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Tag: causes of crime

  • Why do white people commit so much suicide?

    One of the first things I ask in my criminal justice students is, “why do people commit crime?” Students are pretty well trained to talk about social and environmental factors. After agreeing with all that, I like to add, “I thought people committed crime because they’re criminals!” Everybody laughs, but there’s a basic truth there, too. People do make choices. Some make better choices than others.

    This is an old debate: Free will and choice versus structural conditions. Nature versus nurture. Conservative (aka: classically liberal) versus liberal. Classical versus Positivist. Punishment versus prison. You could even go back to Old Testament versus New Testament.

    So do people commit crime because they’re criminals or because society made them? The wishy-washy answer, alas, is: yes.

    Sociologists emphasize “root causes,” the idea that racism, poverty, unemployment, poor school and housing–the social and environmental factors–cause crime. This doesn’t ring true to cops and non-criminal poor. And nothing makes “root causes” seem more suspect than talking about in front of students who, at least according to the “root causes,” should all be criminals but aren’t.

    But there is a basic truth to “root causes,” especially if you replace “caused by” with “correlated with.” You certainly will not be mugged on the street by a rich man (yeah, I know the boardroom is something else).

    This was all inspired by Jay Livingston’s post on David Brooks. Compare your beliefs about crime with your beliefs about suicide. Is suicide just a matter of choice and free will or is it caused by the “root causes” of sadness, depression, and rough times? Livingston, building on Durkheim, writes:

    Explanations of individual facts (like who gets ahead and who doesn’t) often aren’t much help in explaining social facts (like the overall degree of inequality and poverty in a society).

    In explaining suicide at the individual level, sadness is a pretty useful concept. People who commit suicide are, no doubt, sadder than those who don’t. The surest way not to commit suicide is to be happy, not sad. But does knowing about these individual differences help us understand why the US has a rate of suicide nearly triple that of Greece? Are Americans three times as sad as Greeks? And within the US, are whites twice as sad as blacks?

    Nobody makes you kill yourself. But clearly suicide–one of the most personal, selfish, and inwardly directed choices a person can make–is influenced by social and cultural factors beyond one’s control. Why is crime any different? Read the above but replace “suicide” with “violent crime” and “sadness” with “poverty” and things get deep… or at least confusing. Oh, the real world… she is complicated.

    But if you believe in police and crime prevention, you really have no choice but to emphasize the power of choice and free will. It’s part of the premise behind Broken Windows and the crime drop in New York: root causes matter, but because there’s nothing we (as police) can do about them, we’re going to focus on what police can do: order maintenance, compstat-based deployment, hot spots, outstanding warrants, situational crime prevention, anythingbut sitting back waiting to respond to crime after the fact.

    Effective crime prevention is a bit like like a suicide barrier on a bridge: a piece of metal won’t get to the root causes or make people any less sad, but it might stop them from killing themselves.

  • A Mugging on Lake Street

    A Mugging on Lake Street

    A reader pointed out a good article in Chicago Magazine by John Conroy, “A Mugging on Lake Street.” It’s a bit heartbreaking to learn that John Conroy, whose name I recognize as a quality journalist, doesn’t have a regular gig. But at least he got this assignment. Too bad it all started with Conroy getting jumped while riding his bike home through the West Side of Chicago. (Actually Conroy was “banked” more than “jumped,” but only those in Baltimore will understand that subtle distinction.)

    The story that follows is all about crime and race and punishment. It’s worth a complete read.

    I was ambushed on the West Side last year, an attack that on its face made no sense. I’d never seen my assailant before; he’d never seen me; no words were exchanged; nothing was taken. Like many crime victims, I wanted the incident, which changed my life for the worse, to have some meaning. I’m white, he is black, and in time it was hard not to wonder if race had something to do with it.
    …
    I stopped by the 15th District police station, at 5701 West Madison Street, hoping to thank the officers who’d helped me. Looking for help in finding them, I asked for an acquaintance, T. C. McCoy, an African American officer who lives in the district and has worked there for 24 years. When he heard my story, he said, “It’s a hate crime.”

    Conroy wants to meet his offender. He does. He wants to interview him. He doesn’t.

    But in the process Conroy learns what it’s like to be a victim in our f*cked-up criminal justice system. It’s not good and Conroy ends up being had. But read the whole article because I can’t do it justice in excerpts. And it’s far deeper than a simplistic tale of a naive liberal who got mugged (though there’s some of that, too. I wonder if he’ll becomes conservative, as the old cliche goes).

    His article hits home with me for many reasons.

    1) I was born in Chicago.

    2) I bike around cities in all neighborhoods at all times. I’ve never been the victim of violent crime (or been hit by a car), on or off a bike. I hope to keep it that way.

    3) My father grew up less than two miles from where Conroy was jumped. I drove through this area coming back from my father’s funeral last year. Before my father died he liked to say that his block on N. Avers Avenue (the eight or ten-hundred block?) looked basically the same as it did when he was a kid, except now everybody is Mexican and Puerto Rican.

    My in-depth knowledge of Chicago basically ends in 1989 when I went to college. I still call L lines by their destination and can’t get over the fact that yuppies live around Cabrini-Green. Cabrini-Green was a no-go area when I was a kid. So was the West Side.

    So my first thought when I saw Conroy’s piece was, “What the hell is a white boy doing biking down Lake St?” In my slightly dated mind, the map of Chicago turns to dragons and winds west of Greektown and Halsted Street. My how times have changed; Conroy was biking home.

    Of course sometimes sh*t just happens. But it usually takessh*ts to dosh*t. And most people choose to live as far as possible from sh*t.

    You could say that Conroy was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But some neighborhoods have more wrong places and wrong times than others. The corner of Lake and Laramie is a wrong place. There’s a liquor store, a check cashing store, a phone store, a Chinese take-out, loitering people, and a vacant lot. Presumably it was the vacant lot from where Conroy was attacked.

    I learned that from google earth’s street view. You can learn a lot about a neighborhood from google earth. If you like google earth (and who doesn’t?), zoom in on the intersection of Chicago and Pulaski, north of Garfield Park in Chicago and cornering a big industrial zone.


    To the northwest you get row upon neat row of Chicago bungalows. All’s well there. That’s probably what Conroy’s block looks like.

    To the northeast is where my father grew up. Things still look OK. You have homes and trees. But a few vacant lots are very worrisome. Still, you can even see nice block party / church festival being set up by Our Lady of Angels. That’s where my father went to school (before the horrible fire) until the family moved out to Albuquerque.

    But go south on Avers past Chicago and things start to git grim. Now you’re in the rough black West Side. From above, you can see fewer trees, more vacant lots, roofs in disrepair, trash in backyards, and abandoned cars littered to and fro. The street view shows boarded-up buildings next to well kept-up homes.

    It’s always the abandonment that strikes me. Entire city blocks empty. And just a short distance from where people pay half-a-million dollars for a “tear-down” lot. Crime, fear of crime, and race matter so much that in just miles property goes from being worth millions to being worthless and literally abandoned.

    Ta-Nehisi Coates comments on Conroy’s article here and here. As usual, he’s insightful, bold, and more often right than wrong (and who can resist the title, “The Logic Of The Bumrush”).

    I was struck by Conroy’s quest to find a deeper meaning in what happened to him. This may be more about me than him–but my sense of what always makes the hood so dangerous is the actual lack of real meaning, the random nature of violence, and how it pervades everything.
    …
    Put bluntly, it’s not that they treated [Conroy] like a honky–it’s that they treated him like one of their own, like a nigger.

    And

    Eventually you tire of the whole dynamic. At least those of us who aren’t built like that, do. And make no mistake, most of us aren’t.

    One thing I learned policing in Baltimore is that I canhandle tough streets. I just don’t want to. Luckily for me, I don’t have to.

  • “People have got to get indignant”

    [Detroit Police Chief] Evans reiterated his sense that people feel Detroit is supposed to have crime. He said he goes out two nights a week and works the streets, stopping motorists who rarely have driver’s license, registration, insurance.

    “What I say is: ‘Do you drive north of 8 Mile like this?’ And they say, ‘Hell no! They’ll lock you up.’ Your conduct can be whatever you want it to be in the city of Detroit. It’s a safe haven for BS. When people feel that way about minor things, that’s the way they’ll feel about bigger things.”
    …
    Evans cites a consent decree that has governed Detroit for six years. The decree, designed to curtail police misconduct, has led to reluctance to arrest.
    …
    “Over 1,100 people being shot is getting kind of Third World to me.”

    Of course, comparing Detroit to the third world isn’t really doing justice to the third world. Third-world cities tend to have far lessviolence.

    The column by Rochelle Riley in the Detroit Free Press.

  • Rain Prevents Crime

    Duh. All cops know that. Rain keeps all the sh*ts inside. But apparently it’s breaking news to the New York Times.
    But I also think, despite what the article says, that rain reduces domestics as well. I don’t have the stats to back that up, but it’s certainly what I saw. Domestics don’t start because two people are cooped up all day. Somebody gets cut when somebody returnshome. People fight because one person is out getting drunk and maybe a little “suh’um suh’um” and then comes home.

    We it rained in Baltimore, not only would wenot like getting wet, we didn’t want our cars to get wet. And then you can’t keep the windows open and talk. So we would move from 800 Chester to under the Amtrak tracks on Broadway and enjoy the quiet.

  • Crime Down in Baltimore

    Justin Fenton writes in the Sun.

  • Babies in the Big House

    The story by Suzanne Smalley in Newsweek:

    A prison may not seem like the best place to raise infants. But researchers are finding that it’s better than the alternative. Joseph Carlson, a criminal-justice professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney who recently completed a 10-year study, says he thought such programs were “strange” when he began his research. Now he thinks they’re “a win-win situation” for mothers and babies—and reduce crime by helping inmates to reform.

  • New York City crime rate still falling

    The story in the Daily News:

    The city’s crime rate for the first three months of 2009 was the lowest in more than 40 years, defying fears that the sinking economy might send the city back into the bad old days of rampant murders and rough streets.

    Through the end of last month, overall crime dropped 13.5% from a year ago – down in every major category, including homicides, with 89, according to daily crime statistics from police. Last year, there were 116 homicides during the same period.

    Robberies were also down from 4,837 last year at this time to 4,131 this year, and grand larcenies dropped from 10,030 to 8,854.

    “I know there’s an anticipation … that crime would go up as a result of the economic turndown. We just haven’t experienced that,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Friday.

  • Broken Windows, Subways, and Crime

    The danger in New York City of subway cuts and transit fare hikes looms. Keeping the transit system in decent shape affects more than your commute to work. It’s a public safety issue. The proposed MTA “doomsday” service cuts puts the past 15 years of public-safety gains in jeopardy.

    Many factors contributing to New York City’s crime drop, but a huge part was better policing and a focus on minor and not-so-minor quality-of-life issues, the so called Broken Windows. New York City’s great crime drop was both unpredicted and unprecedented, and it started on the subways. Broken Windows, as formulated by James Q Wilson and George Kelling, says that an unfixed broken window, figuratively speaking, is a sign that nobody cares. This leads to increased disorder, fear, and crime.

    It’s easy to forget how bad things were in the early 1990s. The city was still seen as out of control and, as the New York Times wrote, fear was constant: “Crime, the fear of it as much as the fact, adds overtones of a New Beirut” in a city “bristling with beggars and sad schizophrenics tuned in to inner voices.” In 1990 2,245 were killed. Then crime started going down. It went down fastest in the subway.

    Then transit Police Chief William Bratton focused on the Broken Windows of the subway: turnstile jumping, aggressive begging, and homeless people—many with stunning hygiene needs—using the subway as a free 24-hour shelter. In 1991, crime dropped three times as fast underground as above. By 1994, the subways were safer. Much safer. Felonies had dropped by one-third in three years. Successes in the subway told the city’s tax-payers that they could beat the criminals The great crime drop had swung into gear. A tipping point had been reached.

    Over the past 25 years, many of the city’s broken windows have been fixed. As an improved transit system—started with investment and the virtual elimination of graffiti in the 1980s—lead the way. While academics continue to debate the causal link between disorder and crime, a Broken Windows’s approach resulted in a massively safer New York City and the simply concept that policing and quality-of-life issues matter.

    Since then, tourist spending in New York City has doubled to $29 billion per year. Compared to that, the $1.2 billion needed to close the MTA’s budget gap is a drop in the bucket. Just a few muggings and “random” crimes shown on YouTube will cost the city and state far more than what the MTA needs to keep moving forward.

    Dirtier stations, less maintenance, fewer station attendants, longer waits, and aggressive teenagers tell the public that nobody is in control. With increased fear, fewer people will use the streets and subways, giving criminals a greater opportunity to act. Fear and crime thrive in systems of disorder and decline. With crime and fear, suddenly a vicious cycle is born. That’s why the proposed cuts to MTA service are so dire.

    It is not inevitable that tough economic times bring more crime. Murders in New York were up last year to 523 from 496 in 2007. This is worrisome, but not so much because the numbers are bad. They’re not. But in tough times, it is particularly important to prevent a slide back to New York City’s bloody past. Crime could go down even further. Canada has a few more murders than New York City but with four times the population. With continued good policing and public funding, we could move in that direction.

    Or we could slip back. It is possible, with bad public planning and the self-fulfilling idea that crime and violence will increase. MTA service cuts affect more than service. The doomsday cuts can lead to a real doomsday with thousands of New Yorkers again being killed each year. In her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote, “We must understand that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary though they are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves.” Service cuts equal more disorder, fear, and crime.

    In tough economic times, the subway is the last service that should be cut, not the first. There’s no reason we can’t slide to New York’s dark ages. But it doesn’t have to be this way, but if we lose the subways, the city will follow. Subway cuts are the first step to breaking our city’s windows, the same windows that have so painstakingly been fixed over the past twenty years. And that will be the most costly mistake of all.

  • Broken Windows Works

    Broken Windows Works

    Researchers, working with police, identified 34 crime hot spots. In half of them, authorities set to work – clearing trash from the sidewalks, fixing street lights, and sending loiterers scurrying. Abandoned buildings were secured, businesses forced to meet code, and more arrests made for misdemeanors. Mental health services and homeless aid referrals expanded.

    In the remaining hot spots, normal policing and services continued.

    Then researchers from Harvard and Suffolk University sat back and watched, meticulously recording criminal incidents in each of the hot spots.

    The results, just now circulating in law enforcement circles, are striking: A 20 percent plunge in calls to police from the parts of town that received extra attention. It is seen as strong scientific evidence that the long-debated “bro ken windows” theory really works – that disorderly conditions breed bad behavior, and that fixing them can help prevent crime.


    Read the whole story in the Boston Globe. I’ll try and get my hands on the actual report.

    [Update: The article is Braga, Anthony A and Brenda J. Bond. 2008. “Policing Crime and Disorder Hot Spots: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” Criminology. Vol. 46(3).

  • That Christmas Spirit

    I’m not one to give dumb crime fighting tips, but keep this in mind: even criminals need to buy presents.

    The week before Christmas is always a busy time for police, with extra muggings and robberies.