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« Back to Has the Crime Wave Crested? main page    Transcript for: Has the Crime Wave Crested?Think Tank Transcripts:Has the Crime Wave Crested? ANNOUNCER: 'Think Tank' has been made possible by Amgen, arecipient of the Presidential National Medal of Technology. Amgen,bringing better, healthier lives to people worldwide throughbiotechnology. Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, theRandolph Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I'm Ben Wattenberg. Crime is the number oneissue in America today, but violent crime rates are now dropping.Does this mean that the worst is behind us, or might it turn out tobe just the calm before the storm? Joining us to sort through the conflict and the consensus are JohnDiIulio, a professor at Princeton University and an adjunct fellow atthe Manhattan Institute; Jerome Skolnick, visiting distinguishedprofessor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York Cityand former president of the American Society of Criminology; LawrenceSherman, professor of criminology at the University of Maryland; andAdele Harrell, director of the program on law and behavior at theUrban Institute. The topic before this house: Has the crime wave crested? This weekon 'Think Tank.' For the first time in decades it appears that America might bewinning the war on crime. For years the nightly news has been filledwith more and more images of murder and mayhem. Indeed, since the1950s the violent crime rate has gone up six-fold. But recently wehave seen the crime rate flatten and now apparently drop. In thefirst half of 1995 violent crime rates, particularly the murder rate,dropped in many major cities. In New York City and in Houston, thehomicide rate fell by almost a third. Why? Well, some experts say that cities which have increased thenumber of police on their streets in dangerous neighborhoods haveseen the biggest drop in crime. Others emphasize that putting morecriminals in prison has done the job -- and we have put a lot morepeople in prison. Since 1960 the prison population went from 200,000to over one million. Some observers suggest a demographic reason for the drop inviolent crime. Most such crime is committed by men under age 25, andtoday there are fewer young males; therefore, it is said, less crime.But demographers point out lots more young men are on the way. By theyear 2000 there will be two million more 14- to 24-year-old men inthe population. Some people are calling this a demographic crimebomb. John DiIulio, let's begin. Why did the crime rate originally go upso fast for so long. MR. DIIULIO: Well, Ben, it's a multi-variant world. Demographicsmatter. They matter when crime rates go up. They matter when crimerates go down. More young males spells at the margin more crime.Fewer young males will spell at the margin fewer crimes. But also, inaddition to demographics, you're talking about the impact of lawenforcement, policing and correctional practices. I would say that inthe years that crime was going up those practices, the number ofpolice on the street contracting in big cities, revolving doorjustice polices didn't help any. And now I think those policies havebeen turned around largely in big cities and nationally with respectto corrections, and we're seeing the effects. MR. WATTENBERG: Jerry Skolnick? MR. SKOLNICK: I agree with John. It is a multi-variant world. Iwant to add another variable. MR. WATTENBERG: You two are supposed to disagree. Go ahead, Jerry. MR. SKOLNICK: Well, the other variable is economics andinequality. During the 1960s there was great hope in this countrythrough the war on poverty that we would have reducing inequality.Then the Vietnam War came. The war on poverty declined. And as thewar on poverty declined, as we began to see collective protest andviolence, we had to crack down on that, and then we began to seecrime rising. Crime is economic opportunity, and as we as a nationoffer less economic opportunity to people who are in areas wherecrime is high, we're going to see -- generally we're going to seemore crime. We saw a huge rise in crime in the 1980s when crack camein. And crack is economic opportunity. And if you are going toprotect your crack market, you're going to have a lot of violenceassociated with it. As crack markets destabilize, you have moreviolence. When crack markets stabilize, as I think they are now, youhave less violence. MR. WATTENBERG: Larry Sherman? MR. SHERMAN: If we ask the question more specifically -- not whyall violent crime, but handgun crime and murder, why that rose fromthe mid '60s on -- I would take the consequence of the riots to bethat many people, and we have good data on this from Detroit andother places -- the work of David McDowell -- many people bought gunsfor self-defense which then got stolen, got circulated. Gun carryingrose very substantially among this young male population, and by themid '80s, of course, it became almost like a hula hoop; it was thefad that you couldn't leave the house without your gun. And the gunsthemselves changed, becoming more likely to be a semi-automaticpistol firing lots of bullets catching bystanders, bigger bullets,large-caliber guns -- all much more likely to cause death. I wouldsay, if we focus specifically on gun violence in the homicide rate,we've got to look at the arsenal. MR. WATTENBERG: Adele Harrell, Urban Institute. MS. HARRELL: I'd like to return a minute to the drug marketargument. I think that that did play a major role in the expansion ofviolence during the late '80s, early '90s, and it was more than justdrugs. It was the effect of drug markets destabilizing entireneighborhoods, increasing the tension in those neighborhoods,offering opportunities for kids to get involved with gangs, then toget weapons. As the weapons spread, they took on a life of their own.As Larry has just said, they became the hula hoop or the -- some kidsarmed themselves out of fear. Other kids armed themselves because itwas cool. But the fact of the matter was you suddenly had a lot ofdangerous weapons in a destabilized community situation and in an agegroup that is very violent prone. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. John DiIulio, it seems as if your colleaguesare pretty well arrayed on the root causes argument, and that has notbeen what you have been saying. MR. DIIULIO: Well, it is to an extent. There's no question thatwe're not just talking about the number of young males in thepopulation. We're talking about the conditions under which they growup. Liberals will stress the joblessness. Conservatives will stressthe godlessness and fatherlessness. Together, you have godless,fatherless and jobless. MR. WATTENBERG: And the lack of punishment or the diminishment ofpunishment. MR. DIIULIO: And the diminishment of punishment, the lack ofself-discipline, not only the economic poverty, but the moral povertyof growing up in settings where many adults, if not most adults, arethemselves deviant, delinquent or criminal. But the interestingthing, I think, of what we just heard is that the points of consensusoutnumber the points of discensus on this point, which is thateverybody basically agrees about the general direction of thenumbers, whether the victimization data and the demographic data, andeveryone, I think, agrees that we have some concern, some realconcern, about what's just over the horizon. MR. WATTENBERG: Does everyone agree that these first six-monthdata coming in from places like New York City and Houston and otherplaces have actually declined as starkly as some of those numbershave indicated, that you have really dropped, for example, thehomicide rate in New York City by a third in one year? Is there -- MR. SHERMAN: Well, in those places, yeah. But I think, if we tryto extrapolate from that to the whole nation, the bad news is thegood news is wrong, if I may paraphrase a book by our host. The factis that you've got to look at a longer period of time before you drawany conclusion, even about the murder rate. And I think to get backto the -- not the root causes side, but the policy side, the factthat both Houston and New York are the two cities in Cliff Krause's(sp) story in The New York Times that have the biggest decreases inhomicide and both those cities had major changes in the way they didpolicing -- not necessarily the numbers, although New York took anincrease in numbers -- but what they -- MR. WATTENBERG: Increase in numbers of policemen. MR. SHERMAN: Increase in numbers in police in New York. ButHouston didn't have that big an increase. What they did was tototally change what they were doing. In fact, they moved away fromcommunity policing, which has been Shibboleth and certainly of thelast crime bill, and went back to more crime-focused policing,traditional methods of field interrogation, making arrests for minoroffenses. There's good data in the literature that shows that themore arrests you make for traffic offenses and disorderly conduct,the lower the robbery rate. MR. WATTENBERG: I withdraw my remark that you are in the rootcauses section. You are in the law and order section. MR. SHERMAN: I'm not on the prison side. I don't think theprison's going to get you nearly as much as maintenance of order onthe streets through the use of arrests, citation, the criminal court,which the New York state legislature just abolished. MR. WATTENBERG: Well, but if you arrest people -- I mean, let'sjust follow that train for a moment. If you arrest people, where arethey going? MR. SHERMAN: It's not so much where they go, but where their gunsgo, which is to be melted down. MR. WATTENBERG: You mean, you're going to arrest their guns andbook them and put them back on the streets? MR. SHERMAN: Well, in effect, that's what's happened in New York,and that's how Bill Bratton explains the drop in the crime -- in thehomicide and the shootings in New York City -- exactly what you justsaid. MR. SKOLNICK: My understanding of Bratton's theory, and I recentlyhad a discussion with him. I've read a lot of the literature. MR. WATTENBERG: Bratton is the police chief in New York. MR. SKOLNICK: He's the police commissioner of the City of NewYork. Very bright, articulate, vigorous police commissioner who has alot of ideas. And I would say that his basic idea goes something likethis: We ordinarily think that people who will commit the mostserious crimes will commit lesser crimes. A robber will commit aburglary, right? His theory is that people who will commit minorcrimes -- jumping over a turnstile, drinking beer in the street,urinating in the street -- if you get a population of these, one outof every seven or eight or ten is going to be a serious criminal. Andif you get them for this, then, A) they may have a warrant outagainst them for a more serious crime and you're going to beharassing that population; as you harass that population, word getsout on the street and crime goes down. That's essentially the theory. MS. HARRELL: I think we should be careful about congratulatingourselves too quickly on the effect of policing, period. I think thatthe -- what I view happened was like an epidemic that to some extentburns itself out. We may be returning to a period of normality from aperiod that was essentially a crisis brought on by the destabilizingeffects that I mentioned earlier. And so that to some extent thepolicing is part of a return to normality and also you've got goingon communities and residents mobilizing themselves to clean upcommunities, you've got prevention programs going, you've gotcommunity policing linked with these enforcement efforts. It's not aone silver bullet -- MR. SKOLNICK: Can I just add one thing to Adele's point? There issomething -- to your multi-varied analysis, one other variable that'svery important to consider; there's something that statisticians callthe regression effect. If you -- let's talk about golf. If you takethe top golfer, Nick Faldo or Ben Crenshaw, they'll hit, you know,65, 65, 65. But pretty soon they return to their mean, okay? That maybe what's happening here also, that as we get a rise in crime, wehave a period of extreme crime, then we begin to have a statisticalregression effect; we're getting back to what it normally would be. MR. SHERMAN: Before going back up again. MR. DIIULIO: I want to -- MS. HARRELL: Which it probably will. MR. DIIULIO: I want to maybe -- I don't know if it's adisagreement or an agreement. I think what we're hearing is thatcrime rates did go up, that it's a multi-variant world -- it'sdemographics, it's law enforcement, we can argue about incapacitation-- but right now we're witnessing the lull before the storm. I want to seize upon, however -- I would feel amiss if I didn'tseize upon -- I think what's going in particular in New York City hasan awful lot to do with what Bill -- this is Bill Bratton Day, Iguess, here. We've all recently spent some time with Bratton. There'sa seven-prong strategy that the NYPD is following. Do you want toknow why a big part of the reason why auto thefts are down? Becausethey doubled the number of officers in the Bureau of Auto Larceny. Doyou want to know why they're, you know, doing this aggressive gunfrisking? It's because that SNAG unit, the Special Narcotics and Gununit, is out there and it's high priority and the precinct commandersknow it and everybody's working on it. I mean, these guys are, in fact -- he has -- Bratton has succeededin changing the culture. These are the '27 Yankees, and they're goingafter it. And it is exactly as Jerry Skolnick says, it is not justthe arrests, the busts, it's also enforcing city-wide the nuisanceabatement. You know? Going after the -- you know, the crack houses,cracking down on the remaining crack houses, the massage parlors. MR. WATTENBERG: The one that has a lot of attention paid to itwhen Mayor Giuliani came in was the hassling or harassment orelimination of the so-called squeegee men, the people who came up toyour car and went like this and demanded a dollar and were prettynasty to you if you didn't. I mean, is that the sort of low-levelkind of thing that you're talking about? MR. SHERMAN: Yeah, there's two arguments. One is that you create aclimate of civility which tends to retard the feeling that things areout of control and you can get away with anything. That's James Q.Wilson's 'broken windows' argument -- and George Cowling. But theother thing is that squeegee men, like everybody else, are carryingguns in these big cities. And, in fact, the rate of gun seizure perthousand arrests has gone down dramatically with all this enforcementof minor stuff that gives you a legal basis to frisk people. I hasten to add we're talking about New York; we're not talkingabout the rest of the country. Because for most police agenciesthey're not doing this. MR. WATTENBERG: Well, we saw that chart. We're talking about a lotof major cities. MR. SHERMAN: Well, but not by that much of a decline. Remember, ifyou've got -- MR. WATTENBERG: No, I -- MR. SHERMAN: -- 200 or 150 homicides a year, a 10 percentreduction is 15 homicides. That could be exactly what Jerry's talkingabout, just chance change. MR. DIIULIO: But even if you -- I agree with Larry. I mean, thisis not a -- at this point we're not talking about a nationwide shift.No question. Nonetheless -- MR. WATTENBERG: Hold on just for a second. MR. DIIULIO: Nonetheless -- MR. WATTENBERG: The national rates have flattened out and begun tocome down the last few years. MR. DIIULIO: Right, but you -- that's true. When you disaggregateit, you'll see a lot of that's coming from New York and Houston and16 percent drop in overall crime in San Francisco, 10 percent in SanAntonio, 6 percent in Philadelphia and LA the first six months of '95compared to the same period of '94. MR. WATTENBERG: This is violent crime, not murder. MR. DIIULIO: This is violent crime, but the interesting fact here,if there is a trend line that may be meaningful, if you take -- ifthe cut is '93 -- you know, January of '93 to July of '95, you seethat violent crime is down at least 6 percent or more, in fact by 10percent if you stretch it out a little more, in eight of the 10cities that have had the highest violent crime rates. So something'sgoing on. What is going on? I don't think anybody's exactly sure. MR. WATTENBERG: Yes, Larry, go ahead. MR. SHERMAN: Just again on this are the national rates going down?Remember that 10 percent of all the murders, 10 percent of all therobberies in the United States happen in New York City. So what NewYork does matters for the national rate just because of that hugechunk of that pie, not of population, but of crime that it consistsof. MR. WATTENBERG: What percentage? MR. SHERMAN: Ten percent of murders and robberies in the UnitedStates happen in New York City. If they cut their rates in half, youget a 5 percent reduction in the national rate. So that's a veryimportant point for why we're talking about New York. MR. WATTENBERG: Adele, let me ask you this question. Has thenature of the young male criminal in the last few decades and thenature of their behavior -- has that changed? MS. HARRELL: Yes, it has. When you look at the age distribution ofwho's committing murders for example, it dropped very dramatically --it dropped by almost five years, the average age from over -- fromapproximately 23 to approximately 18 years of age. There has been alarge increase in the number of violent crimes committed byjuveniles. MR. SKOLNICK: And the reason for that is the reason that Adelegave earlier. That is, you've got drug selling. You've got kids ingangs who then need -- they believe they need guns, and they probablydo for self-protection. But it becomes the thing to do. So you've got14-, 15-, 16-year-olds who have guns in their possession, a lot oftestosterone flowing and a lot of homicides. MR. SHERMAN: But the 135 percent increase in youth arrests formurder, under 18, in the last 10 years. MR. WATTENBERG: Have these -- I mean, you talk to some cops, andthey indicate that not only are there more crimes, but they arefiercer and more vicious. MR. DIIULIO: Definitely. MR. SHERMAN: Absolutely. MR. DIIULIO: Definitely. I mean, what's scary, what's troubling,about the demographic bulge is not just the sheer numbers. It's thateach successive cohort of young males has done more crime, somepeople would say three times as much crime per capita, as the beforeit. So essentially we've got the Sharks and the Jets of 'West SideStory' fame versus the Bloods and the Crips. Now we've got the Bloodsand the Crips, the original gangsters. Here comes a group of people,for whatever reasons, who are almost certain to be far worse. MR. WATTENBERG: 'If you drive down our street in Los Angeles,we'll blow you away.' MR. DIIULIO: And we're not talking about 24-year-olds or 20 yearsold. We're talking about 18-year-olds. And this is what AlBloomstein, one of our colleagues, and others have shown, I think,very well with all the systems. MR. SKOLNICK: I interviewed a bunch of these kids in Chino, aSouthern California prison, and they showed me marks. I mean, one ofthe things we have to realize about the homicide rate is that it'slow. Why is it low? Because we have trauma centers. These kids wouldhave died 20 years ago if they were Sharks and Jets, but we have verygood medicine now that saves them. They're full of wounds. MR. WATTENBERG: Do you do much prison interviewing? MR. SKOLNICK: I haven't done it in three or four years. MR. WATTENBERG: Because? MR. SKOLNICK: Because I'm getting old and tired, and it's a lot ofhard work. MR. WATTENBERG: A distinguished criminologist I know says hedoesn't do it anymore because it's getting too dangerous. MR. SHERMAN: I have my observers out in the streets watching thecrimes happen. Several of my observers have been attacked. Threepercent of all the places in a city produce over half the crimes. Ifwe want to go out and watch crimes happen, put it under a microscope,we can do it. But the point is so can the police. And if policepatrols -- to come back to what it can do, we have an experimentcoming out showing that, if you concentrate police patrols in thatvery small number of locations, which the cops hate because it'sboring, but if they just stay there -- MR. WATTENBERG: Why would it be boring if it's the place where themost crimes are committed? MR. SHERMAN: Because they don't happen while the cops are there.And so they -- it's like preventive medicine. It's not as exciting asemergency room medicine. MR. WATTENBERG: We now fully understand exactly what's happening,at least I do. Now -- right. I am going to make you -- congratulations -- the president, theCongress and the Supreme Court. You are in charge for the next 10years. Adele Harrell of the Urban Institute, what would you do? MS. HARRELL: I think that we need to anticipate this coming youthboom. I do think most of us are convinced that demographics are anunderlying engine to this, and I would put in place lots of youthprevention programs, lots of gun -- handgun control programs to tryto head it off as much as possible. I would try to increase the use,which Larry has put us onto, of problem-oriented policing, where thepolice anticipate and respond very flexibly to problem changes; theyget there, and they use everything in their arsenal when they getthere from gang task forces to community policing. MR. WATTENBERG: Would you put more of them in prison for a longertime so they couldn't do this once they were found guilty of avicious crime? MS. HARRELL: I have yet to see the algorithm that's going to allowus to predict who we should be locking up for long periods of time. MR. WATTENBERG: Well, I said -- but if somebody commits a viciouscrime, that's a pretty good algorithm. He's committed a viciouscrime. MS. HARRELL: I have no problem with long sentences for viciouscrimes. The problems that we are seeing now is that we are locking upa lot of people who probably wouldn't be committing crimes if we letthem out. MR. WATTENBERG: All right. We now come to President LawrenceSherman of the University of Maryland. You are now president, theCongress and the Supreme Court. What are you going to do in the nextfew years? MR. SHERMAN: I'm going to change the 100,000 cops on the streetprogram to limit it to the 200 census tracks in the United Stateswhere over half of all homicide occurs. If you don't have a homiciderate at least 200 per 100,000 population, you don't get the cops.When you get the cops, they've got to go to those neighborhoods, andthey've got to spend all their time trying to take guns off thestreet. A condition for your state getting the money is that it's gotto repeal its law requiring the state to issue permits to carryconcealed weapons to anybody who doesn't have a prior felony, whichis what Texas and Virginia have just done and makes it very difficultfor the police to enforce the -- to use gun-carrying enforcement as astrategy to reduce gun homicide. And I would also perhaps conditionit on life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for allconvicted murders, domestic or otherwise. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. President Skolnick? MR. SKOLNICK: I'd focus on drugs. Drugs have been the engine ofcrime for the last decade. I would focus on drug prevention and drugtreatment. Demand reduction is the key to the drug problem. There area number of reasons why law enforcement is very limited in what itcan do about controlling drugs. I can do something, but it can't do ahell of a lot. What we need to do is to get the idea that drugs arebad for you in the communities where drugs are being used, to changethe culture of kids, to give them new incentives, and to give themthe opportunity to have new incentives. So I would have CETAprograms. I would have all -- MR. WATTENBERG: CETA programs are? MR. SKOLNICK: Well, let's talk about -- MR. WATTENBERG: What does that stand for? MR. SKOLNICK: I can't remember what it stands for. MR. WATTENBERG: Community Employment -- MR. SKOLNICK: Something. MR. WATTENBERG: -- Training Act. MR. SKOLNICK: Community Employment and Training. MR. WATTENBERG: Act. MR. SKOLNICK: Act. The WPA. The CCC. I would have -- I would putkids into institutional situations where we're going to change theirculture so that they don't get up in the morning and hang out withthe gang of boys. MR. WATTENBERG: WPA, for our younger viewers -- Works ProjectsAdministration. MR. SKOLNICK: Right. MR. WATTENBERG: CCC -- Civilian Conservation Corps. MR. SKOLNICK: Oh, of course. MR. WATTENBERG: Since then, we have had Job Corps, we have had 100programs. MR. SKOLNICK: But we're cutting them. MR. WATTENBERG: Well, but wait a minute, Jerry. While we have hadthose 100 programs that you are endorsing as a remedy, the crime ratewas going up through the roof. MR. SKOLNICK: Yeah, we didn't do enough of them. I mean, yourassumption -- MR. WATTENBERG: No, now, but wait a minute. That's illogical, thatthey were going up and so was the crime rate. MR. SKOLNICK: No. MR. WATTENBERG: So you can't say, if we did more -- what? Then thecrime rate would have gone up even further? MR. SKOLNICK: Okay. They went down during the '80s, thoseprograms. The CETA program went down. The Job Corps went down. That'sthe period of time when the crime rate shot up. The crime rate wasnot going up in the '80s the way it went up during the Reaganadministration. And that's where the conservative and the liberaldisagree. MR. WATTENBERG: John DiIulio? MR. DIIULIO: The first thing I'd do I guess I would appoint mythree colleagues here to my 'kitchen cabinet' to keep me on my toesand honest. I think more than anything else I would batten down thehatches, use the bully pulpit to say, look, we have a problem; it's agrowing problem. It's not merely a problem of numbers; it's a problemof the degree to which these children -- and some of the kids we'retalking about, who we're so afraid of, are still in diapers and maybecan still be rescued somehow, some way. But at the end of the day, the crime problem is a crime problem.And the first thing I would do is get Bill Bratton come in, bottlethat seven-prong strategy that he's used in New York. I believe thatexplains a lot of what's going on there. MR. WATTENBERG: Is more prison one of his prongs? MR. DIIULIO: Well, as I far as I understand it, I don't thinkBratton -- I think he has wisely stayed away from -- he knows what heknows and stays away from the rest. But I think that, in my view, thepolicing strategy. I don't disagree with Larry. I think the policingstrategy will give you at the margin more bang for the buck. If youdo it the way it's being done there and in Houston and in some otherplaces. But at the end of the day you're going to have a large numberof juvenile offenders who are dangerous to themselves and certainlydangerous to the rest of us. And in my view they need to beincarcerated. And I don't say we need to incarcerate them for lifewithout parole. I say if we can get them young and while they're hotand put them away for 10 or 15 years, no ifs, ands or buts, we'll doourselves a lot of good. And I'd rather have those kind of juveniles.I would gladly trade 'three strikes and you're out' for a 34-year-oldwho does his third violent crime for policies that really do get ahandle on the kids who are most likely to do the most serious crime. MR. WATTENBERG: And this is the thrust, I understand it, of thecrime battle that we will see on Capitol Hill in the next few months,the Republicans trying to reform that truth in sentencing act to makeit tougher and keep more people -- more guilty people in jail longer.Is that -- MR. DIIULIO: And the Republicans trying to re-focus it onjuveniles as well. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Thank you, John DiIulio, Adele Harrel,Jerome Skolnick and Lawrence Sherman. And thank you. Please send your comments to: New River Media, 115017th Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20036. Or we can be reached viae-mail at thinktv@aol.com, or on the World Wide Web atwww.thinktank.com. For 'Think Tank,' I'm Ben Wattenberg. ANNOUNCER: This has been a production of BJW, Incorporated, inassociation with New River Media, which are solely responsible forits content. 'Think Tank' has been made possible by Amgen, a recipient of thepresidential National Medal of Technology. Amgen, unlocking thesecrets of life through cellular and molecular biology. Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, theRandolph Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. END Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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