Beyond bad cops and bad neighborhoods

Sociologist Patrick Starkey wanted to explain, first why crimes against property and people soared in the 1970s and 1980s -- and then rapidly declined after 1993. In Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, he outlines, both meticulously as befits a quantitative scholar, and journalistically, as suits an author who wants to be read, what he found out.

It's all there, from theories of widespread lead poisoning in inner cities leading to more violence (he's skeptical) to figures on increased militarized policing (he attributes to this both some success and some exacerbation of racist violence) to an examination of what growing up amidst heightened violence does to children (not good, as you might expect.)

The most novel bit of his survey to me -- as someone who lived these years by choice in what is widely considered a violent, depressed urban neighborhood -- was his appreciation of successive nonprofit efforts at community building and rebuilding that characterized some to the worst locales.

Yet for all its virtues, I would describe this book as "stranded." Starkey wrote in the mid-2000 teens -- he identifies 2014 as the deepest year of the "great crime decline," knowing as early as 2017 that crime was again on the rise. Of course he couldn't predict the pandemic and its discontents which seemed to raise the murder rate, then has seen it drop, while reported burglaries and assaults have gone up and then gyrated. He saw trouble ahead. He concludes:

The calls for justice that have dominated recent debates about policing, poverty, and crime are well justified and crucially important to developing effective reforms of law enforcement and the criminal justice system. But the war on violence -- with all its tremendous physical, emotional, social, educational, and financial costs --starts with investment.

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I'm suspicious of survey research on crime. Sure, there is hard evidence which enters into this -- there are bodies on the street. 

But not in most places in the country, most of the time. For most Americans, even in the bad old '70s and '80s, crime was something over there, among those people. But our media told us it was bad and out of control. And even when material evidence says it is bad, most of us don't encounter its violence in person everyday. 

I suspect it would take a long period of rising incomes and social peace before most of us would tell a researcher that crime is getting better. Our fears exceed our realities, even when the underlying trends are good. We're not smart about objective observation -- for the good reason that overconfidence might be dangerous.