Per capita income in Manhattan, NY: $42,922
Per capita income in Elizabeth, NJ: $15,114
Per capita income in Newark, NJ: $13,009
Per capita income in Washington, DC overall: $52,811
Per capita income in Baltimore, MD: $16,978
Per capita income in Washington, DC 20020 zip code: $15,401
Per capita income in downtown Philadelphia (19103): $45,002
Per capita income in Camden, NJ: $9,815
Per capita income in north Philadelphia (19133): $7,133
These are numbers culled from various reports over the last decade, so don’t take them as the gospel truth. I put these per capita income levels to illustrate an obvious point: the persistence of violent poverty immediately surrounding – and in some cases, in walking distance of – America’s wealthiest neighborhoods.
Not surprisingly, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Newark, and Washington DC had some of the highest homicide rates in the country in 2007.
We usually see news reports about the most meaningless or sensational murders: a kid gets shot over an argument about sneakers, a man is mugged for $10 and murdered in the process, a serial killer lures and kills a prostitute. These reports serve to catch our eye and force us to shake our heads in disbelief. “How could anyone do this,” we ask. “What kind of people are these?”
Indeed, I’ve seen plenty of erstwhile thoughtful people make the quick leap from hearing about an isolated incident to extrapolating a citywide trend. It’s as though we’re reading about the mere tip of the iceberg in a world more sordid and inhuman than we can possibly imagine.
Naturally, this leap is aided by whatever latent Willie Hortons lurk in the minds of the readers, assuming that poor Black and brown (and, depending on where you are, sometimes white) neighborhoods are populated by superpredators and faceless gangbangers thirsty for random blood.
This pervades our entire culture. Adolph Reed, Jr. has written so scathingly and convincingly about even the most committed progressive intellectuals and their willingness to endorse the ridiculous and crypto-eugenicist notion of the “culture of poverty”, the “pathology of the underclass”, etcetera.
We’ve absorbed these concepts so unquestioningly that every little anecdote becomes confirming and damning evidence of the psychic diseases of the American poor.
By transforming urban crime into a primarily psychological issue, we can then quickly leap to the solution of aggressive policing in the form of massive, sloppy hiring waves, zero-tolerance policies, profiling, mandatory minimums, alongside of gentrifying economic policies to increase private capital in the neighborhoods. We recreate miniature military-industrial complexes in every city, pumping millions into what amounts to defense and private enterprise and gutting public education, employment, and mental health care. This is all old news to anyone who considers themselves left of right, but the surprise in all of this is how many liberals still believe that the Giuliani Solution was a necessary and welcome way to improve urban life.
Indeed, for that small and certainly well-exposed percentage of crime that is truly nihilistic or sociopathic, policing is necessary. Of course we need detectives and people dedicated to tracking down serial killers and psychopaths. If you believe at all in the need for a state – which I do – you endorse some form of state-sponsored policing.
Yet, they’ve done a bit of a magic trick and made it seem like the whole world was filled with murderous nutjobs, and that we just needed more cops to dig them out of their holes.
So if it’s not psychology, what is it? I believe – and I think there’s strong evidence for this – that the issue is economics. After all, while New York’s murder rate might have gone down, it’s pretty obvious that the murder rates in surrounding cities have actually increased over the past decade or so (despite a highly publicized dip this year, which seems questionable to me in any case). Our incarcerated population has never been larger, yet the homicides keep piling up all over the East Coast. Drugs have become purer and cheaper since Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and the Bushes vowed to “get tough”. On top of that, no psychologist in the world would ever declare that the number of sociopaths has gone up. It simply cannot be some kind of invidious psychological disease affecting only the urban poor.
I usually believe that the drug war is the primary economic driving force behind the East Coast murder rate, but I am beginning to realize that the volume of unregulated and underground money circulating in this part of the world is only partially due to the drug trade. Certainly, however, the disposable and untaxable income of the wealthy in America’s richest region contributes heavily to the demand side of homicide economics.
Add to that underemployment and a lack of a living wage, and the transformation of the American working class from manufacturing and production sectors to the service sector?
It took me so long to work on this post. I think this is why I can’t really blog too much, just so much work to do anything that feels satisfying! Maybe I’ll just post random snippets of my master’s thesis from now on. Ha.