egb_hibs
Private Member
- Joined
- Jul 2, 2002
Just finished a book by this title which I recommend - although lazy readers like me may struggle to finish when it moves off the streets and into the courts which I found a little dull.
Nevertheless a very thought provoking study on the awful problems of crime within US black ghettos. The author doesn't really dwell on explanations that suit liberal or conservative arguments - the legacy of both slavery and family breakdown are all over it but not particularly dwelled upon. Meanwhile, suggested remedies will please and displease both sides.
An interesting dimension of the book is the way that cliches are busted. The homicide cops may be uniformly republican, but all are well grounded and wear the horrors of the job lightly - no one is sitting each night with a bottle of jack, contemplating their revolver. Meanwhile they are animated with the conviction that black lives matter and that suggestions of a specifically black problem are bullshit, that the problem is instead a deficiency in enforcing a state monopoly on violence (see what I mean about pleasing and displeasing both political camps at once).
The author sympathises with the view and traces the appalling rates on black homicide as consistent right back to the slave era, where a lack of equivalent attention from the legal system is argued to allow violent lawlessness to prosper. Bearing this up is a stat I read somewhere else whilst reading the book - black men are famously over represented in U.S. Jails. However given the ratio of violent crime they commit vs whites, they are actually underrepresented on that basis. This chimes with the books point - black perpetrators of violence actually receive less attention and lighter sentences (when their victims are black as they overwhelmingly are) and the black population suffer the consequences. In the affected neighbourhoods the politics are of course complex, with the police simultaneously taunted for their lack of attention, and decried as an occupying force where attention is given. (The chant 'one time' you used to here in rap records seems to mirror a street shout to patrolling police who come by once a day).
The stats in the books are fucking horrific. Black men in affected areas are 38x times more likely to be murdered than the average citizen and have a 1 in 35 chance of being murdered (possibly the other way around). Meanwhile the book is at its most bleakly effective in passages where it is following the cops in real time - say a week has gone by between two events, the author will casually and without comment catalogue all the murders in the area in the intervening days; it's horrific.
As well as the GOP pleasing / liberal displeasing tough policing line, the reverse is argued to be a main strategy, in respect of welfare payments helping first offenders go straight. The book ends on an optimistic note with homicide plummeting in LA (the setting) as elsewhere in the U.S.
Sadly, since then, this year has seen a rocketing rise in several U.S. Cities, which pundits I have read attribute to one or both of liberal mayors rolling back the broken windows policing policy after which crime fell massively, and which has always been dismissed by liberal thinkers as the cause (their conclusion being it just happened for reasons unknown) and / or a roll back of police presence after all the cop shooting controversies this year. (I read the book on the back of these, I'm presently wading through a tome on white power movements in the U.S. On the back of the charleston shooting which is genuinely tedious, being full of unsympathetic racist socialists and anarchists of the the most aresholeish kind)
Recommended.
Nevertheless a very thought provoking study on the awful problems of crime within US black ghettos. The author doesn't really dwell on explanations that suit liberal or conservative arguments - the legacy of both slavery and family breakdown are all over it but not particularly dwelled upon. Meanwhile, suggested remedies will please and displease both sides.
An interesting dimension of the book is the way that cliches are busted. The homicide cops may be uniformly republican, but all are well grounded and wear the horrors of the job lightly - no one is sitting each night with a bottle of jack, contemplating their revolver. Meanwhile they are animated with the conviction that black lives matter and that suggestions of a specifically black problem are bullshit, that the problem is instead a deficiency in enforcing a state monopoly on violence (see what I mean about pleasing and displeasing both political camps at once).
The author sympathises with the view and traces the appalling rates on black homicide as consistent right back to the slave era, where a lack of equivalent attention from the legal system is argued to allow violent lawlessness to prosper. Bearing this up is a stat I read somewhere else whilst reading the book - black men are famously over represented in U.S. Jails. However given the ratio of violent crime they commit vs whites, they are actually underrepresented on that basis. This chimes with the books point - black perpetrators of violence actually receive less attention and lighter sentences (when their victims are black as they overwhelmingly are) and the black population suffer the consequences. In the affected neighbourhoods the politics are of course complex, with the police simultaneously taunted for their lack of attention, and decried as an occupying force where attention is given. (The chant 'one time' you used to here in rap records seems to mirror a street shout to patrolling police who come by once a day).
The stats in the books are fucking horrific. Black men in affected areas are 38x times more likely to be murdered than the average citizen and have a 1 in 35 chance of being murdered (possibly the other way around). Meanwhile the book is at its most bleakly effective in passages where it is following the cops in real time - say a week has gone by between two events, the author will casually and without comment catalogue all the murders in the area in the intervening days; it's horrific.
As well as the GOP pleasing / liberal displeasing tough policing line, the reverse is argued to be a main strategy, in respect of welfare payments helping first offenders go straight. The book ends on an optimistic note with homicide plummeting in LA (the setting) as elsewhere in the U.S.
Sadly, since then, this year has seen a rocketing rise in several U.S. Cities, which pundits I have read attribute to one or both of liberal mayors rolling back the broken windows policing policy after which crime fell massively, and which has always been dismissed by liberal thinkers as the cause (their conclusion being it just happened for reasons unknown) and / or a roll back of police presence after all the cop shooting controversies this year. (I read the book on the back of these, I'm presently wading through a tome on white power movements in the U.S. On the back of the charleston shooting which is genuinely tedious, being full of unsympathetic racist socialists and anarchists of the the most aresholeish kind)
Recommended.
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