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Anthony Bouza and the roots of the crime problem. Has anything changed since then? [1]
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Date: 2022-08-13
Recently I ran into a book on policing written by Anthony V. Bouza, The Police Mystique. An Insider’s Look at Cops, Crime, and the Criminal Justice System. Bouza, a former Chief of Police in Minneapolis and a former Commander of Police in the Bronx, wrote the book in 1990. These were times when the public demanded stricter laws, more police officers, jails, and judges, and opposed social welfare programs.
I found Chapter 18 to be the most exciting part of Bouza's text. It examines the roots of street crime. Here, he argued that street crime resulted from social and economic conditions, and our society's reluctance to do anything about them hindered the fight against criminality. As long as these socio-economic conditions continue, violence will not go away. No matter what the police do, their efforts against crime will fail. If society does not change course and leave these socio-economic problems unattended, it will regret it. These difficulties will get worse and eventually result in riots and more violence.
Bouza was not afraid to criticize a system that benefited him but failed to meet the needs of many of its people, namely the poor, the weak, and the marginalized. In answering his question about why there was so much crime? He wrote: “The answer may lie in a complex series of factors that probably includes unpopular economic notions about the distribution of wealth, ideas about our morals and values, and racist policies that stubbornly resist even being discussed.”
The author believed that the country's economic system worked against the poor and benefited the rich. It distributed wealth inequality, and, as a result, the rich got more prosperous, and the poor got poorer. The gap between the rich and the poor continued to expand, but society did nothing to reverse it.
The taxing and economic policies of the Reagan administration expanded the disparity between the haves and have-nots. They left the issue of the poor unattended. This indifference toward the poor resulted from racism and a culture that encouraged selfishness, money, greed, and luxury and neglected the welfare of others. “A nation full of zest and vigor, growing under values that emphasize “us” rather than “me,” altruism over hedonism, sacrifice over pleasure, and service over self, will provide for a much safer society than the one that we have today, which is fast sinking into dissolution in the pursuit of happiness,” he stressed.
Bouza wasn't exaggerating about the country's economic state. Even Republican strategists admitted that the economic policies of the Reagan administration concentrated vast wealth in the hands of a favored few. Kevin Phillips, in his book, The Politics of Rich and Poor. Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath (1990) wrote that this intensified inequality and increased poverty and homelessness.
Under Reagan, the United States witnessed the most significant transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich. Borrowing money to fund the 1981 tax cuts that benefited the rich and the big corporations and trillions in defense spending exacerbated economic hardship and the homeless problem. It also turned the United States from the world's leading creditor to its largest debtor.
Bouza described how the white people destroyed the black family and how they brought blacks to the United States in chains. They subjugated them, treated them as second-class citizens, and stripped them of their dignity. Eventually, they gave them legal and political equality with whites. But “while this was going on, very visibly and attended by high excitement, the cultural, social and economic barriers were being silently strengthened.”
According to Bouza, the typical street criminal was a poor, uneducated male involved with drugs. In most cases, he was born to a single, usually teenage mother. He was deprived of care or abused during infancy. He was the creation “of the welfare culture”; and had “otherwise been shaped and brutalized by the conditions” of his life. Racism played a vital role as well.
The cycle of violence started even before the child was born. Neglect began in the womb, with the mother's diet or addictions, prenatal neglect, or other factors. The mother's incompetence in dealing with the baby deepened and sped up the problem. By the time a poor, abused kid got to kindergarten, his path was already set.
Bouza was concerned that America was losing the drug war, and drugs produced crime. The Reagan administration spent millions on “law enforcement” but granted “little or no money for experiments, treatment, or analysis.”
Police drug raids and “buy and bust” on the street-level operations did not produce the expected results.
He also criticized anti-abortionists for forcing women to bear children they didn't want, couldn't, or didn't know how to raise. “It is a contemporary anomaly that antiabortion groups, usually allied to conservative law-and-order causes, have never been attracted by the argument that making abortions freely available to poor young women is an effective method of reducing the number of potential criminals,” Bouza wrote.
Bouza lamented that while rich pregnant young women could fly to states where abortion was legal, the poor would have been at the mercy of ”midwives and butchers.” If caught, they would have faced legal repercussions as well.
Since the roots of the crime problem lay in bad socio-economic conditions, Bouza proposed policymakers should divert their attention to these difficulties and try to eliminate or reduce them. Overcoming these obstacles will require a fairer tax system, more attention, and money for health and social welfare reforms, education, the homeless, and drug addicts.
Over thirty years have passed since Bouza published his book. Do you agree with his conclusions? How accurate were his predictions? Has anything changed since then?
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