Script: Police Militarization
Added 2020-07-06 15:00:04 +0000 UTCFinal script for The Quartering of Troops | Police Militarization
Comments
@Lawrence, do you have the sources for those points listed or in a digital form? Everyone has an angle, or so I am told, and mine is EVs. So less lead in the atmo is a goal of mine. Sounds like a worthwhile topic to look into.
SirSpammenot
2020-08-19 03:03:35 +0000 UTCI watched the video just now. The one thing I really disagree with is the notion that the increase in crime up to 1991 was purely a consequence of changes in laws or the War on Drugs. No question that criminalizing stuff made more criminals, but the big increase happened before Nixon declared that war. From 1960 to 1975, the US homicide death rate tripled. Most other violent crimes (not as accurately measured) probably rose in exact parallel. In just 15 years, the country became MUCH more violent, and this prompted a huge backlash among voters. More about that below. The cause of this tremendous increase in crime has been debated for decades now. Initially, there was some notion that the fault lay with lawless culture of the 1960s. Influential criminologist James Q. Wilson theorized that the Baby Boomer generation had overwhelmed the usual process of socializing young people into law-abiding citizens. It is true that the proportion of the population in the high-crime age group of 15 to 25 had increased. When that age group started to grow again, Wilson predicted a new crime wave. It didn't happen. To his credit, he openly acknowledged that he had been wrong. The rate of violent crimes that increased hugely from 1960 to 1975, then fluctuated within a narrow range until the 1990s, then fell back to the rate of the 1950s. Why did this happen? Many theories were proposed, but the growing consensus now points to leaded gasoline. As more and more kids grew up breathing leaded exhaust fumes, especially in cities, all of them (me included) suffered brain damage to an extent. A small proportion were affected badly enough that their inhibitions against violent behavior in their teens and 20s were loosened. And then, as lead was removed from gasoline, the generation of kids growing up without lead in the air were significantly less violent. More recently, a study of cities that installed new water systems around 1900 (there were many) showed that the ones that used lead pipes had higher rates of violent crime by the 1920s than the ones that used steel pipes. But the increase in violence had severe consequences, beyond the people who were hurt or killed. Starting in the 1970s, there was a growing anger among American voters about crime. Of course, many of them remembered the 1950s, when the violent crime rate was much lower. This fueled the culture-war notion that the 1960s were a disaster and had unleashed criminals. Ronald Reagan probably wouldn't have been elected without this backlash against crime. Also part of this reaction was the passage of tough-on-crime ballot proposals in many states, lengthening sentences, restricting parole, etc., etc. For a politician to oppose these measures was political suicide at the time. The 1994 crime bill was part of this. Here in Michigan, in 1978, we had a ballot initiative which abolished "good time", that is, shortening a prison sentence for good behavior. My friends and I all voted against it, but it won overwhelmingly in all 83 counties. The county with the largest "no" vote -- I think about 35% -- was Jackson County, site of the huge state prison, where at least some of the voters knew a thing or two about how prisons work. Of course, the war on drugs and the militarization of police made everything worse, exactly as you said, but the context was the huge wave of public resentment over crime -- which didn't just immediately recede when violent crime rates finally fell.
Lawrence Kestenbaum
2020-07-12 23:44:16 +0000 UTC
