I Live in the Hype

Mark Holden and Ronal Serpas take to the op-ed page of the Washington Post to throw cold water on the idea that the U. S. is experiencing a crime wave with an op-ed with the caption “Don’t buy the hype: The U.S. is not experiencing a terrible new crime wave”:

There has been a surge of assertions about rising crime recently. At the Republican convention in July, GOP nominee Donald Trump said, “Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement.” The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald echoed these concerns, noting that homicides increased by nearly 17 percent in the 56 largest U.S. cities last year and citing sharp rises in Baltimore, Chicago and the District. In an op-ed in last Sunday’s Post, Sean Kennedy and Parker Abt made the same case.

As two strong conservatives, let us set the record straight. These statements on rising murders are highly misleading. The truth is that Americans are still experiencing hard-won historic lows in crime.

I live in the city of Chicago. Here the rising number of homicides is not “hype”. We call it “the weekend”. Another page of the Washington Post reports:

Chicago has experienced a surge in violence in the past year, much of it concentrated on the city’s South Side, where Lucas lived. A staggering 2,500 people have been shot in the city since the beginning of the year, more than in any year at this point since the 1990s. There have been at least 426 homicides in 2016, far more than in New York, which has three times Chicago’s population.

Turn to the website HeyJackass to see the scope of Chicago’s problem in lurid black, red, and baby blue. If the number of murders here continues at the present rate we’ll have had more than 700 homicides by the end of the year—something not seen since the 1990s.

These homicides are concentrated in just a few neighborhoods and are mostly of young, black men perpetrated by other young, black men.

Some things to keep in mind when thinking about these sad statistics:

• Tough gun laws do not reduce the rate of gun homicide. If there’s any correlation at all, it’s a positive one (which I interpret as “people enact tough gun laws where there are lots of gun homicides”). Chicago has some of the toughest gun laws in the country.
• More police officers per 100,000 population do not reduce the rate of gun homicide. Chicago has one of the highest number of police officers per 100,000 population of any city in the country, probably more than we can afford.
• If the statistics tell us anything, it’s that if you pack enough young, black men into a small enough area without much in the way of available jobs or hope for the future but with plenty of drugs and alcohol, the number of murders will rise. Nearly half of the young, black men in Chicago are neither working nor going to school.