan in the last five years.”

Retrieved July 17, 2019 from http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2019-07-17.html#read_more

And here is a link to a local crime and justice foundation lawyer who checked out these reported facts, all true… http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/crimblog/2019/07/a-poster-boy-for-the-long-sent.html#more

Broken Windows Works

As if we needed another reminder, but here’s one from City Journal.

An excerpt.

Three months ago, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system that serves San Francisco and surrounding counties began a “blitz” to deter morning rush-hour fare evasion at four downtown stations. As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, the first month’s results were startling: proof-of-payment citations rose 13 percent, new ticket sales rose 10 percent, add-value transactions to existing tickets rose 29 percent, and—most significantly—average weekly calls to police dropped a remarkable 45 percent. This rapid turnaround in behavior was achieved simply by staffing the stations with extra police officers, fare inspectors, and BART managers wearing bright yellow vests so that anyone trying to jump a fare gate or use a bypass door saw their way blocked by an official.

These results should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the Broken Windows theory of policing developed by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. The theory’s simple premise: responding proactively to minor crime (vandalism, disorderly behavior, and fare evasion) also reduces serious crime, including violent crime. Before he made New York City the safest large city in the country as commissioner of its police department, William Bratton put Broken Windows into effect as the head of the New York Transit Police, directing his officers to focus on fare evasion. The effect of the policy—first in the subway tunnels and then on the streets of New York—is now legendary.

San Francisco’s BART “blitz” demonstrates the effectiveness of Broken Windows. Just by putting people at the gates who looked to be in charge—neither the fare inspectors nor the yellow-vested managers were badged police officers—BART was able to cut crime in those stations almost in half. Exactly as Broken Windows predicts, those willing to commit serious crime often start by committing minor crimes, like fare evasion. Keeping such people out of the transit system means that everyone paying the fare is safer.

The data also put to rest two common arguments against fighting fare evasion—and, by extension, against Broken Windows policing. Advocates claim that enforcing laws against fare evasion criminalizes the poor. People don’t evade fares out of malice, the argument goes, but because they’re struggling and can’t spare the cash. But the more than 600 additional fares bought during a recent month show that fare-jumpers can pay—they just chose not to do so, knowing that they faced no consequence. Furthermore, the large increase in add-value transactions demonstrates that it’s not only poor people who jump the turnstile. People who already have a ticket or transit card are more likely to be regular riders, perhaps commuters, who figured that they may as well skip paying the fare since no one was watching. Jumping the gates instead of buying a valid fare remains a choice, not an involuntary circumstance.

Another argument against Broken Windows policing is that monitoring petty transactions is a waste of resources because the money spent paying public employees to do this exceeds the revenue from fines or additional tickets. Some of the police officers involved in the new BART policy worked overtime, and their additional salary may have exceeded the value of fines and extra fares. But this argument discounts the cost of the approximately 40 police calls that did not occur as a result of stationing guards in the stations. Each response to a crime is expensive in terms of officer time, the potential deployment of medical personnel, and justice-system costs—but the social benefits of establishing public order are incalculable. Letting people get away with jumping turnstiles leads to a deterioration of the transit environment. When some commuters become cheats, some cheats become thieves—and some thieves become muggers, a progression that Broken Windows seeks to interrupt.

Retrieved July 11, 2019 from https://www.city-journal.org/san-francisco-bart-blitz

 

Is Addiction the Issue Rather than Lack of Housing?

That’s the thesis of this worth-thinking-about crime/homelessness article from City Journal.

An excerpt.

By latest count, some 109,089 men and women are sleeping on the streets of major cities in California, Oregon, and Washington. The homelessness crisis in these cities has generated headlines and speculation about “root causes.” Progressive political activists allege that tech companies have inflated housing costs and forced middle-class people onto the streets. Declaring that “no two people living on Skid Row . . . ended up there for the same reasons,” Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, for his part, blames a housing shortage, stagnant wages, cuts to mental health services, domestic and sexual abuse, shortcomings in criminal justice, and a lack of resources for veterans. These factors may all have played a role, but the most pervasive cause of West Coast homelessness is clear: heroin, fentanyl, and synthetic opioids.

Homelessness is an addiction crisis disguised as a housing crisis. In Seattle, prosecutors and law enforcement recently estimated that the majority of the region’s homeless population is hooked on opioids, including heroin and fentanyl. If this figure holds constant throughout the West Coast, then at least 11,000 homeless opioid addicts live in Washington, 7,000 live in Oregon, and 65,000 live in California (concentrated mostly in San Francisco and Los Angeles). For the unsheltered population inhabiting tents, cars, and RVs, the opioid-addiction percentages are even higher—the City of Seattle’s homeless-outreach team estimates that 80 percent of the unsheltered population has a substance-abuse disorder. Officers must clean up used needles in almost all the homeless encampments.

For drug cartels and low-level street dealers, the business of supplying homeless addicts with heroin, fentanyl, and other synthetic opioids is extremely lucrative. According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the average heavy-opioid user consumes $1,834 in drugs per month. Holding rates constant, we can project that the total business of supplying heroin and other opioids to the West Coast’s homeless population is more than $1.8 billion per year. In effect, Mexican cartels, Chinese fentanyl suppliers, and local criminal networks profit off the misery of the homeless and offload the consequences onto local governments struggling to get people off the streets.

West Coast cities are seeing a crime spike associated with homeless opioid addicts. In Seattle, police busted two sophisticated criminal rings engaged in “predatory drug dealing” in homeless encampments (they were found in possession of $20,000 in cash, heroin, firearms, knives, machetes, and a sword). Police believe that “apartments were serving as a base of operations that supplied drugs to the streets, and facilitated the collection and resale of stolen property.” In other words, drug dealers were exploiting homeless addicts and using the city’s maze of illegal encampments as distribution centers. In my own Fremont neighborhood, where property crime has surged 57 percent over the past two years, local business owners have formed a group to monitor a network of RVs that circulate around the area to deal heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamines. Dealers have become brazen—one recently hung up a spray-painted sign on the side of his RV with the message: “Buy Drugs Here!”

What are local governments doing to address this problem? To a large extent, they have adopted a strategy of deflection, obfuscation, and denial. In her  #SeattleForAll public relations campaign, Mayor Jenny Durkan insists that only one in three homeless people struggle with substance abuse, understating the figures of her own police department as well as the city attorney, who has claimed that the real numbers, just for opioid addiction, rise to 80 percent of the unsheltered.

The consequences of such denial have proved disastrous: no city on the West Coast has a solution for homeless opioid addicts. Los Angeles, which spent $619 million on homelessness last year, has adopted a strategy of palliative care—keeping addicts alive through distribution of the overdose drug naloxone—but fails to provide access to on-demand detox, rehabilitation, and recovery programs that might help people overcome their addictions. The city has been cursed, in this sense, with temperate weather, compounded by permissive policies toward public camping and drug consumption that have attracted 20,687 homeless individuals from outside Los Angeles County.

Retrieved June 17, 2019 from https://www.city-journal.org/opiods-homelessness-west-coast

Broken Windows Works

This superb article from City Journal fills us in.

An excerpt.

Broken Windows policing receives credit—rightly—for being part of the crime turnaround that saved New York and other cities. The theory, originating with George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, argued that tolerating too much local disorder created a climate in which criminal behavior, including serious crimes, would become more likely, since criminals would sense that public norms and vigilance were weak. In practice, this meant that police should crack down on so-called low-level offenses. When the NYPD started doing this during the 1990s, aided by the Compstat crime-mapping and accountability system, it became clear that the low-level offenders were also often wanted for more serious felonies. In short, there was a continuity of bad behavior, just as Broken Windows suggested, and order-maintenance policing, as the Broken Windows approach is also called, reduced disorder and led to the apprehension of many serious criminals, helping reinvigorate formerly-troubled neighborhoods. The last quarter-century in New York offers a powerful case for the theory’s accuracy.

Now, a professor says that Broken Windows theory is bunk. Writing in the New York Daily News, Northeastern University professor Dan O’Brien, who conducted a series of studies along with several colleagues, insists that Broken Windows “is inaccurate and that we as a nation need to move away from the policing strategies that it inspired.” O’Brien, et al. found a small but significant association suggesting that areas with greater social disorder had greater crime—but, they concluded, once other control variables were considered, that association became insignificant. Thus, the foundation on which Broken Windows is built “doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.”

Like too much scholarly work in academic criminology, however, the new study offers more sophistry than sense. The scholars’ meta-analysis—that is, a study of a collection of studies—purports to disprove Broken Windows, but in fact more often simply restates its core principles. Though “disorder might not elicit crime,” the authors claim, they agree that “there are certain types of disorder that can create ecological advantages for criminal activity.” The creation of such environments is exactly how Kelling and Wilson described the process of neighborhood disorder—absent community control—leading to the promotion of antisocial behavior. “Disorder does not encourage crime,” O’Brien and his coauthors go on, “but makes it easier to commit crimes.” This, too, merely paraphrases Kelling and Wilson, who wrote in 1982 of the “folk wisdom that happens to be a correct generalization—namely, that serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behavior goes unchecked.”

Elsewhere, O’Brien, et al. use narrower definitions of key Broken Windows concepts to attempt to discredit its conclusions. They radically understate the concept of urban disorder, for example, by describing it as “the presence of litter or graffiti.” They dismiss the idea that trash on the ground “could inspire people to commit acts that they have never even considered,” but the notion of disorder that Broken Windows described was about much more than just litter or graffiti. When Wilson and Kelling’s Atlantic article appeared in 1982, New York and many large American cities were in crisis. Disorder wasn’t benign; residents were plagued by more than dirty streets and defaced walls: abandoned buildings, stripped automobiles, flagrant prostitution, open-air drug use and drug-dealing, vacant lots strewn with junk, and much more. Transients, serial criminals, and gang members controlled entire parcels of the city, including parks and subway stations. Many commentators saw disorder and crime as intractable problems that had be tolerated; there was no way to fix them. Cities’ abdication of their responsibility for civility and public safety signaled to everyone, including potential wrongdoers, that no one was in charge.

But Broken Windows, and the proactive, assertive policing strategies that it empowered, changed the narrative. Critics allege that the theory is anecdotal and lacking scientific basis, but part of its basic logic is thoroughly empirical. Criminals are generally versatile in their offending and thus commit transgressions of all sorts. Arresting people who commit low-level offenses like vandalism, fare evasion, prostitution, and public drug use not only reduces those problem behaviors but also, as New York discovered, turns up fugitives with outstanding felony warrants, who are carrying firearms and other contraband, and who may be suspects in more serious crimes—including murder, sexual assault, and armed robbery. Many of today’s successful criminal-justice programs and interventions, including the Department of Justice’s Operation Weed and Seed program, incorporate Broken Windows thinking.

With the advent of Broken Windows and other policing reforms in 1994, New York experienced the largest homicide declines in its history. The city transformed from an increasingly dystopian wasteland to America’s City. So why are so many criminologists declaring that Broken Windows doesn’t work, and why are advocates and the media trumpeting methodologically weak findings? The answer: they’re ideologically opposed to the proactive policing that Broken Windows fosters, because it draws sharp moral lines and is unafraid to make judgments about environments and behaviors.

Retrieved May 30, 2019 from https://www.city-journal.org/broken-windows-policing-works

City Without Broken Windows Policing

Broken Windows policing sharply reduces street crime, making the streets safer; but San Francisco has gone in the opposite direction, as this article from City Journal notes.

An excerpt.

San Francisco is the nation’s leader in property crime. Burglary, larceny, shoplifting, and vandalism are included under this ugly umbrella. The rate of car break-ins is particularly striking: in 2017 over 30,000 reports were filed, and the current average is 51 per day. Other low-level offenses, including drug dealing, street harassment, encampments, indecent exposure, public intoxication, simple assault, and disorderly conduct are also rampant.

Many in law enforcement blame the crime wave on Proposition 47, which in 2014 downgraded possession of illegal narcotics for personal use and theft of anything under $950 in value from felonies to misdemeanors. Anti-incarceration advocates disagree with that argument, but theft is indisputably booming, and narcotics activity is exploding on sidewalks, parks, and playgrounds. When compounded with other troubles for which the city is now infamous (human feces, filth, and homelessness, which is up 17 percent since 2017), San Franciscans find themselves surrounded by squalor and disorder.

“A lot of people are ready to leave because the crimes are causing depression,” says Susan Dyer Reynolds, editor-in-chief of the Marina Times, an independent community newspaper. “Navigation centers” for the homeless, says Reynolds, “are not sober facilities, and people steal and break into cars to feed their habits. Crime will go up. We know this.”

Property and other supposedly low-level crimes are intensifying the destruction of the retail market. Landmark Mission District stores are shuttering, citing theft and lack of security. In April, CVS closed two pharmacies that had been ravaged by constant shoplifting. Mom-and-pop businesses, wracked by so-called minor losses, find it impossible to survive. Empty storefronts dot once-vibrant neighborhoods.

“Property and low-level crimes shrink the space for everyday people and enlarge them for the people committing them,” says Nancy Tung, a criminal prosecutor for two decades, who is running for district attorney in the 2019 election. “If we continue down this path, we will see more people leave San Francisco.” Tung will face a competitive field of opponents, including Deputy Public Defender Chesa Boudin, a socialist and the son of two convicted Weather Underground murderers, who wants to reduce criminal sentences. Keeping people out of jail is the new social-justice battle; in March, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that San Francisco’s bail policy violates the rights of poor defendants and brings no public benefit.

Meantime, the poor bear the brunt of low-level and property crimes. “In the Tenderloin we have vulnerable populations—people of color, the most children, the second-highest concentration of elders, and they are held hostage by drug dealers and theft, and the city tells them these crimes are not that bad,” says Tung. “We are failing to protect them. The police do a good job, because the criminals are caught, only to be released back on the streets over and over.”

David Young is board president of his building, located in the South of Market neighborhood. In a recent six-month period, four windows were smashed by vandals, and replacement costs are huge. “The everyday wear and tear on your psyche gets to you,” says Young. “When we walk out the door, we know that there is a 100 percent chance we’ll see someone on drugs, in various states of undress, blood on sidewalks, and discarded sharps. These are crimes no one in city hall seems to care about. When you say something about it, you’re called a fascist.”

Until recently, Young says, San Francisco was an amazing place to live. “Now people look at the city as an abscess,” he says. “The cost of housing compared to the quality of life is way off. Everyone is talking about it. Crime has been ignored for so long, and it’s gotten so huge. Serial repeat offenders have no problem making bail, especially drug dealers, as they see it as the cost of doing business.”

Some citizens are attempting to fight back. Frank Noto cofounded Stop Crime: Neighborhood for Criminal Justice Accountability after an onslaught of break-ins. Neighbors had come together for an art project, which drew crowds—but also crime rings. First tourists’ cars were hit, then residents’ cars, and then homes. So the group started a court-watch program. They attended hearings and observed decisions, and they noted a casual judicial approach to these cases. Their presence didn’t go unnoticed. Judges know that they’re being scrutinized; one actually recused himself. “We have to take a stand,” says Noto. “We talked to one guy, an electrician, who’s been burglarized six times, and all of his tools have been stolen. All we want is for the DA and judges to take this seriously.”

Retrieved May 20, 2019 from https://www.city-journal.org/san-francisco-crime

Broken Windows Prophet

One of the two men who changed the streets of cities into a safer place to be, George Kelling, has passed away—James Q. Wilson passed away some time ago—and Heather MacDonald wrote a great obituary in City Journal.

An excerpt.

Law-abiding residents of high-crime neighborhoods keep proving George Kelling right and most of his colleagues wrong. Kelling, 83, died yesterday of cancer at his home in New Hampshire. Go to a police-community meeting in any troubled neighborhood—whether the South Side of Chicago or South Central Los Angeles—and you will rarely hear complaints about what most criminologists call “serious” crimes, such as robbery or shootings. Instead, residents will plead for surcease from open-air drug dealing, the unruly teens colonizing corners, loud music, and other affronts to civility. Kelling recognized this yearning for public order among the poor and in so doing created one of the most important contributions to urban policy in the last half century: the Broken Windows theory of policing.

Kelling formulated that theory in a seminal 1982 essay in The Atlantic, coauthored with social scientist James Q. Wilson. “Broken Windows” grew out of Kelling’s passion for observing what police officers actually do. He had accompanied cops walking foot beats in Newark, N.J., and had documented how they enforced local norms of order, whether keeping panhandlers away from bus shelters, quieting noisy youth, or rousting unknown loiterers. The law-abiding residents of the community backed the officers wholeheartedly, ridiculing norm violators and providing information on who was a “regular” and who a “stranger.”

Kelling and Wilson hypothesized that communities where public disorder goes unchecked were likely to enter a spiral of decline. Most people avoid public spaces perceived as being out of control, fearing that such hubs of disorder give cover to criminals. That perception becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as the law-abiding stay indoors, ceding terrain to miscreants who flout the bourgeois social order. As aggressive begging, public inebriation, graffiti, and vandalism increase, thieves and robbers spot an environment where they can target victims with impunity.

Kelling and Wilson ended the Atlantic essay with a plea to return to the “night watchman” role of policing. That model, stemming from America’s colonial period, focused on discretionary order maintenance. It had been supplanted in the 1960s by the rule-bound, rapid-response model of policing, whereby officers in patrol cars raced to crime scenes as quickly as possible. Kelling and Wilson urged departments to put cops back on foot patrol.  In a now-overlooked but prescient coda, they rejected the emerging libertarian consensus that authorities should ignore disreputable behavior—such as drug dealing and use, public prostitution, and illegal gambling—that allegedly hurts no one. If such behavior occurs en masse, it destroys whole neighborhoods. The police, they concluded, have a responsibility to protect communities as well as individuals.

The first big test of the Broken Windows concept occurred in New York City’s subway system in the 1980s. The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) had lost control to graffiti vandals who defaced entire subway cars. New Yorkers who could not flee to private automobiles or to the suburbs cowered underground under a pall of ugliness and crime. In 1984, the MTA announced that it would eradicate subway graffiti, which it did by cleaning every car when it returned to the train yards, thus denying vandals the satisfaction of seeing their spray-painted aggressions touring the city. By 1989, the MTA declared victory. A relieved public returned to the now graffiti-free subways in ever-higher numbers, creating an informal bulwark against subterranean crime.

Ray Kelly drew on Broken Windows insights during his first tour as New York police commissioner under Mayor David Dinkins, cracking down on the infamous “squeegee men” who “offered” to clean the car windows of drivers stuck in New York’s bridge and tunnel traffic. In 1994, Broken Windows theory went citywide under newly elected mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his police commissioner, William Bratton. Bratton and Kelling had collaborated at the Kennedy School of Government in the 1980s, studying how midlevel police commanders can best use their authority. As New York commissioner, Bratton targeted public prostitution, aggressive begging, and, most significantly, subway turnstile-jumping. The trains themselves may no longer have symbolized a city out of control, but the sight of youth defiantly breaking the rules with impunity underscored the perception that the forces of anarchy still ruled over the forces of civilization in New York. Bratton instructed the transit cops to arrest the fare-beaters, rather than standing by passively waiting for more “serious” crime. Many of the fare thieves were wanted precisely for those serious crimes, including rape and murder. Criminals, it turned out, do not scrupulously obey one set of laws while violating another—they are polymorphous offenders. Subway riders cheered on the arrests, which signaled a broader determination to restore order.

The Broken Windows concept spread beyond policing. Business-improvement districts seized on Kelling’s work to revive central business cores, wrenching trash- and graffiti-filled streets back from chaos. Without the advances in policing and urban management that Broken Windows ushered in, New York City would never have experienced its 1990s economic renaissance.

Retrieved May 16, 2019 from https://www.city-journal.org/george-kelling

 

Soft on Crime?

That seems to be the point these Alaskan prosecutors are making in this editorial from the Daily News-Miner; and their concerns are echoed across the country.

An excerpt.

The following commentary is submitted by Fairbanks District Attorney Gregg Olson (retired), Juneau District Attorney Angie Kemp, Kodiak District Attorney Gustaf Olson, Nome District Attorney John Earthman, Kenai District Attorney Scot Leaders, Palmer District Attorney Roman Kalytiak and Anchorage District Attorney John Novak.

Many of us are lifelong prosecutors who have spent years in the trenches trying to do the best we can to keep Alaskans safe and seek justice. We work side by side with law enforcement to try and get those offenders off the street who are likely to do more harm, get those offenders into treatment who need some help and achieve the best outcome under the circumstances to protect the community. The current criminal laws tie our hands along with the hands of judges and keep us from achieving these important goals.

We thought it was important to speak out and make sure the perspective of an everyday prosecutor is represented. We may not be able to control all the factors surrounding crime — that is a constant struggle those in the criminal justice system face. But, through our laws, we can control the range of outcomes and incentives available to cut down on the number of individuals that are reoffending — sometimes within just days or weeks. Right now, the law is not working.

Drug offenses are a good example. The U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, followed approximately 400,000 prisoners over nine years throughout 30 states. The study found that 77% of released drug offenders were rearrested for nondrug offenses within nine years. This just shows that drug use and drug addiction transcends committing drug offenses and can lead to other serious issues. We have to have the tools to deal with drug crimes comprehensively and nimbly, depending on the circumstances and risk factors. Right now, there is effectively zero jail time for drug possession, which means there is zero incentive for an addict to try to get clean. This has to change.

This leads us to the pre-trial risk assessment tool. Although it sounds good on its face, the actual implementation of the risk assessment tool has led to decisions on bail and release being made on less information, not more, and has resulted in the release of individuals that present a significant public safety risk. What we know from experience — and is also born out in the U.S. DOJ study — is that there is a subset of offenders that just never learn no matter how many times they are arrested. Judges need to have the flexibility to take all information into account, including prior offenses, and determine what risk an offender poses to the community when determining bail. And prosecutors need to have the tools to incentivize good behavior.

This is true of technical violations of conditions of probation and parole as well. Under current law, no matter how many technical probation or parole violations an offender commits, the punishment is generally three to 10 days maximum. This means that an offender who commits a technical violation has free reign to commit as many more technical violations as they wish without further consequence so long as the additional violations occur before the court sanctions them for the first one. This provides no incentive to be on good behavior — nor is this a good system of probation or parole.

Another item important to highlight is our atrocious track record as a state when it comes to sex offenses and the current loophole in our law that allows sex offenders from other states to come to Alaska and not register as a sex offender. We have people calling our state and asking if they would have to register if they moved here. If you had to register in another state, you should have to register here in Alaska. We have enough problems with sex offenders as it is, and we shouldn’t be incentivizing sex offenders to move to Alaska.

Retrieved May 10, 2019 from http://www.newsminer.com/opinion/community_perspectives/legislature-must-change-alaska-s-crime-laws-now/article_33068786-7166-11e9-8cf3-5ba66a490d72.html