OPINION: Kendall P. Stanley — The great crime sham - Petoskey News-Review

To hear President Trump tell it, along with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, America is a violent, crime-ridden country that must be fixed by getting tough on crime.

The problem is, it’s not.

Inconvenient for the president, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t go out in the hinterlands and wave the bloody shirt of crime. Or when Sessions says “for the first time in a long time, Americans can have hope for a safer future.” What twaddle.

Adam Gopnik reviewing the new book “Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence” by New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey in The New Yorker looks at the “puzzling disappearance from our big-city streets of violent crime.”

The great crime decline, as Berkeley criminologist Franklin E. Zimring put it.

Sharkey starts his book by looking at the South Bronx, where in the 1970s attendance at Yankee Stadium was about 10,000 fans less during night games because people wouldn’t travel in the Bronx after dark. People wouldn’t use the public parks.

Now, Starkey writes, “the calm of Franz Sigel Park reflected the atmosphere of peace throughout New York City. In the city where more than 2,000 people used to be murdered each year, 328 were killed in 2014, the lowest tally since the first half of the twentieth century.” Gopnik noted the tally was even lower in 2017.

And it wasn’t just New York, violent crime fell in Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles and Washington and not just a little but a lot, Gopnik notes.

That’s not to say that murders are not an issue in all cities. Chicago and Baltimore in particular have gang-related killings at a high rate but overall crime is down. In those cities murder affects a very, very small percentage of the population but it intensely affects certain neighborhoods.

Gopnik notes that crime not only fell across the United States, but across the Western world – it dropped as much in East London as the South Bronx.

What Sharkey can’t do is pinpoint exactly the why of the drop in crime.

Community action, where people in their own neighborhoods started to push back on crime and more coercive police practices “seem about as good as any” Gopnik writes.

Sharkey echoes Zimring’s earlier conclusion “that many small walls are a better barrier to crime than any single big one.” But the magnitude of the change from crime-ridden to crime-free “remains mystifying.”

“With the crime wave, it would seem, small measures that pushed the numbers down by some noticeable amount engendered a virtuous circle that brought the numbers further and further down. You didn’t have to change the incidence of crime a lot to make people worry less about it. What ended violent crime, in this scenario, was not an edict but a feedback system – created when less crime brought more eyes onto the streets and subways, which in turn reduced crime, leading to people feeling safer, which in turn brought more eyes out. The self-organized response of society to crime was, in effect, to outnumber the muggers on the street before they mugged someone. One has only to get on the New York City subway at 3 a.m., and recall what 3 a.m. on the New York City subway was like 30 years ago, to sense the presence of this circle,” Gopnik writes.

Sharkey talks about the social fabric of a community – when it’s torn, violence can exist, when it’s strong violence, disappears. Build on a strong fabric through the use of police as “community quarterbacks” rather than through the “warrior cop” that works to squash crime.

Gopnik ends on this positive note:

“We have curbed crime without knowing how we did it, perhaps simply by doing it in many ways at once. It is possible to see this as a kind of humanist miracle, a lesson about the self-organizing and, sometimes, self-healing capacities of human communities that’s as humbling, in its way, as any mystery that faith can offer.”

There is much more in the article but the bottom line is violent crime is no longer an issue in our big cities, our president’s thoughts aside. Or as Gopnik noted, if he truly believed violence is rampant in the city, he wouldn’t be building apartment buildings on the West Side of Manhattan.

This and that

If I could find the person who is spoofing 881 cell numbers to call me and talk about my credit, there’d be blood on the floor. The calls are becoming more frequent and my blood pressure is rising higher.

You could use call blocking – if they used the same number but they don’t. There is one word for these folks – evil.

Finally, our president would have really run into the Parkland, Fl., school even without a weapon, to get to the gunman? Knowing Donald Trump’s proclivity to bend the truth – lie – one of these days soon he’ll probably say he never said that. Bravado is one thing Mr. President, stupidity is another.

Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily of the Petoskey News-Review or its employees.

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