As I’ve mentioned in a number of posts over the years, I believe the Late 20th Century Crime Wave was one of the two or three most politically and culturally consequential events in the US in the second half of the twenty century. It is hard to overstate the impact of this very real rise in the rates of all violent crimes but most especially murder. And one of the greatest mysteries about it is that that for all the studies, theories and attempts to control it, we simply do not have a clear understanding of why it began in the early 1960s or why it ended over the course of the 1990s. I’ve noted that, somewhat against my better judgment, I’ve become increasingly open to the seemingly crude and monocausal theory that lead poisoning played a key role in driving the crime wave. Still, I think we still basically do not know. Yet, over the last year or so we’ve seen a rising chorus of commentary and political posturing which claims that increasing civil rights activism (i.e. Black Lives Matter or the so-called “Ferguson Effect”) and more permissive or cowed policing is at least starting to push crime rates back up toward where they were in the bad old days.
So what’s actually happening?
Going back to my post yesterday about the US murder rate, I wanted to go back and consider the regional and international terrain. As we’ve discussed before, there really is no such thing as a US murder rate. The US has always had a few geographically distinct murder rates. Murder in New England for instance is not that much more common than it is in Western Europe, whether today or 25 years ago. But the South has always had dramatically higher murder rates than the rest of the country. And even with the South, Louisiana has long had a murder rate wildly higher than even the rest of region. But even for all that, we tend to look at the US murder rate and compare it to Europe. But that obscures what is in many ways a much truer, historically meaningful and telling comparison: high murder rates as a phenomenon of the Americas.
TPM is pleased to announce the winners of the Ninth Annual Golden Dukes recognizing the year’s best purveyors of public corruption, outlandish behavior, The Crazy and betrayals of the public trust. The awards are named in honor of former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who epitomizes the iconic modern scandal.
This latest news about the implosion of the Ben Carson campaign is almost enough to convince me that Armstrong Williams is really a nefarious Svengali figure cynically manipulating the actions of a hapless Chauncey Gardner type candidate, all to the end of getting rich quick selling mail order candidate-signed Carson/Jesus velour paintings.