Once you emancipate people from strings, once you give them freedom to prosper, you're going to empower them to do all sorts of things ranging from the spectacularly good to the heinously bad. And the ability of public figures, or families, or village life, or customs, or tradition to restrain people is going to be powerfully degraded. You cannot change that without reimposing economic controls. Our friends in China and Singapore believe that you can have economic freedom and advantages without paying the social price. I don't think they are right.
Reason: Would you favor giving up some freedom, some affluence, in exchange for lower crime rates?
Wilson: I would certainly give up some freedom in exchange for that. I certainly am willing to give the police more power to stop and question people, just as I am willing to have metal detectors at airports. I don't like it, but there's a great benefit and the inconvenience to the average person is not that great. But I don't think giving up some freedom will produce much of a gain.
Other countries experiencing higher rates of property crime than we do already give their police more power. You don't want to be arrested by the police in Stockholm or London. They are not bound by the Miranda rules.
Reason: Wouldn't increasing police power to conduct pat-down searches of individuals exacerbate antagonisms between communities and the police, especially in the lower-income and minority areas likely to be searched more frequently?
Wilson: Yes. It's a problem of reconciling an imperfect empirical generalization with standards of fair play. The imperfect empirical generalization is that young blacks--and to some extent young Latinos--commit a disproportional share of crimes, so they will get disproportionately stopped for searches. However, they may get stopped to a greater degree than they are actually over-represented in crime statistics. It's that excess that creates the antagonism.
That seems to me the best argument for community-based policing. If you get the police sufficiently close to the neighborhoods, then the neighborhoods will consult the police and tell them who the bad apples are. Blacks will still be stopped more frequently than somebody who lives in San Marino [a wealthy WASP Los Angeles suburb], but it will not be this excessive disproportion because the police will have calibrated distinctions among individuals based on local lore and local information. That's the theory. We don't know yet whether or not it will work.
Reason: While community-based policing might work--in fact, while it might already be informally at work--in affluent neighborhoods, what can be done for those areas that are almost totally overwhelmed by street crime?
Wilson: I said earlier that there are two crime problems. Now you're talking about the second. You're talking about the crime problem that grows out of the absolute destruction of communities. These are communities where people are growing up absent any social norms. Among industrialized nations, this is a distinctly American problem, although it also exists in backward nations and developing nations.
There has always been some disorganized lower class--we used to call it skid row. Now, of course, we have whole residential areas that are skid rows. There is not an inherent dynamic in human nature that makes it necessary for hundreds of thousands of people--as opposed to thousands--to live in totally disorganized communities. Nothing has changed in human nature in the past 40 years that should have produced this. What I think has happened is that a downward cycle of neighborhood decay has gotten to the point where the situation won't improve as long as people stay there. If you take people out of those neighborhoods and put them elsewhere, they might well have a chance at a decent life.
So how do you take them out? I think there are a lot of alternatives that we haven't thought of. One, of course, is the Section 8 [federal housing] voucher. Give them a voucher and let them find housing somewhere else. I think there's a lot of merit in that. I've always been in favor of rent vouchers. But it also creates a problem because if you just move them out the way they are now, no neighborhood would want to take them. Who wants a crack addict with three illegitimate kids? That's not an adequate solution. It's part of a solution.
I've been toying around with this idea in which young mothers who want welfare would be required to live in group homes. These could be located physically very near where the mother is now living. But you would still be taking them out of the neighborhood in the sense that no drugs would come in and no drugs would come out, including alcohol. And the children and the mothers would be under the supervision of responsible adults.
The problems of our urban areas are rooted in the failure of parents to raise decent children. Admittedly, it is a failure partially excused by the horrifying conditions under which these children must be raised. But these horrifying conditions themselves reflect a collapse of family structure from the prior generation.
I was recently arguing about this question with someone who claimed that society had let down these teenagers. I said, "No, society hasn't let them down. Their parents have let them down." But, she rejoined, even if the parents let them down, isn't it the case that they have to grow up in such a terrible environment that it would take a truly heroic parent to do much better?
There are two answers to that. One is that their own parents are at fault because they put themselves in the situation in which they had very little competence to raise a child. Second, it is the widespread failure of other parents that is now making the environment so threatening for decent parents. It is a downward spiral that reveals how fragile civilization is and how quickly we return to savagery.
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