The Marshall Project, a liberal but not unhinged group, has a commentary out with this appalling news: The "national spike in murder [in 2015 is] the largest single-year increase since at least 1960."
If this does not set off alarms in Congress and in the states, nothing will. But what we see instead of alarm is a snarling complacency, in which the problem is not murder but -- ready now? -- the death penalty. This would be the death penalty the great majority of Americans continue to think is a morally acceptable punishment for (at least) the most aggravated murders.
The other aggressively complacent response is that, for all these many prior years when murder and other sorts of violent crime have been decreasing, we've been too tough on criminals -- so now, in the wake of an astonishing murder surge, we should go easier and start emptying out the prisons!
This is what passes for "logic" in academia and some parts of Congress.
The entire Marshall Project piece is worth the read, and I want to repeat some parts of it here.
Progressives did not take these charges [of a "Ferguson effect" on policing] lying down. Many pushed back, asserting there was simply no evidence of a spike in violent crime. One widely cited report by the progressive Brennan Center for Justice admitted that homicide in 25 of the nation's largest cities jumped 14.6% in 2015, but argued that the current rate is near historic lows, that rates vary widely and that any increases are localized and not part of a national trend. Moreover, they asserted that any increase was due to "root causes," i.e. poverty, unemployment, and other structural factors, not policing.The Brennan Center was also mistaken in a number of ways. First, while it is true that violence remains historically low (and that crime overall continues to fall), a 14.6% national spike in murder would be the largest single-year increase since at least 1960. Furthermore, while local rates of violence often fluctuate, national rates are more stable, and the Brennan Center's own data shows that murder is up in 18 of 25 of the nation's largest cities. As for "root causes," there is little evidence of a direct connection between violence and structural factors like poverty and unemployment. And none of those factors changed significantly last year, so they can hardly explain the surge of violence.
Oooops.
I might add that the Brennan Center initially pegged the increase in murder at "only" 11%, then quietly revised the figure up by about a third. Not than 11% increase in murder would be anything but shocking, either.
But the Marshall Project piece makes its own errors. For example, it says next:
To summarize, the increase in homicides appears real, but there is no broader national crime wave.
With respect, it is January 11, 2016, and too early to know whether or not 2015 saw a broader national increase in crime; the statistics take weeks to compile. But we do know that it would be very unusual for just one category of violent crime to increase by so much unless others increased as well, even if to a more modest extent. We also know that heroin deaths were spiraling up, and heroin (and other drug abuse) is closely linked to both violent and property crime.
It is unclear what is driving the problem, but my own hunch - and it is still just a hunch at this point - involves a criminological phenomenon called legal cynicism. Multiple studies have demonstrated that, controlling for other factors, when communities view the police and criminal justice system as illegitimate, they become more violent. When people believe the system is unwilling or unable to help them, they are more likely to take the law into their own hands, creating the cycles of violent retribution that were chronicled so vividly last year in Jill Leovy's Ghettoside.
This is yet another example of legal academia's divorce from reality. Does the author here, a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard, actually think murder is driven by "legal cynicism"? I suggest he take a year's sabbatical to work in either a prosecutor's office or with a public defender, and he will see that murder is driven by all manner of other things: Greed, revenge, poor impulse control, and (that old reliable) witness elimination. People stick up the convenience store, and occasionally kill the clerk, because they want the money in the cash drawer, not because they think the police are racist.
The odd thing is that the Marshall Project's analysis fails even taken on its own terms. In 1960 (when Eisenhower was President), how many big city police chiefs were black? How many are black today? When the crime rate has dropped precipitously over the last generation, to the great benefit of African Americans, is it even possible to believe that " the system is unwilling or unable to help them"? Has the author, Thomas Abt, seen the studies showing the African Americans -- to a significantly greater degree than whites or Hispanics -- want more police in their communities, not fewer? Does he know that in the very year upon which he focuses, 2015, minorities' trust in the police nearly doubled? And does he think that trust in the system now, after the Warren Court's innovations have been the law for decades and the Attorney General is black, is shakier than it was during the days of the Civil Rights revolution, Vietnam, flag burning, the Martin Luther King assassination and the Black Power salute?
No, it's not that the criminal justice system, and the police in particular, are now more distrusted by the community. It's that they are under more relentless and scurrilous attack by those who see criminals as victims and criminality as a callous America's just desert.
I'll go ahead and wait until the actual FBI crime data to come out before taking the 14.6 percent murder rate increase reported by the Brennan Center as gospel. After all, the Brennan report was based only on the 30 largest U.S. cities; the FBI's stats are based on info from more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies. Even the Marshall Project piece you cite acknowledges that the Brennan Center's increase, if true, "WOULD BE" the largest increase since 1960. It never claims to be an established fact. -Jim
You are ordinarily well-advised to wait for verification of anything the Brennan Center claims (such as its preposterous assertion that increased incarceration over the last 15 years has had little or nothing to do with falling crime), but I think I'll believe them this time. Their interest, as they have shown over and over, is in minimizing crime to the extent -- if not beyond the extent -- they can get away with it. They would rather contribute $10,000 to Ted Cruz than publish a murder figure they thought there was any chance was too high.
It feels like we are going back to the 1960s on crime. Democrats were to blame for it then, but then Republicans weren’t helping them. Now they are and so it’ll be even worse.
I have hope that enough Republicans see sentencing "reform" for what it is that we'll be able to stop the slide back to the bad old days.