Tag Archives: safety

Politics And The Cities

Conversations over the last couple of weeks have focused my attention on a troubling aspect of political life that has been receiving less attention recently, due to the Trump/Musk hourly assaults on America’s government and constitution– the social and political divides between urban, suburban and rural Americans.

I recently ran into an old acquaintance who used to live near me, in the heart of the city. She’d subsequently moved to the very edge of suburbia, to an area one might characterize as “rural adjacent,” and in our catch-up conversation, she noted that several of her neighbors were afraid to go downtown (in one case, admitting to a fear of traveling south of 56th Street). Her new neighbors seemed amazed that she’d survived her years as an urban resident, and seemed unwilling to believe her description of urban life as safe.

Paul Krugman recently addressed that mindset. He began by describing a recent “evening out” in New York.

I had a civilized evening Tuesday. I did a public event at the CUNY Graduate Center, interviewing Zach Carter, author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. Video of the event, which seemed to go well, should be available in a few days.

Then some of us took Zach out for dinner near the GC, which is just across the street from the Empire State Building. The conversation was great, and we lingered until almost 11, after which several of us walked over to the subway and took it home. And you know what happened?

Nothing. There were plenty of people out on the streets, which felt perfectly safe; so did the subway, which efficiently delivered us to our destinations.

Krugman documented the safety of his city, but he recognized that offering such evidence has become political, because trash talking about cities and urban life has become a constant theme in MAGA rhetoric.

According to Donald Trump, people in New York are afraid to go outside, because they can’t cross the street without getting mugged or raped. Just last Friday Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, called the NYC subway a “shithole,” which nobody wants to ride. Spoiler: It isn’t.

The data confirms Krugman’s point, which raises the question, why has trash-talking about urban life become a MAGA theme?Krugman says that Trump’s hostility to immigrants impels him to portray urban areas with large numbers of immigrants as  crime-ridden dystopias. While that is undoubtedly part of it, it would be a mistake to ignore a more obvious motive: Trump’s constant efforts to restore White males to dominance over other Americans.

Black people, immigrants and various other “Others” tend to live in cities. Suburban developments and gated communities are slowly becoming more diverse racially, but not economically. Some small towns in Indiana have seen an influx of immigrants, mostly Hispanic, but they are the exception. When someone says they are “afraid” to come into an urban core, they are really communicating a belief that “those people” are dangerous. They might make an exception for the Black doctor who can afford the mini-mansion down the street, but they’re sure that their neighbor is unrepresentative.

There’s a reason that virtually every city in the U.S. with a population of 500,000 and above is Blue on political maps, and virtually every rural precinct is Red. Those of us who live with that dread word–diversity–are comfortable with the varied fabric of life produced by a diverse demography. Most of us celebrate it. We find that our daily lives are enriched, not threatened, by encounters with interesting people who don’t look or pray (or eat) like us. We are less likely than our rural relatives to believe that difference translates to threat, and more likely to enjoy the expanded foods, perspectives and entertainments that those differences offer.

We’re also more likely to accept the necessity of government. I still recall an observation I once read to the effect that when you live down an unpaved road a mile or so from your nearest neighbor, and throw your dinner scraps out the back door for the dogs and other critters, you tend to discount the importance of a government that provides services like roads and garbage collection.

Obviously, not every rural resident is fearful or racist, and plenty of urban dwellers are both–but the Blue and Red of that political map is instructive. MAGA is essentially a rural phenomenon.

It will be interesting to see what happens when the full effect of Trump’s insane economic policies hit the rural folks who have been voting their racial animosities rather than their economic interests.

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Speaking Of Bad Choices

One of my sons lives in Amsterdam, so when I come across a headline featuring that city, I generally take more than a cursory interest in the report that follows–especially when that report confirms my own impressions.

And especially when the implications confirm my policy conclusions.

A recent article by Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post hit both of those targets. Rubin began by recounting how, on a recent visit to Amsterdam, she’d walked back to her hotel late on a weeknight. It was a pleasant evening, and a relatively long walk, yet she never felt nervous or unsafe. She acknowledged that there are many New York neighborhoods in which she also feel safe, but unlike her Amsterdam experience, her feeling of security there was largely “because police are everywhere. Visible on the street, in cars, on horseback.”

The experience led her to consider the very different approaches to crime chosen by policymakers in the Netherlands and the U.S.–beginning with gun ownership.

In the Netherlands, there are roughly 2.6 guns for every 100 people; there are more than 120 guns per 100 people in the United States. In the Netherlands, it is very, very hard to get a gun; in the United States, it is ridiculously easy to get guns. In fact, according to a report by Mariel Alper and Lauren G. Beatty in the Bureau of Justice Statistics, roughly “21% of state and 20% of federal prisoners said they possessed a gun during their offense. … About 29% of state and 36% of federal prisoners serving time for a violent offense possessed a gun during the offense.

In the Netherlands there are about 27 gun homicides a year. Not 27 per 100,000. Total. In the United States, the Pew Research Center reports, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in 2021. (The U.S. population is about 20 times that of the Netherlands; U.S. gun homicides are more than 1,777 times the number in the Netherlands.)

The differences go well beyond gun policy; Rubin reports that the Dutch don’t incarcerate people for drug addiction, for example, a decision that has allowed them to lock up far fewer people. She cites a report from the Guardian,

“Since 2014, 23 prisons have been shut, turning into temporary asylum centres, housing and hotels. … The number of prison sentences imposed fell from 42,000 in 2008 to 31,000 in 2018 — along with a two-thirds drop in jail terms for young offenders. Registered crimes plummeted by 40% in the same period, to 785,000 in 2018.”

By contrast, a report from the Prison Policy Initiative found that in the United States, “Drug offenses still account for the incarceration of over 350,000 people, and drug convictions remain a defining feature of the federal prison system…. As a result, “Drug arrests continue to give residents of over-policed communities criminal records, hurting their employment prospects and increasing the likelihood of longer sentences for any future offenses.” In short, the United States has 163 times the number of incarcerated people as the Netherlands, more than eight times as many per 100,000 people.

And–just as with our other policy choices (health care comes immediately to mind) our choices have been and continue to be expensive. The United States spends some $300 billion annually on policing and incarceration. And as Rubin points out, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Overpolicing and over-incarceration costs include lost earnings, adverse health effects, and damage to the families of the incarcerated. Those social costs are estimated to be three times the direct costs.

And none of those fiscal consequences include the ongoing, negative social effects of disproportionate policing of Black and White citizens…

The public safety choices we’ve made might be defensible, if the result was to make Americans safer than the Dutch. But–you knew this was coming, didn’t you?–that clearly isn’t the case. As Rubin says, “Our choices have not made us safer and have cost us dearly.”

In real terms, the U.S. criminal justice system and ubiquitous guns require an industry — ambulances, emergency room personnel, police, courts, judges, prisons, lawyers, private security and more — that the Dutch system does not. As I walked down the streets of Amsterdam, I imagined what we could have bought with the money we spend on the criminal justice system: universal college education, universal medical care, a strong social safety net.

Bottom line: American policy choices feed a “criminal justice industry”–without doing much to eliminate crime. As Rubin writes, different criminal justice policies “very likely could allow us to spend less money, lower incarceration rates, reduce the human and opportunity costs, and increase personal safety.” She says we have the system we do because we’ve “fetishized guns, criminalized addiction, neglected mental and emotional health, and resisted addressing social factors driving crime.”

We could make better choices–but that would require a clear-eyed look at the consequences of the choices we’ve made.

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