We’re in the middle of a crime wave the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades. We know this despite the Biden Administration failure to update the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer—the new dash-boarding system that should be giving criminal justice experts and the public as near to up-to-date crime data as possible. We know this because crime is a concrete manifestation of immorality that directly affects our lives. People experience crime and disorder in their lives. And social media has provided a means for seeing even more through other people’s eyes. We suspect the reason the FBI is not reporting the facts is because the facts will confirm what we already know: governments have utterly failed to protect the public from crime and violence.
Above the crime wave is represented at the national level by the rates of homicide and aggravated assault, both of which rose precipitously with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, what has been dubbed the “Ferguson Effect.” Because much of American is rural and suburban, and crime rates are typically much lower in these contexts compared to urban areas, the rise in these rates, as dramatic as they are, are made less so by aggregation. You may explore states and police areas by following the link with the caveat that these data have not been updated since 2021.
What explains the crime wave? “If crime is a product of poverty and discrimination as they say endlessly, why was there so much less of it when poverty and discrimination were much worse than today?” Thomas Sowell once said. “If massive [social] programs are the only hope to reduce violence in the ghetto, why was there so much less violence long before anyone ever thought of these programs?”
The implication of Sowell’s observations is correct: poverty doesn’t cause crime. The cause of crime is multifactorial. Structural inequality and material deprivation associated with poverty must be accompanied by family disintegration, demoralization, and the emergence and nurturance of a subculture that delegitimizes normative structures conducive to the development of a law abiding character. To be sure, without a system of determined wealth redistribution the capitalist mode of production produces inequality and material deprivation, but it’s the custodial state that progressives built over the twentieth century that demoralizes populations under their control and undermines their moral integrity, and these pieces are necessary for the emergence and persistence of a criminogenic culture.
The lull in crime between the early 1990s and the current rise in crime over the last decade was achieved by a massive expansion of the criminal control apparatus—more police on the street, greater technological prowess, better organization of command-and-control structure, aggressive policing and prosecution, tougher laws and sentencing, and a drastic increase in the incarceration of serious offenders. This effort was mounted at all levels of government—local, state, and federal. After decades of rising crime and violence beginning in the late 1960s, crime plateaued in the early 1990s and then began declining, this occurring in the face of rising inequality and poverty caused by globalization, i.e., offshoring of production and mass immigration.
Since then, a comprehensive political project, involving both propaganda of the word, seen in the rhetoric of antiracism and critical race theory, blaming the plight of poor disproportionately black and brown people on the western way of life, and propaganda of the deed, has delegitimized American institutions, especially the criminal justice system. The project has targeted the police with respect to its interactions with those subpopulations drastically overrepresented in crime, primarily black males, with the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” accompanied by the systemic depolicing of vulnerable communities under the banner of “Defunding the Police,” the politicization of prosecutors’ offices by transnational financiers, the widespread practice of cashless bail, and a myriad of other “reforms.”
This massive stand down of the criminal justice apparatus has unleashed those socialized in the criminogenic environments created by progressive policymakers and managed by Democratic Party members to prey on each other and those living near them. The millions flowing across the southern border fuel the fire. The effort to tamp down popular recognition of these facts is marked by accusations of bigotry and racism. But the public is becoming desensitized to the smears of woke progressivism. Situations often carry their own radicalizing effects. The people want law and order. They demand their human right to public safety. The violence of the present moment has shaken loose the memory of our disorderly past. We’ve been here before. And we don’t like it.
freedom and reason 