The data may show that the progressive worldview is only right 10 percent of the time. But, in his heart, the progressive believes he is right 100 percent of the time. It doesn’t really matter what the data say. Progressive thinking isn’t very logical. It is often pure emotion feeding on earnest faith in the perfectibility of man. That is the reason why the progressive discipline of criminology hasn’t made much progress in the last fifty years.
In January, I’ll write to you in more detail about the problems with the leftist understanding of crime. But meanwhile, good luck with your exams, and have a great Christmas break.
LETTER 14
How LBJ Abandoned Kitty Genovese
Dear Zach,
Progressive approaches to ameliorating crime—and poverty, which progressives tend to see as the major cause of crime—have not been stunningly successful in the past half century. To understand why, let’s rewind to the point in American history, now almost fifty years ago, when those liberal solutions were first being put into practice.
The spring of 1964 was a difficult time. The Warren Commission was trying to heal the wounds caused by the Kennedy assassination and to bring closure to a murder case that would never reach trial. Lyndon Baines Johnson was trying to step out of the Kennedy shadow and forge a new direction for the American people. Then, one March night in New York City, a killer stepped out of the shadows and opened a new set of wounds—not just on his intended target, but on the conscience of a nation.
Kitty Genovese was attacked shortly after 3:00 a.m. outside her apartment in Queens, New York. Her attacker was a man named Winston Moseley. When he initially attacked her, she started screaming. Her screams were said to have been heard by thirty-eight people—none of whom did much to help her. Some lights came on in the apartment complex where Kitty lived. Someone shouted something at Moseley, and he went away for about ten minutes.
But Winston Moseley came back and resumed his attack on Kitty Genovese. She had been injured too badly to get all the way back inside her apartment. So she was extremely vulnerable when the attack resumed. Moseley did not meet much resistance when he started stabbing her again. He punctured both her lungs and then raped her as she lay dying. An ambulance arrived, but it was too late. She died around 4:15 a.m.
There have been some challenges to the notion that thirty-eight people heard the screams of Kitty Genovese without coming to her aid—a number as low as twelve has been suggested. But regardless of the exact number, the incident inspired a line of research by social psychologists into what is now referred to as the “bystander effect.” This behavioral effect is said to stem from a psychological process known as “diffusion of responsibility.”
The idea behind the bystander effect is that we should not assume that it is unusual for a victim to go unassisted despite the presence of numerous witnesses or passersby. The victim may go unaided because of the presence of numerous witnesses or passersby. This makes sense for a couple of reasons.
A bystander could be reluctant to help someone when others are around because of a feeling that the others might be more qualified to help. For example, if some injured person is lying by the side of the road after a nasty fall, someone who lacks medical expertise may decline to help, assuming that there is a nurse or even a doctor among the other bystanders.
But also the presence of others may give a bystander an “out” in a situation where he simply does not want to help. By saying to himself, “Someone else will probably help” (diffusion of responsibility), he can justify walking away and leaving the task to someone else (bystander effect).
The New York Times ran a story on the Kitty Genovese case two weeks after the attack. The author of the piece pulled no punches in describing a city—and a society—that had become calloused and indifferent toward those in need. Were there no Good Samaritans among the thirty-eight who were eyewitnesses to (or who at least heard) the attack on Miss Genovese? The attack seemed to speak volumes about the coarseness of American society.
The attack on Kitty Genovese came at a turning point in the history of our nation’s approach to controlling crime. Just a few months earlier, President Johnson had taken the reigns of government under tragic circumstances. Just a few weeks earlier, he had given his first State of the Union address. In that address he had promised to push through civil rights legislation that had failed during Kennedy’s abbreviated term as president. He had also promised an unconditional war on poverty.
President Johnson’s message was twofold:1) Poverty is caused by societal factors including, but not limited to, racial discrimination, and 2) it is the responsibility of the government to solve problems like racism and poverty.
The non-response to Kitty Genovese’s cries for help is in some ways a symbol of a deep transition in American life. It had always been assumed that the answer to the question “Am I my brother’s keeper?” was a resounding “Yes.” But the unspoken theme of President Johnson’s Great Society was, “The government is my brother’s keeper.”
Of course the causes for the change that seemed to be crystallized by the Genovese case are more profound and complicated than just Johnson’s policies. A president’s agenda can affect a society in profound ways, but big changes take years, not months. The encroachment of the social welfare state in America would not have been possible without a significant decline in Christian charity. In fact, it would not even have been necessary.
LETTER 15
Camelot
Zach,
One of President Eisenhower’s most enduring contributions is the interstate highway system—something few twenty-first-century Americans can imagine life without. Ike was first inspired to undertake this initiative shortly after the invasion of Normandy on D-Day in 1944. After troops had landed, they had some difficulty navigating the back roads of France. Those navigational difficulties impaired the American troops’ ability to drive the Nazis back into Germany and finish the war. When the Americans finally did make it to Germany, they found that the Germans had a much more sophisticated roadway system than the French. Ike never forgot that, and as president, he was determined that in the U.S. the road system would be modeled after the one in Germany.
But sometimes broad government initiatives can have unanticipated consequences. Eisenhower’s interstate highway initiative is no exception to the rule. While it made interstate travel easier, it also changed the nature of our neighborhoods and affected the nature and prevalence of interpersonal crime.
The United States began construction on the interstate highway system in 1956. During the next decade, America saw the greatest crime increases in its history. Serious crime increased by more than 100 percent in the span of a decade. Without question, the principal reason for that drastic increase was the baby boom. Because we had an unprecedented number of babies born in the mid-1940s, we had an unprecedented number of teenagers in the 1960s. Because people are most likely to commit crimes while in their teens and early twenties, the 1960s saw a serious crime wave.
But anyone alive during the 1960s can tell you it was a complicated and turbulent decade. Many factors helped drive up the crime rate. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out how changes in our transportation system contributed to crime increases. We have long known that serious crime is higher during the summer months, simply because people are out and about and therefore exposed to one another with greater frequency. To the extent that people are out in public, they become targets of interpersonal crime. And while they are away from home, they are also more likely to be victims of certain property crimes such as burglary.
The interstate highway system contributed to this problem by making our country smaller. It has given those who are motivated to commit violent crimes easier access to potential victims and has allowed them to escape more quickly to destinations that are farther away.
Transportation has also changed the nature of crime in America. Before we had an interstate system, the most violent crimes were between people who knew one
another. Over the last several decades, interpersonal crimes against total strangers have been on the rise. The Internet has accelerated this trend—creating, in effect, a new virtual interstate highway system that brings people closer together, for both good and bad purposes.
In this interconnected nation of ours, people travel not only for illicit reasons but also for legitimate business reasons. The nationwide business chain has replaced the small-town store. The changing nature of business means that people are likely to change jobs often, which increasingly means working in new and unfamiliar cities. Since people move so often, it is not surprising that fewer of us get to know our neighbors.
Last summer, I had a long discussion about all of these changes with an old friend of mine named Jeff Chambers. I had not seen Jeff in years, as we had lost track of each other for nearly a decade. He had moved so often that it was tough for us to keep in touch the way we once did. When we began to reminisce about the old days of our childhood, he used a word that I found interesting. He referred to our old neighborhood as “Camelot.”
I remember the first day our families met. It was during the summer of 1969 (please, no references to stupid Bryan Adams songs!). My mother used to go down to the water authority to get the names of families who had just moved to the area and had recently opened new water accounts. That’s how she found out that the Chambers family had moved into the apartment complex right across the street. My mother took me over to their house so we could introduce ourselves and invite them to church.
After they joined our church, my family started to spend time with theirs once a week when our parents played bridge together. I spent every other Saturday at the Chambers family’s apartment playing G.I. Joes with Jeff and his younger brother Chris. They spent every other weekend at ours. To top it all off, my dad and Mr. Chambers joined the church softball team. Our families were inseparable.
Our families were not the only ones that were close. We had a huge network of other families that kept in touch even after we moved out of those apartments and into our first little houses. Looking back on it all reminds me of an important principle of what’s called “routine activities theory” (related to “control theory,” which I wrote about in connection to Boyz N the Hood)—the idea that the nature and prevalence of crime often has less to do with the decisions of criminals than it does with the routine everyday activities of non-criminals.
When people are out of their homes working and traveling extensively in a vibrant economy, they are more likely to be subjected to the risk of interpersonal crime. When people do not take the time to get to know their neighbors, they are less likely to have someone watching over their homes. They are even, as in the case of Kitty Genovese, less likely to have someone willing to personally watch over them.
In the neighborhood Jeff Chambers remembers as “Camelot,” people got to know their neighbors personally and learned their habits and proclivities. They were able to detect when something was wrong and then felt an obligation to intervene. That feeling is more likely to occur when the person next door is your neighbor—not just the person next door.
The progressive worldview, as we have seen, assumes that human beings are naturally innocent, and that crime has to be explained by something outside them—poverty, or the influence of society. Thus the “social strain,” “labeling,” and “differential association” theories of crime are developed. The “routine activities theory” is more compatible with the Christian and conservative worldview which takes a realistic view of human nature—namely, that the world is full of people who are motivated to commit crimes. But motivated offenders are unable to commit crimes unless they come into contact with suitable targets (like Kitty Genovese) in the absence of capable guardians (such as concerned neighbors).
The central idea of routine activities theory, the equation that “crime = motivated offender + suitable target - capable guardian,” has obvious application to the realm of violent crime. But its application to property crime is even more compelling. That will be the subject of my next letter.
LETTER 16
The Case for Transistor Control Legislation
Zach,
I know you don’t like your present off-campus job very much, but I want you to imagine a job far more risky and far less rewarding. I want you to imagine that you are a professional burglar in the early 1950s. I mean that literally. I want you to stop what you are doing and imagine trying to commit the crime of burglary in an average neighborhood in an average town during the decade after our soldiers returned from World War II.
Progressives argue for gun control on the theory that when guns are readily available, crime increases. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence that just the opposite is true. I’ll write in some detail about gun control in a future letter. But in this letter, I’m going to make a similar case for transistor control legislation.
Prosperity was on the rise in the 1950s, but people still did not have much in the way of electronic gadgets. Whether we are talking about electronic inventions that make life easier or about devices used for entertainment, there simply was not much to be found in the average home—at least compared to today. And the electronics that did exist were built with cumbersome vacuum tubes, not silicon transistors.
If you looked into a living room window and tried to “case” a house for a burglary, these are the kinds of things you might have found: a television set weighing well over one hundred pounds; a radio (on top of the TV) with huge “rabbit ears” antennae protruding from its top; and perhaps a stereo system with turntable, receiver, and speakers all welded into one highly immobile audio entertainment system.
What you were also likely to see was a housewife doing chores, or worse—from the perspective of the burglar-staring right at the TV that you would like to steal if you had the opportunity. And that is really the key word in the present narrative: “opportunity.”
“Routine activities theory,”—which, like the “control theory” that I explained in the context of Boyz N the Hood, is compatible with man’s fallen nature—posits that crime equals a motivated offender plus a suitable target minus a capable guardian. If that’s the case, then you as a burglar in the ’50s are in very serious trouble. Since these valuables inside the living room are very heavy (not suitable targets for stealing) and a housewife seems to be virtually always home (and capable of guarding them), you would seem to be out of luck. If you want to burglarize this home, you had better wait until the whole family is on an extended vacation. And you had better bring some friends and a U-Haul to help cart off the stolen merchandise.
Now take a few minutes to imagine what it would be like to be a burglar today. Imagine yourself planning the burglary of an average house in an average neighborhood in an average town. If you peered into the living room window, here is what you might find: a television set weighing about twenty pounds, a DVD player weighing no more than five pounds, and a stereo system with CD player, receiver, and speakers—each component separate and weighing less than five pounds. You might also see a laptop weighing just a few pounds and an iPod weighing just a few ounces.
Remembering that crime really equals a motivated offender plus a suitable target minus a capable guardian, you are in very good shape. Because these valuables inside the living room are very light (suitable targets for stealing), and the husband and wife seem to virtually always to be at work (and thus incapable of guarding them), you would seem to be in luck. If you want to burglarize this home, you do not have to wait until the whole family is on vacation. And you will not need to bring friends and a U-Haul to help cart off the stolen merchandise. Just bring an empty laundry bag and a Honda Civic. You’ll be able to clean the place out in a few minutes.
This illustration seems to paint a dismal view of crime in the twenty-first century. It is true that modern technology has created an abundance of suitable targets for property crime. But there are ways to increase capable guardianship in order to offset the effects of modern technology—wa
ys that stop short of banning the transistors that make electronic devices lighter and easier to steal.
Back in the 1990s, Marcus Felson wrote a book called Crime and Everyday Life, which offers cause for optimism in a society vulnerable to predatory crime. In that brilliant book, Felson explores ways of increasing capable guardianship without spending a lot of money.
For example, he discusses the desirability of building a short picket fence around your home, instead of a tall brick wall. It may seem counterintuitive, but the latter invites burglary while the former does not.
To illustrate Felson’s point, imagine yourself casing a house surrounded by an enormous brick wall. It might be tempting to pass on the opportunity because the wall is high and somewhat hard to scale. But once you are over the wall you have it made. Passersby cannot see what you are doing once you get inside the yard. The large wall operates as a shield to allow you to take your time as you break the lock and eventually rummage through potentially valuable papers and personal effects hidden in the house.
But a short picket fence has the opposite effect. Once a burglar is over the fence everything that he does is in plain view of passersby. He had better pick the lock quickly and close the blinds as soon as he gets inside. Otherwise, a jogger or dog walker just might call the police on a cell phone and spoil his fun.
Another of Felson’s examples of how homes and businesses can be designed in such a way as to increase capable guardianship is the decision of a convenience store chain to make some experimental changes in accordance with the central idea of routine activities theory, that crime equals motivated offender plus suitable target minus capable guardian.
The convenience store chain had long had a routine habit of posting advertisements in its windows, which were all located in the front of the store. It also had had a habit of installing its cash registers in the back of the store. Putting the registers in the back had seemed to make intuitive sense—the robber would have a longer distance to travel on his way from the register and out the front door as he tried to flee the scene of the crime.
Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don't Understand Page 7
