Thursday, December 8, 2011
Imagine That
Can trust in government result in a lower crime rate?
Posted by Michael Corbin on Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 4:00 AM
In America, distrust of social institutions is part of our national fabric. But here in the 21st century, in cities like Baltimore, we face a choice about how or whether we will share responsibility for changing the dynamic that allows social phenomena like our "crime problem" to persist.
In the present we lack a shared story about our collective complicity, our collective responsibility, and our collective ability to change Baltimore and America. This is not some Pollyannaish call for us all to just get along, nor is it some saccharine call to patriotic purpose. Rather, it's a modest proposal: We can think specifically about Baltimore's crime problem differently and in so doing imagine a different America.
From the final installment in the Crime and Punishment series:
In 1998, University of Maryland professor Gary LaFree wrote a book called Losing Legitimacy, arguing that street crime in places like Baltimore was not merely a function of economic conditions, inequality, demographic forces, or changes in policing strategies, as was then, and is largely still, the conventional wisdom. Instead, he argued that the best predictor of crime was whether people believed that government officials and social institutions were legitimate. If you believed that the social contract applied to you, you were less likely to become a criminal.LaFree, who today directs the university's Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, was ahead of his time. Today, many others have taken up his argument in an effort to explain crime's continuing decline in America and Baltimore despite historically bad economic conditions. Ohio State University history professor Randolph Roth, author of the award-winning 2009 book American Homicide, says the theory explains why people kill. (See "Murderland," Jan. '10 Urbanite.)
Roth and others have even proposed an "Obama effect" to explain the continuing drop on urban crime. "The inauguration of the first black president and the passing of the Bush administration re-legitimized the government in the eyes of many Americans during the first few months of 2009," Roth says. "African Americans and other racial minorities, who live disproportionately in America's cities, were more deeply affected than anyone else, and it is likely that their greater trust in the political process and their positive feelings about the new president led to lower rates of urban violence."
It was precisely this trust that De'Von Brown was trying to foster with his city council run this summer.
Here is Roth taking on some common misconceptions of his work in American Homicide, and whether our trust of social institutions over time in American history really has the power to reduce the crime rate. And here is Roth's take on the "Obama effect" on crime and the piece in Slate.com examining the evidence.
But beyond a narrow academic debate about Roth's or LaFree's thesis, something else is possible to discern in their approach. It seems quixotic to talk about our trust in institutions and the stories that allow us to apprehend collective responsibility in America today, and that's because we have such little practice at it. Hyper-irony or caricatured patriotism and earnestness, exaggerated partisanship or the focus on the minutiae of building a "program" for a technocratic solution to our problems is where we live now.
We need more than this. We can do more than this.
Comments (2)
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"Roth and others have even proposed an "Obama effect" to explain the continuing drop on urban crime. "- I think it's the best way to explain this fact. The World history showed that these are not isolated cases of urther developments.I'm agree with them.
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dislikeMistrust to the social institutions is more than just part of our national fabric it's our core belief.
Well, maybe not the one we realize. But it exists deep down in our minds.
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