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 mericans
don't care about crime anymore. Even after the September 11 attacks
muted and refocused campaigns in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York
City, ordinary crime never emerged as a major issue. While all major
party candidates mouthed the same reassuring platitudes about terrorism,
law enforcement, a defining left-right wedge issue in nearly every
important election from 1960 to 1996, became little more than a
cipher.
Indeed, all
three loosing candidates, Virginia's Mark Early, New Jersey's Bret
Schundler, and New York City's Mark Green, understood crime better
than their opponents. Two of the three winning candidates, New York
City Mayor-Elect Michael Bloomberg and Virginia Governor-Elect Mark
Warner, have never held office much less worked with a police chief
or prison warden. Early, on the other hand, built his reputation
as a tough-on-crime state legislator and then showed genuine compassion
in creating an innovative mentoring program as Virginia's attorney
general. As a mayor, likewise, Schundler helped to rebuild a corrupt
police department and improved relations between the police and
minority communities in Jersey City. Old-school leftist Green, who
surprised many by running to the right of Republican Bloomberg,
secured the endorsement of legendary former New York City Police
Commissioner William Bratton and promised to move NYPD away from
the unsustainable, costly, and disruptive strategy of keeping crime
down through massive spending on police overtime and street-level
drug busts. On the other hand, Bloomberg, Warner, and New Jersey
Governor-Elect James McGreevey (who briefly worked as a prosecutor
and parole-board official in the early 1980s) did support the sensible
center-right consensus on law enforcement. All three spoke in favor
of community-police partnerships, continued investments in prison
infrastructure, and effective, lengthy sentences for wrongdoers.
Still, none equaled his opponents' crime-fighting credentials.
While the last decades' 40-percent across-the-board drop in reported
crime shows that the trio of better policing, more prisons, and
tough penalties has worked to reduce lawlessness, the United States
still has a major criminal-justice problem. Low-income neighborhoods,
particularly those with large minority populations, remain far too
dangerous. While putting thugs behind bars has made the country
safer, public policy verges on negligence
when it comes to reintegrating convicts and providing humane
environments inside prisons. Ending traditional parole in many states
provided a quick-and-dirty way to increase prison sentences without
amending individual laws but it also removed the biggest incentives
for prisoners to take part in rehabilitation programs and, perhaps
as a result, participation in those programs has fallen sharply
even as prison populations have swelled. New spending on coercive drug treatment and testing coupled with certain punishment for relapsed addicts would almost certainly achieve a greater marginal reduction in drug use than would increased enforcement spending. Overtly
virtue-based mentoring programs and special boarding schools for
disadvantaged children offer hope for nipping crime at the bud in
places where morals-free Great Society programs failed. In the wake
of September 11, police departments and state governments might
even want to consider taking community partnerships to the next
level and rebuilding 1940s and 1950s civil-defense programs as a
prophylactic against future terrorist attacks.
But these ideas
don't get mentioned more because the mainstream Left has, in effect,
become prisoner to the conservative status quo on crime.
Even in the wake of September 11, the academic Left still seethes
with hatred for law enforcement but left-of-center politicians have
come to an accommodation with the police. Honest, moderate lefties
like Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown and Delaware Senator Joseph Biden
realize that effective, hard-nosed law enforcement provides an enormous
boost to the poor by reducing fear and stimulating inner city economies.
Even leftists as dedicated as Hillary Clinton know that soccer moms
and dads don't like the idea of seeing drug dealers take over suburban
high schools.
Americans have
every reason to feel deeply suspicious of new ideas about crime
and policing emanating from the left. When the left-wing consensus
that economic development would end crime prevailed between the
mid-1950s and Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, crime rates tripled.
Since Bill Clinton brought the Democrats back to the center on crime,
offense rates have fallen by nearly half. But left-wing solutions
can still be inane: The Department of Housing and Urban Development
sponsored efforts to use magical crystals against crime and stress
until newly installed housing secretary Mel Martinez killed the
program earlier this year. As a result, savvy left-leaning politicians
who want tough-on-crime credentials need to ape their conservative
opponents even when that means refusing to allow terminally-ill
prison inmates to spend their final days at home, failing to follow-up
with mentally-ill released prisoners, funding menacing SWAT teams
instead of police athletic leagues, and demanding 20-year adult
sentences for screwed up 15-year-old burglars.
The Left, trapped
by the manifest failures of its policies on crime, has no credibility
when it calls for change of America's law-enforcement policies and
indeed, traditional left-wing "solutions" like opening
prison doors and creating new entitlement welfare programs would
likely drive crime rates through the roof. The crime issue still
belongs to conservatives. Making America's continuing crime problem
a winning political issue once again will require courage, vision,
and plenty of compassion from American conservatives.
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