ogc163
Superstar
A bit too much moral grandstanding and lock them up rhetoric on here, James Forman in his conversation with Ezra Klein does a good job of explaining the complexity regarding the effectiveness of greater police presence in Black high crime areas:
EZRA KLEIN:
One of my observations, from just being a political reporter for years, is that the threat of violence always and almost everywhere creates terrible politics. Think of America in the post 9/11 moment. Our politics were, in many cases, grotesque. When you have countries that are under threat from an outside player, politics often gets much worse. You have martial law. You have tremendous obligations of civil liberties. You had in America the internment of Japanese during World War II.
And there is a lot of social science research, how it activates authoritarian personalities and fear responses. The more afraid people are personally, the simpler and more punitive and more strong mannish their politics get. And one thing that applies to me is that you really, if you want to see better solutions here, you actually have to take very seriously stopping crime from getting too high before it starts. When it’s not that high, there’s actually a lot of policy space. But the higher it gets, the more the policy space narrows.
But so I think that actually brings us to what begins to happen next, which is that in the ’90s through the mid 2010s, crime rates plummet. I mean, across the country, they fall by roughly half. I mean, in some places like DC and New York and LA and San Francisco, you have falls that are at 70 percent or 80 percent for violent crime. So was this a success for this punitive, tough on crime approach, or how do you explain the crime drop?
JAMES FORMAN, JR.:
It’s such an important question. And when I was doing my research, I interviewed a bunch of different criminologists. And there was nothing close to consensus. In fact, one of them said to me, look, if there’s 10 of us in the room, you’re going to get 10 different reasons for why crime goes up and why it goes down, and when it goes up and when it goes down. And none of the reasons are going to be — they’re all going to contradict and undermine one another.
So there are theories about lead and reduction of lead in paint and in water and in the air because of automobiles. There are some people who think it has to do with the number of young people, right? Young people disproportionately are more likely to commit crimes. And so, when you have sort of age cohorts moving through the system, that can have an impact as well. I think there’s pretty strong evidence that the end of that sort of open air drug markets in the late ’80s and early ’90s and the way in which drug distribution in more recent years has moved because of the internet and otherwise has moved more behind doors and doesn’t have that fight over turf that you see so well documented in the wire.
And certainly, I think there’s no question that most people, even people who are opposed to longer sentences and heavier police presence, nonetheless say that the sort of mass incarceration approach of locking more people up for longer played some role. But how much, that’s where the disagreement begins. Because what we know is that from 2000 to 2020, 2019, we have about 15 states that reduced their prison populations and reduced crime. We know that in New York City, famously, when the stop and frisk era was ended, which the defenders said, at the time, is going to lead to chaos, and, in fact, crime continued to go down.
So there’s evidence, I think, going in lots of different directions. I personally myself, I don’t have an answer. I don’t have a, well, among all these different criminologists, here’s where I come down. I do think it is most likely to be some combination of those factors. And I’m not, honestly, that persuaded that this is one of these things that criminologists are ever going to figure out.
Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews James Forman Jr.
EZRA KLEIN:
One of my observations, from just being a political reporter for years, is that the threat of violence always and almost everywhere creates terrible politics. Think of America in the post 9/11 moment. Our politics were, in many cases, grotesque. When you have countries that are under threat from an outside player, politics often gets much worse. You have martial law. You have tremendous obligations of civil liberties. You had in America the internment of Japanese during World War II.
And there is a lot of social science research, how it activates authoritarian personalities and fear responses. The more afraid people are personally, the simpler and more punitive and more strong mannish their politics get. And one thing that applies to me is that you really, if you want to see better solutions here, you actually have to take very seriously stopping crime from getting too high before it starts. When it’s not that high, there’s actually a lot of policy space. But the higher it gets, the more the policy space narrows.
But so I think that actually brings us to what begins to happen next, which is that in the ’90s through the mid 2010s, crime rates plummet. I mean, across the country, they fall by roughly half. I mean, in some places like DC and New York and LA and San Francisco, you have falls that are at 70 percent or 80 percent for violent crime. So was this a success for this punitive, tough on crime approach, or how do you explain the crime drop?
JAMES FORMAN, JR.:
It’s such an important question. And when I was doing my research, I interviewed a bunch of different criminologists. And there was nothing close to consensus. In fact, one of them said to me, look, if there’s 10 of us in the room, you’re going to get 10 different reasons for why crime goes up and why it goes down, and when it goes up and when it goes down. And none of the reasons are going to be — they’re all going to contradict and undermine one another.
So there are theories about lead and reduction of lead in paint and in water and in the air because of automobiles. There are some people who think it has to do with the number of young people, right? Young people disproportionately are more likely to commit crimes. And so, when you have sort of age cohorts moving through the system, that can have an impact as well. I think there’s pretty strong evidence that the end of that sort of open air drug markets in the late ’80s and early ’90s and the way in which drug distribution in more recent years has moved because of the internet and otherwise has moved more behind doors and doesn’t have that fight over turf that you see so well documented in the wire.
And certainly, I think there’s no question that most people, even people who are opposed to longer sentences and heavier police presence, nonetheless say that the sort of mass incarceration approach of locking more people up for longer played some role. But how much, that’s where the disagreement begins. Because what we know is that from 2000 to 2020, 2019, we have about 15 states that reduced their prison populations and reduced crime. We know that in New York City, famously, when the stop and frisk era was ended, which the defenders said, at the time, is going to lead to chaos, and, in fact, crime continued to go down.
So there’s evidence, I think, going in lots of different directions. I personally myself, I don’t have an answer. I don’t have a, well, among all these different criminologists, here’s where I come down. I do think it is most likely to be some combination of those factors. And I’m not, honestly, that persuaded that this is one of these things that criminologists are ever going to figure out.
Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews James Forman Jr.
All them grown ass people worrying about themselves, running past them kids and leaving them out there sickens my stomach more than anything else in this video. shyt crazy man. Bully love the kids, man. 
Bully love the kids.. 
