Uneasy Peace: the Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence
Uneasy Peace, by Patrick Sharkey
This post, designed to familiarize the reader with what is at stake in getting police reform right, is mostly quotes from Patrick Sharkey’s wonderful book Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, And the Next War On Violence (with the author’s permission), with some commentary.
“The sociologist Elijah Anderson wrote Code of the Street, his classic 1999 ethnography of street life in Philadelphia’s ghetto...He described desperate poverty, widespread joblessness, and lingering racial tension. But the dominant feature of public life in Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods was neither homelessness nor drug abuse nor prostitution; it was violence.”
“Children living within this social world were forced to adapt to its code, adopting informal rules of behavior that allowed them to avoid constant victimization yet maintain status on the street. A smaller segment of young people gave in to the ‘code of the street’ entirely, spending their lives in a continuous campaign for status, which was earned through force…”
“Violence reverberates around entire communities, altering the daily lives of everyone within them...it is impossible to understand the full toll of violent crime without considering the physiological mechanisms by which a stressor in the environment comes to affect the behavior and functioning of the millions of young people who have never been shot and may never have been in a serious fight, but who live in fear… children’s functioning drops in the aftermath of extreme violence.”
“To put this impact in perspective, it was as if the children who were assessed right after a local homicide had missed the previous two years of schooling and regressed back to their level of cognitive performance from years earlier...At the peak of America’s violent era, about 89 out of every 1000 students reported being the victim of a violent assault in school. By 2015, just 18 out of every 1000 students reported being victimized.’ Trends in victimization at school and away from school are almost identical.”
‘’My mom and my dad kept me in the house. I did not have any friends on my block.’ Parents often taught their children to survive by fighting back when necessary, even if they were reluctant to do so...’It used to be the gangs, and fought ‘em, and it was over. But now if you fight somebody, they may come back and kill you. It’s a whole lot different now.’’ [confirmed by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Beautiful Struggle and in ‘Beyond the Code of The Streets’ NYT 2014] ‘when you live around violence there is no opting out.’ Young men joined gangs partly by the need for protection. “In environments outside the control of the formal legal system, young men anticipated violence wherever they went and often struck first in an attempt to survive.”
“Yet from the early 1990’s to the early 2010’s, violent crime fell in almost every American city and it plummeted in many major urban centers. In Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles and Washington D.C. The murder rate fell by 60 to 80 percent, similar to the crime drop in New York. Even in Oakland and Philadelphia it fell by at least a third. While horrible violence persisted in certain neighborhoods, the dramatic decline touched the vast majority of neighborhoods, including poorer ones of color.”
“The decline in violence has altered American cities and the lives of their residents. ‘Cities came back to life in ways that were both obvious and subtle. Families returned from the suburbs and moved into central cities, and the poorest urban neighborhoods began to attract newcomers. Schools became dramatically safer than they were twenty years ago, and test scores rose the most in the places that became safest...The drop in homicides since the early 1990’s led to an improvement in the life expectancy of black men that rivals any public health breakthrough of the last several decades.’”
“Subway cars, commuter lines, and buses in U.S. cities filled up...Public libraries began to brim with activity in the cities where crime fell, as parents no longer had to shield their children from the world outside the front door... Fans came back to Yankee Stadium... and just as many began to show up for night games as for day games.”
“Cities, where public life is prioritized over private life, where property is used collectively and interaction is constant and unavoidable, came back to life as crime declined.”
“The decline in American violence is a stunning development that no one predicted and that many people still do not believe...[I]t has been one of the most important social trends to hit cities over the past several decades. It is a victory for urban America.”
“But it is a tainted victory. And it is an uneasy peace.”
“The decline in violence that changed urban America is fragile. It is threatened by the resentment of police officers who have been asked, for the past twenty years, to take over dangerous city streets by any means necessary--and who are now being vilified in some quarters and being told to change the way they do their jobs...It is threatened by the election of Donald Trump, whose law and order rhetoric is a reminder of the language Richard Nixon used back in 1968, just before the last century’s sharpest rise in violence occurred.”
[Note: The deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray and others were not independent, isolated incidents.] “They are only the most visible examples of a national approach to confronting violent crime, and the larger problem of urban poverty in the nation’s poorest, most segregated neighborhoods.”
“This approach began at the tail end of the 1960’s, when the United States abandoned its efforts to confront urban poverty with a campaign focusing on justice and investment and settled on an alternative strategy that relied heavily on the police and the prison. Since then, police departments nationwide have been bolstered by growing federal and state funding and emboldened by a police of aggressive, zero-tolerance policing that targeted low income communities of color. The rise of intensive policing was accompanied by increasingly punitive criminal justice policies and more aggressive prosecution of offenders, leading to historically and internationally unprecedented levels of incarceration.”
“But our national reliance on aggressive policing and mass incarceration has taken a heavy toll... torn families apart and destabilized entire communities [for example, the impacts of parental incarceration on children]....At the same time, as videos of abusive or lethal police behavior have proliferated and gone viral, the policing tactics that have long been familiar in the country’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods have become visible to the rest of the nation...[and] the methods our nation has used to confront urban violence are no longer acceptable to much of the American public.”
“[Since Elijah Anderson’s day,] the threat of a cop or a parole officer became constant. This shift in focus, from the threat of violent peers to the threat of abusive police, can be found in an array of recent studies of urban poverty...It is the risk from law enforcement, and from the expansive criminal justice system, that preoccupies Ta-Nehisi Coates as he writes to his son.”
“As the movement for criminal justice and policing reform has gathered momentum, we have seen ominous reminders of what the old era of urban violence looked like...After reaching a historic low in 2014, the national homicide rate rose by 11 percent in 2015, then rose again in 2016 and has continued to rise.”
[Note: Many Americans don’t believe crime has gone down because their perceptions are shaped by a combination of media coverage, popular culture, and an informal, imperfect sense of the world surrounding us. Sharkey says the news media plays the largest role in distorting our sense of how much violence is out there. The amount of coverage devoted to crime and violence in an area’s local news bears almost no relationship to the actual level of violence in that area.]
“Politicians on the left are reluctant to acknowledge that conditions for the poorest Americans have improved, and politicians on the right are loath to admit that the behavior of the poorest Americans has changed in a positive way… To borrow the words of Steven Pinker, who wrote the definitive book on the decline of violence over the course of human history, ‘No one has ever recruited activists to a cause by announcing that things are getting better, and bearers of good news are often advised to keep their mouths shut lest they lull people into complacency.’’
“Americans themselves have told us that violence is declining. The National Crime Victimization Survey… has been administered annually since the early 1970’s. [check it out] ...In 1993 about 80 out of every 1000 Americans reported being the victim of a violent crime in the six months prior to the survey. By 2015...only 19 out of 1000 reported being a violent crime victim. The FBI’s official crime statistics tell us that violence has been cut roughly in half. Americans’ own reports suggest that violent victimization has dropped by more than 75 percent.”
[Note: The sheer presence of police seems to affect criminal activity. If police patrols are increased by half, according to one of the strongest studies, crime drops by approximately fifteen percent. Zimring has argued that new strategies of policing are a key reason crime has dropped.]
“But these were not the only changes that took place on city streets in the 1990’s. At the same time that growing numbers of Americans were being arrested and locked away in prisons and jails, a new contingent of community organizations quietly began to emerge in neighborhoods across the country to combat the problem of violent crime. The story of these local organizations is crucially important, but is often left out of discussions of the crime decline.”
“The response to violent crime in America’s cities did not come only from external forces that occupied the most disadvantaged neighborhoods. It also came from within… We found that as the number of community nonprofits formed to combat violence rises, every kind of violent crime falls.”
“Students now feel safer in school. The proportion of all students who feared being attacked on their way to school or in school dropped from 12 percent to 4 percent from 1995 to 2011 with an even sharper change among black and Hispanic students. The racial gap in perceived school safety is almost gone, 5 percent of black and Hispanic students reported being afraid compared to 3 percent of white students. Also a big correlation between violent crime falling and the gap in academic achievement narrowing.”
“When there is a threat of violence in the school or classroom, it is virtually impossible for young people to learn.”
“But as almost every other kind of lethal violence in America has subsided, lethal violence from the police has remained constant. And now that we have cameras in our cellphones, police violence has become visible to everyone.”
“Reducing the prison population, which has grown to a level that is internationally unprecedented, is a fundamental challenge for the United States. By itself, however, it is not a valid approach to reducing violence or confronting urban inequality.”
“The communities that have seen a generation of young people swept into the criminal justice system are the communities that will have to absorb the rising number of returning men, and some women, from our jails and prisons. If policy makers take steps to reduce the size of the imprisoned population without also providing massive resources for reintegration through strong local institutions, they will destabilize communities that are already fragile. They will amplify, not reduce, the costs of mass incarceration.”
“Similarly, changing the way police officers interact with residents in low income communities of color is crucial to restoring legitimacy in one of the most important institutions in our society. But it is also essential to recognize the role that law enforcement has played in preserving social order and reducing violence.”
“If the well justified calls for policing reform drift into a broader movement to reduce the role of police in urban communities, we risk returning to a time when the poorest American neighborhoods are left on their own to deal with the challenges that come with concentrated poverty, a time when police departments were overwhelmed by the problem of violent crime and helpless to do anything about it. We risk drifting into a new era of rising violence.”
“As protesters have called for an end to police brutality, only minimal progress has been made in generating new investments to bolster community organizations that are crucial to stabilizing neighborhoods, to support resident groups that can begin to play a larger role in regulating behavior in public space, or to provide universal training in areas like conflict de- escalation. As advocates have made the case for sentencing reforms and decarceration, there has been little progress in ensuring that every former prisoner has a legitimate opportunity to obtain training before he or she leaves prison, and to find a stable job, stable housing, and physical and mental health care upon exit from the prison system. There has been virtually no progress in supporting the institutions, and the communities, to which the nation’s enormous prison population will return.”
“If police officers are to become a different kind of urban guardian, they will need assistance. Funding is necessary to implement new training and to allow departments to hire new officers whose role is not to enforce the law but rather to build relationships with community residents. Community policing is an old idea that has come to mean many different things to different people--but the neighborhood coordination officers in New York City, whose explicit job description is to build stronger relationships between officers and residents, provide a model for what the next stage of neighborhood policing should look like.”
“The last step is to acknowledge the role that police have played in reducing violence, and to double down on proven methods of controlling violent crime without targeting entire communities.”