Reckoning with the Violent Crime Surge

Reader responses to Lara Bazelon

Last week’s conversation with Lara Bazelon has generated a lot of comments and a fair number of emails. With the permission of the authors, I’m posting two representative examples below.

Whether readers agreed or disagreed with Lara’s positions, most seem to appreciate the open, respectful, and civil tone of the conversation. If more people on opposing sides of the race debate are able to have more discussions like this one, we might actually be able to find workable solutions to our problems.

Here are those (lightly edited) emails. As always, I’m interested to know what you think. Let me know in the comments!

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Dear Professor Loury,

Thanks for having Lara Bazelon on your show. I don't agree with all her criminal justice and systemic racism positions, but she comes across as mostly reasonable and open to a civil discussion about these issues. 

One thing that really surprised me is that Lara Bazelon doesn't seem to appreciate the ways in which the homicide spikes we're seeing in so many cities are affecting people. 

At the risk of sounding like a teaching assistant trying to assemble a lecture for Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs 101, most people don't like feeling unsafe, and they'll do whatever is required to eliminate threats to their safety, real and imagined. The sense of unease in NYC, for example, is palpable if you talk to everyday New Yorkers.  Middle-aged and older New Yorkers have gotten accustomed to “safe NYC” and don't want to go back to the way things were before Giuliani began to get crime under control and Bloomberg finished the job. New Yorkers in their 20s and younger have never known anything other than “safe NYC.”

Eric Adams' candidacy resonated with New Yorkers of all stripes because he was the most credible candidate when it came to addressing concerns about the violent crime spike, the growing numbers of aggressive vagrants camped out all over the city, and what seems to be an endless montage of brazen incidents of violence. Who can feel safe when kids get gunned down during the middle of the day in Times Square and older women are cold-cocked by thugs for whatever might be in their purses or for no apparent reason at all?

Lara Bazelon can say the increase in crime is modest and not at the levels of the 1990s, but St. Louis' homicide rates hit a 50-year high in 2020. Eighteen kids have been killed in St. Louis so far this year. Philly's homicide tally reached levels not seen since 1991 last year, and it's up 25% so far this year.   

Take a look at Jeff Asher's homicide dashboard if you want more numbers the next time you have this kind of debate.

Murders are up 327% in Portland so far this year. They're up 150% in El Paso. They're up 100% in Orlando. I don't know how the homicide numbers in these cities compare to the numbers from 30 years ago, but spikes of this magnitude get people's attention, no matter the baseline.

The other thing that surprised me is that Lara Bazelon was surprised that Yutico Briley thinks there are people who need a “time out.” How could she not have anticipated this? Black teens have grandmothers, too. Why wouldn't Yutico be disturbed by hearing about a grandmother being carjacked and killed? He knows that many of the young folks who commit these crimes won't be rehabilitated quickly. They'll commit more crimes unless they receive a substantial timeout and a major intervention. We should never delude ourselves into believing that reducing the prison population is more important than maintaining order and public safety. The challenge for society is to do a better job of rehabilitating these wayward young people so that they don't go back to their old ways when they're released from prison.  

One last point: I have yet to hear a progressive clearly articulate what “justice” looks like for crime victims and society as a whole. They're willing to impose stiff sanctions for offenses that offend them, but they don't seem to care as much about things that offend others.  

Keep up the good work!

Clifton Roscoe

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Dear Professor Loury,

I listened with interest to your conversation with Lara Bazelon. The level of candor and self-reflection by both of you was quite moving.

Ms. Bazelon first appeared on my radar due to her support for Betsy DeVos's reform of the Obama-era Title IX star chamber procedures. Ms. Bazelon's interest, as you might guess, was in the disproportionate impact of the campus kangaroo courts on black and Latino men, laid out so well by Emily Yoffe in the final installment of her 2017 three-part series in the Atlantic.

I am with Ms. Bazelon on cash bail reform, shorter sentences, and improved efforts to reintegrate felons into society. In my time spent helping addicts, I've seen what criminalizing poverty can do. I've also seen the difficulty that non-violent felons convicted of drug offenses or property crimes face when trying to find employment.

I am far less sanguine about Ms. Bazelon's characterization of the uptick in violent crime as "relatively mild." I find the extant crime statistics to be misleading, as they conflate what I think are three distinct types of violence with differently-weighted causes and possible interventions: domestic/intimate-partner, transactional/acquaintance, and stranger.

Public fear in a city like New York is about stranger violence; people know how to avoid the other forms by taking adequate precautions. Stranger violence is primarily a function of location and frequency of interaction, hence the seemingly outsized reaction when violence spreads out from the known "bad neighborhoods" onto bustling streets and subway platforms.

Lamentably, bail reform has been accompanied by a radical distrust of risk assessment due to its potential to be discriminatory. Judicial discretion was once constrained due to excessive lenience; it is now being constrained due to perceived harshness. Meanwhile, probing discussions of prosecutorial discretion are rare.

[…]

Ms. Bazelon's seeming attitude towards victims of crime reveals what I believe to be a philosophical difference and a progressive blindspot. To many progressives, the state does the victim a favor by taking account of his grievance, for they perceive the purpose of the state to be a well-ordered society that grants rights to the individual.

The libertarian individualist, on the other hand, believes that we grant (outsource, really) a legal monopoly on force/violence to the state (except in the case of self-defense) with the expectation that the state acts in a just and timely manner. When it does not, people inevitably rescind their grant, and we get the streets of St. Louis,
Chicago, or Baltimore.

[…]

As a young Gen-Xer I commuted daily, book in hand and knapsack on shoulder, to attend high school in NYC during the 1980s crime wave.  I was repeatedly (and thankfully unsuccessfully) attacked by people with knives. Turns out that a 30 lb. knapsack is useful! I was hardly a naive liberal, but reality mugged me nonetheless, and my heart hardened somewhat. I felt viscerally that if some great harm were to befall a family member, I would step before a television camera and let the perp know that his best option was to run to the nearest cop and surrender. I don't particularly believe in vigilantism, but I do believe in incentives.

I spent many late nights in the summer of 2020 archiving the violence streaming on Twitter/Facebook/Periscope/etc. before it could be memory-holed, and watching the revolving door of arrests and releases. I recall only one clear instance in which I saw the dynamic of the angry townsfolk play out: the brutal assault in Portland on Adam Haner by Marquise Love.  Watching social media that night, it was clear to Love and almost everyone else that he was potentially in mortal danger if he didn't turn himself in. By 08:30, he had.

The public appears to be growing fed up, and a moderation, if not a backlash, may be on the horizon. But crime, while possessing its own complex dynamics, is a symptom of deeper problems, and our institutions of both governance and sense-making seem to suffer from a toxic brew of incompetence and corruption. Our young and naive Maoist Red Guards smell fear and are devouring these institutions from within, absent any encouraging plan to reform them. The viciousness with which the media Twitterati devour their own most closely resembles Lord of the Flies.

I worry for our republic, and the whole of the liberal Enlightenment project. Thank you as always for being a beacon in the storm.

Warm regards,

[Name withheld]