The criminologist Barry Latzer has noted that the homicide rate for black men fell by 18% in the 1940s and another 22% in the 1950s. It\u2019s probably not a coincidence that black poverty declined by 40 percentage points over the same period, and black incomes grew at faster rates that white incomes. Safer neighborhoods help facilitate upward economic mobility, which is something that the \u201cdefund the police\u201d crowd might keep in mind.<\/p>\n
In the second half of the 20th century, these trends reversed. In the 1960s, violent crime rates doubled, and they continued to increase sharply until the early 1990s, when better policing and more incarceration helped bring crime under control. In his 2007 book, \u201cThe Great American Crime Decline,\u201d Franklin Zimring describes violent crime as a \u201cregressive tax whereby the poor pay much more\u201d and observes that \u201cbecause both victims and offenders are concentrated among the same disadvantaged populations, a major crime decline might produce a double benefit\u2014fewer victims as well as fewer offenders arrested and punished for serious crimes.\u201d Between 1990 and 2016 the overall homicide rate fell by 34%, and among black men it fell by 40%. Had the black homicide rate remained at 1990 levels through that period, tens of thousands of black men wouldn\u2019t be alive today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Yes, it’s all true.\u00a0 We know how to preserve black lives because, until very recently, we’ve been doing just that. It’s worth repeating that the murder rate plaguing black men fell by forty percentage points<\/em> in the generation that began in 1990.\u00a0 Over time, that translates, as Riley says, to tens of thousands of black lives that mattered enough for us to change what we’d been doing before then.<\/p>\nWhat did we change?\u00a0 Put another way, what happened to bring down the violent crime rate so far\u00a0 —\u00a0 a reduction that disproportionately benefited blacks, they being disproportionately the victims of murder (roughly half the murder victims in the United States are black, yet blacks are only 12 to 13 percent of the population).<\/p>\n
The answer is multifaceted but it’s no mystery, although sometimes liberals like to pretend it is.<\/p>\n
Part of the answer does not take root in government policy:\u00a0 The Baby Boom population bulge aged out of its most crime-prone years, and there was a substantial increase in private security and surveillance.\u00a0 Those are significant pieces of the puzzle.\u00a0 But the other pieces are very much centered in the sober policies developed in the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations and carried forward in the Clinton, Bush 43, and (for a time) Obama administrations:\u00a0 More police; computer-assisted policing that concentrated on the most crime-plagued areas; aggressive and pro-active policing; increased use of incarceration, and (relatedly) statutory mandatory minimum sentencing and sentencing guidelines to rein in the wildly disparate and naive sentencing practices of the Sixties and Seventies.<\/p>\n
It worked.\u00a0 Take a look at the crime statistics<\/a> from 1960-1980 and compare them to those from 1990-2010.\u00a0 To an observer looking from 20,000 feet, it would certainly appear that, in the former period\u00a0 —\u00a0 when rehab and the medical model of crime were all the rage, and sentencing judges had nearly unbridled discretion to showcase their “compassion”\u00a0 —\u00a0 black lives didn’t matter so much.\u00a0 The number of black (and other) murder victims exploded.\u00a0 In the latter period, however\u00a0 —\u00a0 often derided by the Left as “tuff on crime”\u00a0 —\u00a0 the number of black (and other) murder victims fell dramatically.<\/p>\nSince black lives matter, which do we want?\u00a0 To do what we know works, or go back 50 years to what we know fails?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I noted in an earlier post, no normal person disagrees with the proposition that black lives matter.\u00a0 So the obvious question is:\u00a0 What can we do to preserve and enhance them? This is not a hard question, because we’ve been preserving and enhancing black lives for an entire generation.\u00a0 We didn’t do it by tearing down statues, defacing monuments, chucking bricks through store windows or setting up lawless “autonomous zones.”\u00a0 Liberals know perfectly well how we did it, but don’t want to admit it because that would confound The Received Woke Wisdom.\u00a0 Jason Riley of the WSJ spills the beans, however.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,49,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-policing","category-sentencing","category-social-factors"],"yoast_head":"\n
Because Black Lives Matter, Save Them Instead of Sacrificing Them to Blind Ideology - Crime & Consequences<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.crimeandconsequences.blog\/?p=1478\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Because Black Lives Matter, Save Them Instead of Sacrificing Them to Blind Ideology - Crime & Consequences\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As I noted in an earlier post, no normal person disagrees with the proposition that black lives matter.\u00a0 So the obvious question is:\u00a0 What can we do to preserve and enhance them? 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