The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America

The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America BARRY LATZER STARTING IN THE LATE 1960S, the United States suffered the biggest sustained rise in violent crime in its history. In some locales, people dreaded leaving their homes at any time, day or night, and many Americans spent part of each day literally looking over their shoulders. How could things have gotten so bad? Why did they get better? This book—the definitive history of crime from World War II to the twenty-first century—provides the answers. The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America Barry Latzer Encounter Books New York • London © 2016 by Barry Latzer All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Encounter Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 601, New York, New York 10003. First American edition published in 2016 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation. Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com Manufactured in the United States and printed on acid-free paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). first american edition library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Latzer, Barry, 1945– The rise and fall of violent crime in America / Barry Latzer. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-59403-835-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-59403-836-5 (ebook) 1. Violent crimes—United States—History. 2. Crime—United States. I. Title. HV6789.L38 2015 364.150973'090945—dc23 2015010962 produced by wilsted & taylor publishing services To Sandra, for her infinite love and patience \ In memory of Gene Plotnik and Marc Raeff, who never saw it completed Contents Preface ix ChapteR 1 World War II and Its Aftermath 1 Crime in the 1940s ChapteR 2 The Golden Years 43 Violent Crime in the 1950s ChapteR 3 Ordeal 103 The Great Post-1960s Crime Rise ChapteR 4 The Violence Continues 171 America in the 1980s ChapteR 5 The Great Downturn 221 1995 to the Twenty-First Century ConClusion History and the Study of Crime 265 Acknowledgments 275 Notes 277 Bibliography 351 Index 393 Preface Violent crime, especially after the late 1960s, was one of the most significant domestic issues in the United States. Aside from the civil rights movement, the campaign for women’s rights, and structural changes in the economy, it is hard to think of a phenomenon that had a more profound effect on American life in the last third of the twentieth century. After 1965, crime rose to such heights that it frightened virtually all Americans and prompted significant alterations in everyday be- haviors and even in lifestyles. The risk of being mugged became an issue for Americans when they chose homes and schools, se- lected commuter routes, and planned leisure activities. In some urban locations, people were afraid to leave their dwellings at any time, day or night, even to go to the grocery store. During the worst of the post-1960s crime wave, Americans spent part of each day literally looking back over their shoulders. Crime stimulated billions of dollars in government expen- ditures and millions more in civilian attempts to harden targets ix x preface with private guards, alarms, and locks. Crime and the interre- lated illegal-substance problem provoked a massive buildup of the nation’s criminal justice apparatus and the incarceration of millions of offenders. Crime also exacerbated racial and ethnic conflicts, largely because of the association of African Ameri- cans and other minority groups with disproportionate offending. Inevitably, politicians responded to public fears, and violent crime became a political issue.1 In the 1988 presidential campaign, to take a particularly vivid example, Republican George H. W. Bush successfully attacked his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, governor of Massachusetts, for being “soft on crime.” Bush ran the famous (or, if you prefer, infamous) Willie Horton advertisement that became a campaign flash point. The ad featured a convicted African American murderer who had been furloughed from the Massachusetts correctional system for a weekend and, instead of returning to prison, broke into a couple’s home, bound and stabbed the husband, and raped the wife. Bush took forty states with 53.4 percent of the popular vote. In the mid-1990s, after roughly two and a half decades, the crime tsunami finally began to ebb. By the turn of the century, the crime issue started to drop off the public agenda. In 1992, nearly nine in ten Americans thought that crime had gotten worse during the previous year. By 2001, only four in ten thought the same.2 In 2008, Barack Obama, the son of a black father and white mother, was elected president of the United States, and many people believed his success as a candidate was a by-product of the decline in anxieties over urban violence.3 Those anxieties were rekindled by a fatal encounter between a white police officer and a young black man in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. When a grand jury failed to indict the officer the follow- ing November, protests and riots erupted across the country, and the subject of crime resurfaced as part of the discussion about relations between African Americans and the police.4 preface xi Whether or not these public concerns have staying power, the time seems ripe for a searching, long-term examination of the rise and fall of crime in the United States. s s s This book begins with the 1940s, but in some respects, this is the middle of the story. To fully understand violent crime, its gen- esis and development must be studied within the context of the nation’s history. The forces that shaped contemporary America began to fall into place about 135 years ago, in the 1880s, when the United States developed an industrial economy, formed great metropolitan centers, received massive influxes of immigrants from all over the world, and first experienced migrations of African Americans from the South to other regions of the country. The study of crime going back to the late nineteenth century gives us a different perspective on its causes. Some of the factors that loomed large in recent decades—poverty, economic downturns, urban environments, and ethnic and racial bias— begin to diminish in importance. By contrast, long-term analy- sis reveals that the propensity for violence of various subcultures, whether they be ethnic, racial, religious, or regional, seems to generate high violent crime rates over fairly long time periods. For instance, white and black southerners, each of which has a distinctive culture, have had high rates of interpersonal violence for well over a century. In the case of southern whites, violent tendencies can be traced back to the eighteenth-century Scotch-Irish migration. For African Americans, the pivotal period for the increase in violent crime was between 1880 and 1900, the notorious Jim Crow era. Other cultural groups that immigrated to the United States have had quite variable records in terms of violent crime. In the nineteenth century, crime rates were high for the Irish and Chinese, but low for German and Scandinavian immigrants. xii preface Eastern European Jews and southern Italians, who arrived at roughly the same time, between 1900 and 1910, and settled in the same place, New York City, had very different rates of violence. Likewise, in the 1920s, Mexican migrants had elevated violent crime rates, while Japanese entrants did not. Given that nearly all of these cultural groups arrived in poverty and suffered shameful mistreatment because of their race, religion, or national origin, the variation in violent crime rates is puzzling. It raises profound questions regarding the standard assumptions about crime and suggests that cultural influences may be more important than social deficits in explaining high or low levels of violence. The examination of crime over the course of U.S. history also raises doubts about the role of cities in crime. In the 1890s, when American cities underwent massive growth, violent crime was relatively low, despite dilapidated urban housing, the ghettoization of immigrants and the poor, abuse by police who lacked any professional training, and thoroughly corrupt mu- nicipal governments. Violent crime rates were much lower than they would be a century later, when conditions were far better. Finally, the long-term history of crime teaches us that economic downturns and upswings are inconsistently related to violent crime. During the low-crime 1890s, the United States was buffeted by an economic recession second only to the Great Depression in its toll on American citizens. On the other hand, crime soared in the economic boom period of the 1920s. Fol- lowing the 1920s, moreover, crime kept rising right through the worst years of the Depression and began descending only when Roosevelt’s New Deal commenced in 1934. And yet, if the federal safety net caused the downturn in crime, what was the explanation for the continued decline when the economy significantly worsened in 1937 and ’38? American history, both before and after World War II, raises profound questions about what we know—or think we know—about crimes of violence. preface xiii s s s As with any major social development, violent crime has in- spired countless scholarly and journalistic analyses. Books and articles have focused on homicide alone,5 on particular or especially sensational cases,6 on violence in general,7 and violent crime in specific cities.8 Several studies tried to explain the decline in crime after 1995.9 Somewhat surprisingly, however, the literature does not include a comprehensive history of violent crime in the United States over the last six decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.

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