Race relations after the pandemic (II)

Source: de.wikipedia.org

[I did not participate in the anti-racism demonstrations in my town this June, because of the coronavirus pandemic. I now regret this, for we are in a time where it is important to stand up and be counted.]

Shockingly and tragically, another name has entered the list of black Americans who have been killed or maimed by the police. Jacob Blake was entering his car when a Kenosha police officer grabbed his shirt and shot him seven times in the back. Accounts vary, as they will, but more than a week later the police have not articulated any rationale for detaining Blake, much less for putting that much ammunition into him.

Two days later, a white teenager from across the Illinois border shot and killed two demonstrators and wounded a third. His gentle treatment by the police has been contrasted with how they treated the unarmed Blake, but we might charitably credit the police chief's statement to the effect that his force was overwhelmed and confused by the outpouring of demonstrators and agitators in the wake of Blake's shooting. I'm sympathetic, but maybe they should have thought of this before they shot him seven times.

These awful events coincided with the Republican National Convention, which renominated President Donald Trump, whose political career has thrived on chaos, much of which he himself has created. (Hello, Portland!) A week's worth of speeches blamed violence at demonstrations on feckless Democratic state and local leaders, complete with video that turned out to be taken in Barcelona, Spain. Vice President Mike Pence said, "The hard truth is, you won't be safe in Joe Biden's America." Pence cited the death in Oakland of federal officer Dave Underwood as a prime example of the "violence and chaos in the streets of our major cities" which would supposedly increase under a Biden administration, but the person actually charged with killing Underwood is a member of the right-wing Boogaloo Boys (Millhiser 2020).

Democrats, starting with presidential candidate Joe Biden, are certainly put in an awkward position by any association of violence with anti-racism demonstrations, given that blacks are one of their core constituencies and civil rights one of their core issues. Biden has articulated a nuanced position of considerable integrity (Feldman 2020), for all the good that may do in the foodfight that is contemporary American politics.

John Locke (Wikimedia Commons)

John Locke (1632-1704), the English philosopher who strongly influenced 18th century political thought including that of the Framers of the Constitution, argued that law enforcement by the state was more "convenient" than doing it yourself in a state of nature, but only if the state was fulfilling its contractual obligation to protect individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the like. Black citizens have long wondered with some justification whether the state is much interested in their individual rights. It is, to say what should be screamingly obvious, an urgent matter for both the police and the whole body politic to contribute to a society where black lives matter. A race war might reelect the President and boost Tucker Carlson's ratings, but in time it's a war that nobody wins.

Martin Luther King Jr. (Wikimedia commons)

One reason I'm continually drawn to the political thought of Martin Luther King Jr.--whose public approval ratings in the 1960s, by the way, were not far from the Black Lives Matter movement's now--is his sustained focus on long-term outcomes. His movement was about remaking American society into one where blacks and whites, including those who opposed him, could live together in genuine community. His activism served his constructive strategy, rather than reacting to provocations of the moment (or playing at presidential politics). 

Looting and violence, even if borne of frustration, don't get us to community, and rightly or wrongly, serve to distract attention to the core issues. Same goes for choosing one side or the other without some constructive action to follow up. However, as in past struggles for justice, both the moral force of protest and the pragmatic tactics of political leadership can move us forward.

Whether sympathetic to Black Lives Matter or not, those speaking out on this issue must do even more to articulate a vision of the American future that [a] takes into account the legitimate grievances of black Americans, and [b] imagines a future inclusive community with [c] law enforcement that acts to support this vision by protecting the rights of all.

SEE ALSO

"Race Relations after the Pandemic," 27 May 2020

Perry Bacon Jr., "Could a Backlash Against Black Lives Matter Hurt Biden? The Two Don't Appear Linked So Far," FiveThirtyEight, 27 August 2020 [includes polling data on BLM though not past the time of the Jacob Blake shooting]

Laura Bliss, "An Alleged Bike Violation Brings on a Police Shooting of a Black Man," CityLab, 1 September 2020

Nicholas Kristof, "The Lawbreakers Trump Loves," New York Times, 29 August 2020

Alec MacGillis, "What Can Mayors Do When the Police Stop Doing Their Jobs?" ProPublica, 3 September 2020

Sarah Maslin Nur, Michael Wilson, Troy Closson and Jesse McKinley, "7 Police Officers Suspended as a Black Man's Suffocation Roils Rochester," New York Times, 3 September 2020

Scott Wilson, "'Why Were You Attacking Me?'" Washington Post, 3 September 2020 [2019 choking-drugging incident in Aurora, Colorado]

 

 

 

 

 

Race relations after the pandemic

The last minutes in the life of George Floyd
(Source: The Daily Mail. Used without permission.)

About two weeks ago, City Lab posted a piece by Archie L. Alston II, an attorney in Virginia. Entitled "When a Walk is No Longer Just a Walk," it is a brutally frank, detailed account of what goes through the mind of "a large negro" preparing one evening to walk off a big dinner in the days after the February murder of jogger Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. Alston writes:

I grabbed my photo ID and my credit card, just in case. But my ID still had my permanent address in Richmond, Virginia, and I'm in Fredericksburg. That wouldn't help me. I grabbed the water bill to prove that I live in this neighborhood. I headed back toward the door, only to catch a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror. I probably didn't look like I lived in this neighborhood. Back upstairs I went. Almost by muscle memory, I threw on a University of Virginia hoodie and a U.Va. hat. Even racists love U.Va., or its home of Charlottesville at least. I contemplated throwing on my U.Va. Law hoodie but feared it may have been too much. Would someone feel intimidated and use that as provocation?

He concludes:

If a 43-year-old black man educated at an elite law school carries such a mental load when he exercises the most basic of his freedoms, then what kind of trauma must those who are less socially and financially secure experience? We suffer from trauma, and Ahmaud Arbery has reminded us that still, we wear the mask.

Alston's essay hit home because I've been walking in the evenings more than ever during the pandemic, just for the exercise. The most thought I ever put into it is whether I should take an umbrella. Alston and I are two men doing the same thing at the same time for the same reason, but sadly with very different experiences of it.

Now comes word from Minneapolis that four police officers participated in dragging a black man, George Floyd, from his car and putting him on the ground where one held his knee on his neck until he died of asphyxiation. They then filed a report that left out key details until they were busted by a cellphone video. The incident is plainly egregious--"It was malicious, it was unacceptable, there is no gray there," said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, but today police are teargassing and firing rubber bullets at protestors--and Minneapolis has its own history to answer for, but the problem of racist violence is clearly systemic.

This week there was this in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and this in Des Peres, Missouri. (Thanks to Dorothy Burge for drawing these to my attention.) 

Make it stop!

Source: City Lab. Used without permission.

In the wake of the Eric Garner shooting, Cedar Rapids attorney (and Coe graduate) Geneva Williams said progress on racial violence was impossible if "we no longer see ourselves in the other," and that it had become "harder to talk [to children] about race than to have the sex talk." In the wake of the Tamir Rice shooting, planner Annette Koh wrote:

Our naiveté borders on negligence if we don’t explicitly address how the very presence of certain bodies in public has been criminalized and the color of your skin can render you automatically “out of place.” Stop-and-frisk policies have criminalized an entire generation of Black and Latino youth in the name of public safety. What kind of places are we making in American cities where a 12-year old kid is shot in his own neighborhood park? (Koh)

Writers like Claudia Rankine (Citizen: An American Lyric [Graywolf, 2014]) and Ta-Nahesi Coatses ("The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration," Atlantic Monthly [2015]) show that the impact of official and semi-official racial violence extends far wider than the dozens of deaths. Black health and black-owned businesses have suffered far more in the pandemic.

Meanwhile, there's Cliven Bundy and his band of thugs occupying federal land, for whom authorities waited patiently, and who were acquitted even of trespassing. People bring big guns to state capitols, egged on by the President of the United States no less, to protest anti-pandemic measures. They're white, of course. The police seemed more interested, at least at first, in a black birdwatcher in Central Park, called as they were by a (white) woman who wouldn't leash her dog.

 

What happens to race relations in post-pandemic America? The coronavirus pandemic could have one of three possible impacts on America's racial divide. It could bring us together in common effort; it could have drive us farther apart; or it could have no effect at all. If anything, when the pandemic has people on edge the danger seems heightened. Can young black men ever just go for a walk or a jog?

This seven-year-old blog has been focused on building community, on the premise that common life is the only way we are going effectively to meet the challenges of the 21st century world. It's also been about confronting the obstacles--economic, political, historic, and how we design our cities--that stand in the way of common life. Four centuries of tragic racial history are not going to disappear easily, or quickly, and even if everyone decided today to give up racism we would have to dig through all the economic damage from decades of exclusion, and heal all the PTSD people of color have accumulated. This at a time when the pandemic and the President are driving us into our separate enclaves. 

I've written in earlier posts about African-Americans in Cedar Rapids urging us to remain hopeful, and reminding us that Martin Luther King Jr. said "the arc of the universe bends towards justice." It is hard to feel that right now. We have no choice but to keep at it, but I don't feel at all optimistic this is going to work.

EARLIER POSTS

"Race Relations 2017," 20 June 2017

"The Latest Bad News and Our Common Life," 17 December 2014

"Are We All Ferguson?" 19 August 2014

"Race Matters, Dammit," 16 April 2013

[I wrote this before an eruption of arson and looting in Minneapolis Wednesday (Faircloth et al. 2020). All indications are that these were the work of a few thugs, the sort that prey on chaotic situations. There was looting, you'll recall, after 9/11, and in Cedar Rapids we had all manner of crap going on after the 2008 flood. These reprehensible actions should not lead to broad condemnation of the protesters, who had every reason to protest, nor to excusing the Minneapolis Police Department, whose response to the protests made a bad situation worse. Those responsible for arson and looting should be in jail (though I'd make allowances for people desperate for milk and water after taking tear gas). The men who murdered George Floyd should be in jail longer. The police department needs a thorough overhaul, starting at the top but not stopping there. Officers should live in the city, for starters.

We cannot live together in peace and security without law enforcement. We need to support the police with public policy and socioeconomic conditions that allow for the peace to be kept. The police must serve the entire community, and be accountable to the entire community. The Minneapolis force has failed spectacularly and tragically to do that.]

Bill Byrnes on law enforcement and the black middle class

Criminal justice policies that result in large-scale incarceration of young black men have spillover effects throughout the black population, middle class as well as poor, according to new research by Bill Byrnes of the Center for Research and Learning presented at one of the Center's Friday morning seminars last month. Byrnes's talk was entitled "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Black Middle Class and Mass Incarceration." My fellow middle-aged white men who can't understand what Colin Kapernick and the kneeling NFL players are on about would do well to draw near and give heed.

Byrnes's Ph.D. research is based on focus group interviews with blacks and whites in suburban Cook County, Illinois (the county that includes Chicago) concerning friends and family members who have been incarcerated as well as their own experiences with the police. It builds on existing research that traces dramatic increases in prison populations nationwide after 1978 not only to increases in violent crime from the late 1960s to the early 1990s but also the effects of de-industrialization, public calls for more policing, federal wars on crime and drugs, longer sentences and stricter parole rules. The United States already had imprisoned a greater percentage of its population than other advanced democracies, but now the discrepancy is huge. Moreover, it disproportionately affects people by social class, neighborhood and particularly race: in Cook County, blacks comprise 24.8 percent of the total population but 66.9 percent of the prison population.

Bill Byrnes (Source: Center for Urban Research and Learning)

Byrnes's focus groups revealed that both blacks and whites suffer emotionally when friends and family members are incarcerated, but whites "seem on the whole better cushioned." Blacks are more likely than whites to know someone who has been incarcerated; to bear financial burdens for family members in jail; and to themselves have had some negative encounters with police. Byrnes's middle class black respondents "have to negotiate their safety in public spaces in ways whites don't have to," relying on extremely proper demeanor and professional clothing to get them through situations (although that doesn't always help, as witness the 2016 killing of Philando Castile in suburban Minneapolis).

Byrnes concludes that "mass incarceration is about resource allocation," redolent of Harold Lasswell's definition of politics as who gets what, when and how. Blacks and whites start from different social places, and their interactions with the state "are not equivalent." This not only puts an "unjust" burden on the poor--greater police presence means more incarceration and afterwards higher unemployment, persistent poverty, and lack of access to education and housing--but extends those burdens to the nascent black middle class, whose economic position does not insulate them from incarceration of friends and family, or from their own awkward interactions with police.

Why should this matter to people who aren't black? Byrnes cites three reasons:

1. The economic costs of mass incarceration diverts state resources from other programs. "Million dollar block" is an expression for a neighborhood where the state is spending over a million dollars incarcerating its residents. "Do you want to know why it costs $40,000 to go to U[niversity] of I[llinois] now?" Byrnes asked rhetorically. He could have added: Or why we struggle to maintain transportation infrastructure or fund schools or treat the mentally ill? 
2. Mass incarceration may endanger public safety as much or more as it protects it. Where areas of concentrated poverty are also areas of concentrated ex-inmates, the lack of economic opportunity as well as ongoing encounters with law enforcement breed desperation, which actually increases the likelihood of crime.
3. Democracy itself is compromised by a policy approach layered on top of existing social and economic inequalities that creates "two-track citizenship" defined to a large extent by race. To this I would add that the era of economic mobility in America ended about 1973, just as black civil rights were beginning to be protected. The subsequent economic arrangements have frozen in place a wealth and opportunity gap that for historical reasons favored whites. The current House and Senate tax reform efforts, most egregiously the proposed end of the inheritance tax but going beyond that in many ways, can only add to the problem.

I will add a fourth reason. It has been a core assumption since the beginning of this blog project that we will not in the coming century be able to live as separately as we have been doing for the last 75 years. Whites are going to figure out how to live with blacks, and vice versa, and policy approaches that reinforce and extend racial inequalities are making that very very difficult.

SEE ALSO:
'The Latest Bad News and Our Common Life," 17 December 2014. For more from Holy Mountain, please choose "race" from the list of labels in the right-hand column.


Ta-Nahesi Coates's essay, "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration," which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 2015, is reprinted along with his own commentary/update as chapter 7 of his We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (New World, 2017). It is particularly useful for his copious citation of sources. Coates was interviewed by Krista Tippett at the Chicago Humanities Festival, and that is here.

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2012)
Charles Marohn, "It's Time to End the Routine Traffic Stop," Strong Towns, 31 October 2017

What the hell, Chicago?

Source: Chicago Tribune

Eleven people were shot to death in Chicago over Christmas weekend, bringing the total number of murders in the city in 2016 to over 750 (Bosman and Smith). It has been a distressing year, to say the least, in the Midwest's largest city, and it casts doubt on the whole urbanist project.

The murder epidemic comes after a 25 year decline in violent crime in the United States, including in the State of Illinois, where the rate per 100,000 population dropped from 1039 in 1991 to 370 in 2014. Nationally, violent crime in 2014 was 51.3 percent of the 1990 rate (Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports, aggregated at disastercenter.com). As I wrote in August, there are at least 11 explanations for this decline, which is too many to be encouraging, particularly when crime comes roaring back as it has in Chicago this year. And if that's not enough to worry about, consider this: the number of people shot in Chicago in 2016 exceeds 3,500 (Bosman and Smith again). Were it not for advances in medical science the number of deaths by murder would be much higher, wouldn't it?

Confoundingly, but happily for the rest of America, Chicago's year has not been replicated across the country, and indeed most of the homicides have occurred on the South and West sides. The Times article notes that neither Los Angeles nor New York has had anything like Chicago's experience; in fact Chicago's 2016 total exceeds those of the two larger cities combined. Smaller cities, too, have had widely varying experiences. So, what is going on? And what can be done?

Arthur Lurigio of Loyola University, cited in the Times article, suggests Chicago's suffers from a combination of easily available guns, persistent poverty, and escalating gang violence exacerbated by social media. One of my students who grew up on the South Side has written feelingly of how his neighborhood became increasingly unsafe beginning around 2006, when he would have been eight; his conversations with law enforcement suggest that a mid-decade scrambling of public housing residents put members of rival gangs in close and dangerous proximity to each other. Meanwhile, the police feel hamstrung by politicians critical of police shootings of black youth.

Chicago's experience is of national interest, because when a lot of people hear "urban" the image they get is not walkable, sociable neighborhoods with opportunity for all--or the commercial meccas of Michigan Avenue and New Bohemia--but the image of crime-infested, dirty streets filled with drug addicts. Whether the issue is sidewalks or affordable housing, design form or corner stores, at the root of pushback is: Don't bring the city to my neighborhood. Because we know what cities are like! (See above.) I can relate to this, having spent an embarrassing proportion of my suburban youth scared to death of Chicago. And, frankly, if there are going to be 750 murders somewhere, I'd rather it not be in my neighborhood.

But the deadly ghettos of Chicago are not examples of urbanism; their people are suffering from the lack of it. The poor areas of America's inner cities and first-ring suburbs are the flip side of the suburban development pattern that created well-off areas on the metropolitan edge. Those left behind need urbanism as much or more than anyone else.

People struggle, and on top of that, in many instances, people have lost hope in their government. They've lost hope that something is going to change for them. And if we can't keep hope alive, then you don't have to wonder whether things are going to get better or worse: They'll get worse. --ALD. DANNY DAVIS, quoted in Bosman and Smith

Everyone needs access to economic opportunity--a difficulty even for the middle-class in these times, much less for the poor who have been cut off for decades by the suburban development pattern. That means redesigning, or undoing a lot of the design of the last several decades, in order to make our cities more inclusive. That means, in part, breaking down barriers and encouraging more spontaneous interaction. There are dangerous people out there, and they should be in jail, but even justifiable fear does not justify cutting off huge chunks of the population. And then blaming them when they don't prosper.

Investment in our cities is fine, but must be aimed at ensuring opportunity for all. Which brings us to the the interesting case of City Center DC...

Source: citycenterdc.com 

...a development in downtown Washington with high-end shopping, fancy restaurants and super-luxury condominiums. Backers of the project point to the flow of tax revenue to the city from sales and rents; apparently at these prices it doesn't take many of either to generate some nice cash flow. But, as a discussion last week on WAMU's "Kojo Nnamdi Show" pointed up, the area has not seen the foot traffic you'd expect from a successful retail area. But more popular stores would not be "driving value upstairs," because condo buyers would rather live above Louis Vuitton than above McDonald's or Wal-Mart. All this proves, I guess, is that a lot of people don't want to live around a lot of other people, and some are able to pay handsomely for the privilege. I hope they're paying very handsomely, enough for Washington to upgrade its education, transportation, small business resources and social services.

But CityCenterDC is not a model for urban development. It's another example of what Michael Mehaffy (cited below) calls the "trickle-down" approach to development--"concentrating attention at the top and in the core, in the hopes that it will 'trickle down' to all"--albeit CityCenterDC was financed by a Qatari sovereign wealth fund rather than the local government itself. He calls, in the spirit of Jane Jacobs, for cities to shun quick fixes and instead

to diversify geographically and in other ways--to move into a system of polycentric complete neighborhoods, and find ways to catalyze more beneficial growth there... In addition, diversity in types, ages and conditions of buildings is also important to maintain diversity in populations and incomes.... Furthermore, while public investment is still important under this approach, it is not used as a way to "socially engineer" problems like affordability through direct expenditures, but rather, it is a catalyst for an alternative kind of pervasive growth that is more beneficial. This is an approach that treats the city as an organic whole, rather than a top-down money-making machine that can be tinkered with at will. (non-italics mine)

I'll admit to being often the pessimistic voice in the crowd, but I think, in spite of such Chicago-specific factors in this year's upsurge in homicides, that Chicago is probably just the first sign of fraying in our national fabric. President-elect Trump's bluster notwithstanding, we can't shoot our way out of this mess. Nor, the urbanists argue, can we blast our way out through big civic projects, no matter how many jobs they allegedly create. The only way out is by making great places by solving the puzzles of economic opportunity and inclusion. Maybe we could start with ice cream?

SOURCES

Julie Bosman and Mitch Smith, "Chicago Tallies Grim Accounts of Violent Year," New York Times, 29 December 2016, A1, A13

Michael Mehaffy, "A Tale of Two Futures," Public Square: A CNU Journal, 15 December 2016

Jonathan O'Connell, "D.C. Got Everything It Wanted Out of CityCenterDC--Except the Crowds," Washington Post Magazine, 8 December 2016

Pete Saunders, "Something Amiss in Chicago," Corner Side Yard, 1 April 2016

City Center DC is located on H Street NW between 9th and 11th Streets.

Paying attention to the suburban development behind the curtain

Source: Business Insider

As the presidential candidates confront each other in the first so-called debate of 2016, Cedar Rapids and other towns along the Cedar River worry about flooding, and the country ponders gun violence in Houston and Seattle as well as two more police shootings in Charlotte and Tulsa.

My first-year class on The Future of the City is reading Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zybek and Jeff Speck (North Point, 2010). For many of them it's their first exposure to critical appraisals of the suburban model of development. One of my first-year students, Dominic Parker from St. Louis, asked why, if suburban sprawl "is as big of a problem as it seems, then why am I just (now) hearing an uproar about it?" I first said it was partly because people tend to see the suburban model of development as part of the natural order of things, as opposed to (what it is in reality) a created situation.

More importantly, the suburban model of development is an important component, though certainly not the sole cause, of problems on which we do focus. The two worst floods in Cedar Rapids history have been 2008 and 2016; this "new normal" is exacerbated by climate change and loss of open land, to both of which the suburban development pattern is a major contributor. Analysis of police shootings tend to put primary responsibility either on the police (for being racist or overreacting to tense situations) or on the victims (for being disorderly and dangerous punks). Without denying individual responsibility, why are there high crime areas, isolated from economic opportunity, into which police are repeatedly thrust, thereby exacerbating the probability of violent confrontation?

It's jarring to hear the candidates debate at the same time that the river is bearing down on Cedar Rapids. The grass-roots efforts by hundreds of Cedar Rapidians this past weekend to protect their fellow citizens' homes and businesses speak to the best potential of our common life. The candidates just don't. Clinton is no visionary, and has a fondness for national programs that will at best nibble at the edges of problems; though the few moments in the debate where the public had a chance to be illuminated were hers. I wish she had more answers like hers on urban crime and fewer attempts to match Trump as an insult comic. Trump, whose campaign has been a toxic stew of racial innuendo, vacuous comments and personal insults, has nothing to recommend himself to anyone who cares about our common life.

Can any good come out of this dispiriting election campaign? Will it cause Americans at last to take a long look at our ongoing political divisions? And if they do, will the answer be to retreat to a private life? Or will we look around and see the potential for our neighbors--all of them, white and black and Latino, Christian and Jewish and Muslim and nones--to deal with our problems at the local level?

SOURCES
Cindy Hadish, "'In God's Hands:' Czech Village, New Bohemia Prepare for 2016 Flood in Cedar Rapids, Iowa," Homegrown Iowan, 25 September 2016, http://homegrowniowan.com/in-gods-hands-czech-village-new-bohemia-prepare-for-2016-flood/
Ben Kaplan, "Photos from New Bohemia Prep,"Corridor Urbanism, 25 September 2016, https://medium.com/corridor-urbanism/photos-from-new-bohemia-flood-prep-3acc4d660d4e?source=latest
Charles Marohn, "It's Time to End the Routine Traffic Stop," Strong Towns, 25 July 2016, http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/7/24/the-routine-traffic-stop
Bruce Nesmith, "Gleanings from the New Urbanism," Holy Mountain, 19 April 2013, http://brucefnesmith.blogspot.com/2013/04/gleanings-from-new-urbanism.html

Crime and our common life

Don't you know the crime rate's going up! up! up! up! up!

--"SHATTERED," The Rolling Stones (1978)

Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump is asserting a dark, dystopian portrayal of America in 2016 as overwhelmed by predatory criminals and terrorists, in spite of data that show the national violent crime rate has steadily fallen for 25 years. This sharp and sustained turn in the crime rate has created space for the rejuvenation of American central cities, many of which have seen population increases above the national average for a decade or more. For those of us who lived through the three decades before 1990, during which the violent crime rate had steadily risen, the new era has come as something of a miracle, one scarcely-to-be-believed (which may be why many people don't believe it).

Trend in U.S. violent crime, from newgeography.com

According to the Uniform Crime Reports produced by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, the national violent crime rate in 1970 was 363.5 per 100,000 population. In 1990, it was 731.8, slightly more than double the 1970 rate. Ten years later, it had fallen nearly a third, to 506.5, at the time the lowest since 1978; and in 2014, the last year for which a report has been produced, it was back to 375.7, roughly back to the 1970 level. A preliminary report for the first half of 2015 shows a 1.7 percent increase in violent crime over the same period in 2014--probably statistically significant, but hardly a reversal of the post-1991 trend (Comey 2016). Criminologist James Alan Fox told PolitiFact: "There are some spikes in homicide and shootings in certain cities, yet other cities continue to experience low rates. As a nation, we are far better off than anytime for the past several decades. Crime rates are low, and there is no consistent and reliable indication that things are getting worse" (Jacobson 2016a).

While this scenario played out over much of the country, it has not been playing out uniformly in all areas. Nearly all states experienced the rough doubling of violent crime (2.013x) from 1970-1990. However, Michigan (1.37 times their 1970 rate), Virginia (1.16x) and West Virginia (1.37x) had much lower increases, while the District of Columbia saw its already sky-high rate hold nearly steady (1.10x). On the other hand, a number of states saw much higher rates of increase during this period, including Iowa (3.77x), Massachusetts (3.63x), South Carolina (3.41x), Connecticut (3.25x) and Wisconsin (3.09x).

There is more divergence among states' experiences after 1990. In the chart below, Iowa's violent crime is always lower than that of Illinois, but increased faster before 1990 and its decline thereafter was slight. Iowa never exceeded half of Illinois' rate before 2003, after which it always did. (Source: F.B.I. Uniform Crime Reports, aggregated at disastercenter.com)

STATE  1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984
Illinois    468    477   508   556   627   670   626   631   677   744   808   793   774   728   725
Iowa         79      99     87   102   121   141   133   144   161   181   200   204   173   181   199

STATE 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999
Illinois   715   800   796   810   846   967   1039  977   960   961   996   886   861   808   690
Iowa      212   235   231   257   266   300     303  278   326   315   354   273   310   312   280

STATE 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Illinois   657   886   602   556   546   552   542   533   528   497   445   424   416   403   370
Iowa      266   268   286   278   288   293   284   295   289   282   269   257   266   273   274

Nationally, violent crime in 2014 was 51.3 percent of the 1990 rate. New York and California, notably, had 2014 rates less than 40 percent of 1990 crime. Seven states, however, saw crime rates actually increase in this period: Montana (203.2%), South Dakota (200.6%), West Virginia (178.4%), New Hampshire (149.1%), Alaska (121.2%), Wisconsin (109.7%), and Nevada (105.8%). Another seven, including my home state of Iowa, had crime rates between 80 and 100 percent of the 1990 level, declines that are unlikely to be perceptible at the level of personal experience. Incidentally...

• the largest metro area in these fourteen states is Las Vegas, Nevada (pop. 2,114,801, rank 29th); most of these states had no metros close to this size. I wonder if the surge and decline in violent crime since 1960 was largely an urban phenomenon?
• The 14 states' 2012 presidential votes were roughly split, but more Republican than the nation as a whole: Mitt Romney won eight of the 14 for an electoral vote advantage of 40-34. This offers mild-at-best support to the thought that the Republican Party's 2016 theme might resonate with their core voters' experiences.

Even at the national level where data are joyous, explanations vary widely, which is hardly going to give people confidence that we know how we got here or how to sustain the decline. Washington Post reporter Max Ehrenfreund (2015) lists five common explanations for the decline in homicides, all of which can be extended to violent crime in general:

1. Larger police forces, funded by the federal Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 as well as state and local initiatives. The ratio of police officers to the general population increased in the mid-1990s, though it had declined to its previous level by 2010. Some analysts credit this with reducing the incidence of crime (Levitt 2004), while others do not (Kleck and Barnes 2010).
2. Use of big data by law enforcement agencies enables better targeting of resources. Specifically identifying certain "hot spots" means police officers can be where the action is, or is likely to be, and their being there can prevent some of it (Roeder, Eisen and Bowling 2015: 67-73).
3. Alcohol consumption per capita, as estimated by the National Institutes of Health, shows a remarkably similar surge and decline with violent crime, rising from around 2 gallons per person through 1958 to a peak of 2.76 (1980-81), and then declining to 2.15 in the late 1990s (Haughwout et al. 2016, Table 1). Since 1999 it has risen back to around 2.3. Should we be alarmed yet? It makes sense that alcohol consumption beyond a certain level is associated with violence, but who knows why national alcohol consumption rises and falls? 
4. The banning of leaded gasoline under the Clean Air Act of 1970 removed a significant hazard to developing young brains, which may have made people less likely to turn violent. However, criminologist Phil Cook notes that the decline in violent crime occurred among all age cohorts, not just those benefiting from the lead ban, so he is skeptical (Kleiman 2014). Meanwhile, many children in older homes--including, in the 1990s, the unfortunate Freddie Gray--still face the hazard of lead paint (Bendix 2016).
5. Sustained economic growth beginning in 1982 preceded the sharp bend in the violent crime curve, and could have accounted for increased confidence and greater actual economic opportunity as well as more money to spend on security. However, it doesn't explain why the declining crime rate has continued past 2000, which years have seen two recessions including one of epic proportions, and when even periods of economic growth have been paradoxically unhelpful to poverty rates and median incomes. And if people in power knew how to fix that paradox, they'd do it, instead of rounding up the same old partisan policy proposals.

Other explanations include (6) the zero-tolerance approach by police to nuisance behavior known as "broken windows" (Wilson and Kelling 1982); (7) "community policing," which is more direct interaction by police with citizens, emphasizing a cooperative approach to problem solving; (8) increased incarceration, thought to decrease crime by incapacitating the most likely offenders; (9) declining proportion of the population in the most crime-prone age group i.e. those between 15 and 24 years of age; (10) widespread repeal of gun regulations and adoption of "right-to-carry" measures; and (11) the end of the surge in use of crack cocaine by the mid-1990s. The Brennan Center for Justice produced in 2015 a comprehensive review of the various theories including results of their own empirical analyses, What Caused the Crime Decline?, which is available online. They find support for theories 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (broken out various ways) and 9 (for the 1990s only). Needless to say, the other theories have their advocates, too. The point is that the degree of uncertainty about what caused the positive outcomes of the last 25 years can lead to anxiety about whether they can or will be sustained. Or that an equally unexplainable short-term uptick isn't the first sign of Armageddon (Ehrenfreund and Lu 2016), especially if opportunistic political candidates are pushing that story (Jacobson 2016b, "Fact Checker" 2016).

Whatever the reason(s) for the long-term decline in violent crime, public reaction has often been muted-to-disbelieving. In most of the 25 years that the incidence of crime has been reduced, large majorities of the American population have told polls crime is actually on the increase.

Most years since 1990 vast majorities think crime is on the increase. Source: Gallup

Policy analyst Wesley K. Skogan of Northwestern University points out that, of course, beliefs about the nationwide incidence of violent crime is not the same as personal fear of being victimized. In a 2011 paper he reported ten years of survey data from Chicago that showed declining fear of crime, which he attributed to declining incidence of both crime and disorderly behavior, improvement in the physical appearance of neighborhoods and increased confidence in the police. And there's all that movement back to cities to back him up. However, it seems to me that if most people believe overall crime to be on the increase, feelings of personal safety are more vulnerable to change. And confidence in the police has been shaken by a number of widely-publicized police shootings of black men and in some cases their own ham-handed responses (See also Ruud 2014).

A sudden increase in incidents involving firearms--shootings in Chicago in the first half of 2016 were half again as many as the same period in 2015 (Sweeney and Gorner 2016), and on a much smaller scale Cedar Rapids saw a spate of shootings (KCRG 2016)--focus attention on crime, although it's hard to account for the consistency of public perception as depicted above. A small number of spectacular, widely-publicized terror attacks in America and elsewhere in the West can also fuel the impression that danger is increasing. And, as I've shown earlier, the nationwide improvement in violent crime rates has been experienced to varying degrees in particular areas.

Many people blame news media for this misimpression by pushing sensational "if it bleeds, it leads" reporting (See about a zillion sources, such as Matthew Robinson, Media Coverage of Crime and Criminal Justice, Carolina Academic, 2010).  David Rothenberg of the Fortune Society wrote The New York Times after the 2016 Republican convention: "Perception is everything at election time. Any casual surfing of the television channels tonight will show murder after murder. Sadly, some of the most dramatic 'crime stories' never make prime time — the stories of men and women being released from prison, facing barriers that limit housing and jobs, fighting personal demons while navigating societal restrictions, struggling just to get through the day. Such stories are the ones that should be surfacing at political conventions. The fiction lives while the truth remains in the shadows." For this reason, violent crime gets far more attention per incident than do fatal auto crashes (Shultis 2016).

Both the reality and perception of crime are important to the future of cities. Urban criminals most frequently victimize the most vulnerable of our citizens; as Dreier et al. point out (Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century, Kansas University Press, 2001, 202-203) most residents of high-crime urban neighborhoods are hard-working and law-abiding, but suffer from predation by a few of their neighbors. To compete successfully with suburbs for residents and businesses, cities need at minimum to be clean and safe (Duany et al., Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, North Point, 2000, 157-158). The dangerous reputation of cities makes many people fearful of the population density we need to be environmentally and fiscally sustainable (Hester, Design for Ecological Democracy, MIT Press, 2006, 205).

Crime and the fear of it threaten to undermine our efforts to build a common life. A common life in the 21st century depends on the success of cities: It's where a large percentage of our citizens live and more are moving, urban design is the most ecologically and fiscally resilient, and diversity and the potential for inclusion are greatest. To the extent Trump's dystopian rhetoric resonates with a significant part of the American population, cities and the people who care about them must strive to improve their reputation.

ON THE SAME TOPIC: Josh Stephens, "Trump to Cities: You're Dead to Me," Planetizen, 26 July 2016, http://www.planetizen.com/node/87620/trump-cities-youre-dead-me

NOTE: The Department of Justice compiles data from the FBI and other agencies at the Bureau of Justice statistics page. However, I find other aggregators easier to use; for this piece I used the same data as found at Disaster Center.