Browsing PBH By Articles

What Changed New York’s Crime

The Article: What really cleaned up New York by Thomas Rogers at Salon.

The Text: If you compare New York in 2011 to New York in 1990, it seems hard to believe that it’s the same city. In the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s, New York was viewed as one of the world’s most dangerous metropolises — a cesspool of violence and danger depicted in gritty films like “The Warriors” and “Escape From New York.” Friends who lived here during that time talk of being terrified to use the subway, of being mugged outside their apartments, and an overwhelming tide of junkies. Thirty-one of every 100,000 New Yorkers were murdered each year, and 3,668 were victims of larceny.

Today, in an astonishing twist, New York is one of the safest cities in the country. Its current homicide rate is 18 percent of its 1990 total — its auto theft rate is 6 percent. The drop exceeded the wildest dreams of crime experts of the 1990s, and it’s a testament to this transformation that New Yorkers now seem more likely to complain about the city’s dullness than about its criminality.

In his fascinating new book, “The City that Became Safe,” Franklin Zimring, a professor of law and chairman of the Criminal Justice Research Program at the University of California at Berkeley, looks at the real reasons behind that change — and his conclusions might surprise you. Contrary to popular belief, Giuliani’s “zero tolerance” bluster had little to do with it. Instead, it was a combination of strategic policing and harm reduction by the New York Police Department. Police targeted open-air drug markets, and went after guns, while leaving drug users largely alone. The implications of the strategy could make us revise not only the way we think about crime, but the way we think about our prison system and even human nature.

Salon spoke to Zimring over the phone about Giuliani’s crackdown, the unique nature of New York violent crime and what other cities can take away from this change.

How unexpected was New York’s decrease in crime over the last decade?

What happened in the United States during the 1990s was itself a major surprise. After essentially not being able to make any substantial progress in crime control over three decades, all of the sudden crime dropped over an eight-year period by something close to 40 percent. Now what happened in New York City was essentially twice as much of a crime decline, a four-fifths drop from its 1990 peak. That is to say more than 80 percent of the homicide, the burglary, the robbery that New York was experiencing in 1990, New York is no longer bedeviled by. And the decline lasted twice as long as the national crime decline.

How significant is that kind of crime drop?

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Patriotic Protest Abroad, Political Dissidence Domestically

The Article: Do as I say, not as I do by Elizabeth Clinton and Jason Netek in Socialist Worker.

The Text: There has been no shortage of crocodile tears from the U.S. political establishment about the violence against protesters in Syria and Iran. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama have taken turns condemning the brutal suppression of movements for social justice in those countries.

Of course, they had a harder time standing up for human rights when it came to similar repression against the revolutionary movements in Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year. It is difficult, after all, to say negative things about one’s friends.

Meanwhile, the absolute silence from the White House regarding the growing repression against peaceful demonstrators in this country speaks volumes.

Since it began in mid-September, the Occupy movement has spread from Wall Street to cities across the country. The movement has as its backdrop the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression and record levels of disparity in wealth distribution.

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The Mormon Diaries: Chapter 1 – The Neighbors

They thought I had a speech impediment. Or, at the very least, a mild learning disability.

First night in the new condo. Why not invite the neighbors over?, I figured. Down a couple shots, pregame through an It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia episode, and see where the night took us.

In New York City, this would be fool-proof. It would invariably led to a club, mysterious $91 bar tab, 4:11 AM slice of baked ziti pizza, Coconut Water-infused Sunday recovery, and an all-around “solid” weekend.

But this was not New York City. This was Utah. The bar (there’s only one) closed at midnight. Baked ziti was simply a greasy lunch side at Sizzler’s. And the neighbors were Mormon.

They didn’t drink. They prayed. They didn’t watch R-rated TV or go to clubs. They attended prayer ward, went bowling, and were in bed by 10:30.

I didn’t know this at the time, of course.

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Why Huffington Post Will Never, Ever Get It

Policing a legal non-violent protest, presented to you by the same good folks who gave you the Wall Street Democratic Party and Joseph Lieberman!

The Backlash Against Neoliberalism

The Article: How neoliberalism created an age of activism by Juan Cole in Al Jazeera.

The Text: From Tunis to Tel Aviv, Madrid to Oakland, a new generation of youth activists is challenging the neoliberal state that has dominated the world ever since the Cold War ended. The massive popular protests that shook the globe this year have much in common, though most of the reporting on them in the mainstream media has obscured the similarities.

Whether in Egypt or the United States, young rebels are reacting to a single stunning worldwide development: the extreme concentration of wealth in a few hands thanks to neoliberal policies of deregulation and union busting. They have taken to the streets, parks, plazas and squares to protest against the resulting corruption, the way politicians can be bought and sold, and the impunity of the white-collar criminals who have run riot in societies everywhere. They are objecting to high rates of unemployment, reduced social services, blighted futures and above all the substitution of the market for all other values as the matrix of human ethics and life.

Pasha the Tiger

In the “glorious thirty years” after World War II, North America and Western Europe achieved remarkable rates of economic growth and relatively low levels of inequality for capitalist societies, while instituting a broad range of benefits for workers, students and retirees. From roughly 1980 on, however, the neoliberal movement, rooted in the laissez-faire economic theories of Milton Friedman, launched what became a full-scale assault on workers’ power and an attempt, often remarkably successful, to eviscerate the social welfare state.

Neoliberals chanted the mantra that everyone would benefit if the public sector were privatised, businesses deregulated and market mechanisms allowed to distribute wealth. But as economist David Harvey argues, from the beginning it was a doctrine that primarily benefited the wealthy, its adoption allowing the top one per cent in any neoliberal society to capture a disproportionate share of whatever wealth was generated.

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