AMERICAN MURDER MYSTERY
Quote:Falling crime rates have been one of the great American success stories of the past 15 years. New York and Los Angeles, once the twin capitals of violent crime, have calmed down significantly, as have most other big cities. Criminologists still debate why: the crack war petered out, new policing tactics worked, the economy improved for a long spell. Whatever the alchemy, crime in New York, for instance, is now so low that local prison guards are worried about unemployment.
Quote:Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn't been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis.
Quote:In the afternoon, I visited an older resident from Dixie Homes who lives across the way from Shaw. Her apartment was dark, blinds drawn, and everyone was watching Maury Povich. A few minutes after I arrived, we heard a pounding at the door, and a neighbor rushed in, shouting.
"They just jumped my grandson! That's my grandson!"
This was 64-year-old Nadine Clark, who'd left Dixie before it got knocked down. Clark was wearing her navy peacoat, but she had forgotten to put in her teeth. From her pocket she pulled a .38-caliber pistol, which was the only thing that glinted in the room besides the TV.
"There's 10 of them! And I'm gonna go **** them up! That's my grandson! They took him away in an ambulance!"
Nobody in the house got excited. They kept their eyes on Maury Povich, where the audience was booing a kid who looked just like the thug who'd shot up his girlfriend's car. "She'll calm down," someone said, and after a few minutes, Clark left.
Quote:In her research, Suresh noticed a recurring pattern, one that emerged first in the late 1990s, then again around 2002. A particularly violent neighborhood would suddenly go cold, and crime would heat up in several new neighborhoods. In each case, Suresh has now confirmed, the first hot spots were the neighborhoods around huge housing projects, and the later ones were places where people had moved when the projects were torn down. From that, she drew the obvious conclusion: "Crime is going along with them."
Quote:"People were really excited about it because it seemed to offer something new," Popkin said. "But in my view, it was radically oversold."
Quote:Ed Goetz, a housing expert at the University of Minnesota, is creating a database of the follow-up research at different sites across the country, "to make sense of these very limited positive outcomes." On the whole, he says, people don't consistently report any health, education, or employment benefits. They are certainly no closer to leaving poverty. They tend to "feel better about their environments," meaning they see less graffiti on the walls and fewer dealers on the streets. But just as strongly, they feel "a sense of isolation in their new communities." His most surprising finding, he says, "is that they miss the old community. For all of its faults, there was a tight network that existed. So what I'm trying to figure out is: Was this a bad theory of poverty? We were intending to help people climb out of poverty, but that hasn't happened at all. Have we underestimated the role of support networks and overestimated the role of place?"
Quote:Earlier this year, Betts presented her findings to city leaders, including Robert Lipscomb, the head of the Memphis Housing Authority. From what Lipscomb said to me, he's still not moved. "You've already marginalized people and told them they have to move out," he told me irritably, just as he's told Betts. "Now you're saying they moved somewhere else and created all these problems? That's a really, really unfair assessment. You're putting a big burden on people who have been too burdened already, and to me that's, quote-unquote, criminal."
Quote:But Betts doesn't think this message, alone, will stick, and she gets frustrated when she sees sensitivity about race or class blocking debate. "You can't begin to problem-solve until you lay it out," she said. "Most of us are not living in these high-crime neighborhoods. And I'm out there listening to the people who are not committing the crimes, who expected something better."
No you can't, but here's a problem the people in power do not wish to lay out because it doesn't comport with either their facile notions of social engineering or the pledges they made to get elected.
This article relates pretty convincing evidence that the program to decentralize state subsidized housing into "mixed class" environments has not at all achieved it's lofty goals and, instead, verified precisely the concerns of those anointed racists when the program was first proposed.
Crime has moved from the Projects to the suburbs.
The understandable, but ultimately silly conclusion is that it is not enough for the State to move underclasses, dependent upon public funding, from a concentrated environment to a dispersed one.
No kidding Dick Tracy? My bet is there were a lot of voices arguing this point when these programs began but that they were shouted down for being racist.
This a classic example of the inevitable failure of social engineering conjoined with a collective bitter sense of retribution.
It is not a coincidence that it draws strikingly similar comparisons to the social engineering approach known as "bussing."
It is ridiculous, and, in fact, insulting, to assume that the mere proximity to success will breed success.
Instead what we find ourselves with is not the elevation of one class, but the descent of another.
Here is the insane and self-destructive principle that Liberals are in the habit of advancing: Affluence is a spoil of greed and corruption; while poverty is a blight against our most noble of citizens.
White Liberals consistently attempt to assuage their guilt and demonstrate their sanctimony by employing utterly superficial, "feel good" solutions to poverty. On the face of them, the ploys are attractive, but in time they are revealed as hollow platitudes.
Unless and until we arrive at a place of truly unlimited resources (perhaps the future utilization of nanotechnology) there will always be an under-class. It certainly need not, and, by God, should not be disproportionately African-American.
If it is not, however, it will not be because White Liberals have finally come upon The Scheme, it will be because African-Americans, as a community, say "enough is enough."
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