I've worked with criminologists on academic projects, and was initially shocked at how blindly, virulently left-wing they were. I'd also expected criminologists to be like economists or B-school profs, i.e. at least intermittently moderate, and perhaps overall somewhat to the right of the average academic.
Nuh-uh! The ones I've worked with are just sociologists who work extra hard to deny reality, because they've got to 'explain' the dark side of human societies.
I recall mentioning broken windows policing in the course of one project -- I might as well have pooped on the table, for the reaction I got.
It is both sad and worrying. The practice of criminology would be greatly improved by closing down university criminology departments, and making the subject a branch of police training.
Possibly the saddest example of the breathtaking naivety of criminologists was the "Learning Together" event for University of Cambridge criminologists and supposedly reformed criminals held at Fishmongers' Hall in London on 29th November 2019. The poster boy for the program was the convicted terrorist Usman Khan, whom the criminologists had given a laptop to help him write poetry. At the London event he killed two alumni of the Institute of Criminology before being shot dead by police.
Gladwell’s thesis is easily defeated by driving around Chicago, Detroit, or Baltimore. It’s quite easy to find neighborhoods with abundant evidence of past glory - broad boulevards, architecturally pleasing homes and commercial buildings - that are centers of all the worst socioeconomic indicators today. A neighborhood and its qualities are fundamentally a reflection of the people who live there. This will forever be the case, but because the people most justifiably associated with dysfunction and decline happen to be an important political base for the most powerful political party in the nation, society is browbeaten into looking at everything but the most obvious explanations.
Well-written. I am most familiar with Washington DC which has undergone massive gentrification over the past thirty years. You can still go into neighborhoods in Northeast Washington that are very black, lower middle-class, with some handsome homes with crime rates not as high as Anacostia's. But these areas are slowly gentrifying. Lefty whites see a stately home, buy it, and renovate it.
Washington's Anacostia neighborhoods have the highest crime rates in the city. Yet you can occasionally see some very nice homes that must have built in the 1920s and even further back. You have to wonder who lived in these homes originally. Businessmen. Doctors. Bureaucrats. Anacostia was part of outer DC for a long time and semi-rural. Frederick Douglas lived in a house in Anacostia after the Civil War.
I lived in DC for a long time and bought my first house in one of those NE black neighborhoods you mentioned. It did gentrify slowly, but the Post had a piece a couple of years ago about how H Street went from one of the hottest places to eat and for entertainment to stalling out after 2020 - gee, what happened? The article did mention crime seemed to be increasing but obviously didn’t include the decision to relax policing and prosecutions. I went on Zillow and saw that my former house basically doubled in value in the ten years leading up to its most recent sale in 2019, but the estimated value today is only about 10 percent higher over the last five years.
H Street was a big slum for a long time. In the 80s, the 8th and H Street Crew tortured and murdered a woman. But as Capitol Hill expanded, H Street began to change as well, especially after 2005. But H Street's problem is it abuts Trinidad, one of Washington's worst neighborhoods. Until Trinidad is gentrified, H Street will have problems.
H Street was once one of my favorite ways to get home. H Street to Benning to Kenilworth Avenue to Route 50 and home. I've seen a lot of change in those years.
What brought so many Latinos to Chicago (and when)--the cool, breezy winters?
At the height of the crack wars, a special time, the WaPoo published a map of DC homicides, and there was some concentration at two intersections in SE and NE, but they still had plenty elsewhere. White/foreign NW had all of one.
I grew up in nice suburb of Chicago and it was getting loaded with immigrants from Mexico by the mid 1980s. In 1985 I got a free order at McDonald drive-thru because one of the guys from the AP classes had a summer job there. When I got back from college four years later it was all Mexicans.
My wife grew up in the Chicago area (Oak Park and Hinsdale) and I've been there numerous times both in conjunction with family visits and in my profession as a corporate pilot. I never had any problems. However, I understand why Chicago has shootings. as does every other city with large black populations whose families moved there from Mississippi and other Deep South states starting in the 1950s as cotton farming became mechanized and black families were forced to move to town, with many moving north. Chicago has the same problems as St. Louis, Detroit, Memphis, Birmingham and Atlanta as well as L.A. Jackson, Tennessee, near where I grew up has major problems in certain areas. Violence was common among blacks in the South after the Civil War (and before, although they were kept in check by the patrollers who patrolled the plantations at night to make sure the slaves weren't engaging in mischief.) Put blacks in concentrations and you're going to have problems, some of it violent.
Atlanta got a statistical bump in crime from New Orleans expatriates. It turned out there were about 10 NO thugs trying to carve out new territory. I also remember seeing Ray Nagin campaign billboards in Atlanta.
I read an article with some white NO old money-types and one of them was quoted as saying they had met with Nagin and said they would stay and help rebuild but if things reverted to the status quo ante, they were gone and not coming back. Here's the NO murder rate, showing a trough after Katrina when everybody left, then a sharp, high spike in 2007. Did everyone come back? WTF? I know Sandra Bullock left so I guess the old bluebloods did too.
Don't teachers say if they could just get their two worst students booted out the door most of their problems would be solved? It would be helpful to the cause if we could show that a really small non-transient number of people are the only ones holding civil society hostage.
The long-run downtrend is good news, but it's because we're getting older and the birth rate is cratering.
Chicago received much of its black population from Mississippi, West Tennessee, Alabama and Louisiana. Just yesterday, I was listening to The Animals on CD and the tune "Send Her Back to Walker", an old blues tune, was played. The South in the tune was the South of Chicago, the heart of the black diaspora to Chicago. Walker is just the small town in the South where the girl in the song comes from. Many of the blues musicians made Chicago a home.
So, per Gladwell, all we need to do is eliminate the shooty blocks. How so? When there is a shooting, just remove the block from the map. Keep it up for a few years and all the shooty areas will disappear from maps. Then, when we look at crime heat maps, we can all breathe a sigh of relief.
Had he written, as many of us initially thought he did, that "A Tiny % of Urban Blacks Accounted for an Overwhelming Number of a City’s Crimes," Gladwell would have been accurate. A relatively small percentage of the black population accounts for most of the killing. Considered the low resolution rate of gang murders, I would suspect that a killer rarely kills only once. Surely there are a number of Urban Aces.
On "The Wire," Wee-Bey Brice handles a lot of the killings for Avon Barksdale's gang. When he's finally arrested, he confesses to some additional murders he didn't commit in order to protect other gang members, knowing it wouldn't make any difference to his already-maximum prison sentence.
Black criminals aren’t like that in real life. In real life they’re like the 17 year old black kid that stole a car last week in Philadelphia. There was a 12 year old girl in the car, unbeknownst to him. When he realized what he’d done, he raped the 12 year old girl, just because.
That’s how black criminals behave, not by sacrificing themselves for others.
If municipalities open up their databases to the AI-assisted number crunchers the data could get pretty granular. I actually wouldn't be surprised if it turned out two thousand individuals are a way outsized part of Chicago's problem, and lots of other cities' problems.
Maybe Gladwell is being Straussian here? He's my age, 61, and my impression is men start resigning themselves to the fact that reality > ideology in their late 50s.
Roll the die and move your game piece forward into the next neighborhood. You can be a BMW ZU8, a Mercedes Maybach, or a Cadillac Celestiq! Friends and family will love playing Blocks or Blacks, coming next year from Hasbro! Chicago, Newark, and Baltimore editions available for Christmas!
"that those same few blocks remained violent year after year, and that this observation was true everywhere—"
Year after year could be two years. This contention obviously breaks down if you try to place those years in the 1960s. I don't even need to check to know my dad's neighborhood on the south side was not shooty when he was young.
As a young man (late 50s or early 60s I'd guess) he took piano lessons in Cabrini Green. Had he tried that when I was a young man, he'd only have got the one lesson.
Austin should share a little with Lake View. Perhaps a little Section 8 Housing will help Lake View catch up to Austin. Michelle Obama Gardens. Refrigerator Perry Dwellings. Javy Baez Towers.
Hey Jackass has some interesting data. It would be interesting to know such statistics for other cities and counties. Having grown up in Prince George's County MD, I can guess which towns have more murders and which towns have less. Same with Washington DC.
The common denominator in the murders of Chicago appears to be blacks. I would guess that the Chicago of Richard Daley, Ernie Banks and George Halas had much fewer murders. Wives could walk to the market without fear in the olden days. Hospital emergency rooms would have been less active. But we're not going back. That would be reactionary. Parts of Chicago are barely livable but they vote universally Democratic and that's what's important.
One reason there is a lot of push, especially in Europe , to 'regulate' AI is that AI programs would be good at noticing these patterns, which would be racist.
I asked Perplexity. 'Are homicide rates in major US cities correlated with percentage of Black residents?'
A simple yes/no question.
It said 'The correlation observed in the data does not imply a direct causal relationship, but rather reflects the intersection of race with concentrated poverty, segregation, historical disadvantage, and other social determinants.'
It reminded me how these blocks were redlined.
Am I forced to go out and kill people , because so many of my ancestors died in a coal-mining disaster that many of my family decided to emigrate in search of safer work?
Way back when, I was listening to "All Things Considered" when they were covering a study that had come out finding that black women a had far higher rate of STDs than did non-blacks. The host asked the journalist if there was an explanation for such a disparity. I thought, "My god, what are you asking this man to do, commit career and social suicide?!" After a moment's hesitation, he answered, "It probably has to do with housing." Quick thinking.
My mother also grew up in Oak Park, moving away in 1933 during the depression to upstate NY. Oak Park was still an attractive neighborhood when we visited during the 1960s. Today’s streetscapes are somewhat marred by the many cars that families accumulate today. The garages on hidden alleys can’t handle the challenge. The trees are really nice. Big.
Maybe it’s trees that make the dirt magic and inhibit the urge to kill the fellow who has “dissed” you in an unacceptable manner?
Think what the murder rate would be if the shooty folks were good at aiming handguns?
In 1983 I took my uncle for his first visit to Oak Park since he was 8 in 1929. I asked him if the trees were much bigger now. He replied, "Much smaller."
I've worked with criminologists on academic projects, and was initially shocked at how blindly, virulently left-wing they were. I'd also expected criminologists to be like economists or B-school profs, i.e. at least intermittently moderate, and perhaps overall somewhat to the right of the average academic.
Nuh-uh! The ones I've worked with are just sociologists who work extra hard to deny reality, because they've got to 'explain' the dark side of human societies.
I recall mentioning broken windows policing in the course of one project -- I might as well have pooped on the table, for the reaction I got.
It is both sad and worrying. The practice of criminology would be greatly improved by closing down university criminology departments, and making the subject a branch of police training.
Possibly the saddest example of the breathtaking naivety of criminologists was the "Learning Together" event for University of Cambridge criminologists and supposedly reformed criminals held at Fishmongers' Hall in London on 29th November 2019. The poster boy for the program was the convicted terrorist Usman Khan, whom the criminologists had given a laptop to help him write poetry. At the London event he killed two alumni of the Institute of Criminology before being shot dead by police.
When I first read the headline I thought Gladwell had said “Blacks” and not “Blocks.” I thought to myself wow Malcolm Gladwell turned a page!
Yes, it appeared to be a typo
Black blocks might be accurate.
Gladwell’s thesis is easily defeated by driving around Chicago, Detroit, or Baltimore. It’s quite easy to find neighborhoods with abundant evidence of past glory - broad boulevards, architecturally pleasing homes and commercial buildings - that are centers of all the worst socioeconomic indicators today. A neighborhood and its qualities are fundamentally a reflection of the people who live there. This will forever be the case, but because the people most justifiably associated with dysfunction and decline happen to be an important political base for the most powerful political party in the nation, society is browbeaten into looking at everything but the most obvious explanations.
Well-written. I am most familiar with Washington DC which has undergone massive gentrification over the past thirty years. You can still go into neighborhoods in Northeast Washington that are very black, lower middle-class, with some handsome homes with crime rates not as high as Anacostia's. But these areas are slowly gentrifying. Lefty whites see a stately home, buy it, and renovate it.
Washington's Anacostia neighborhoods have the highest crime rates in the city. Yet you can occasionally see some very nice homes that must have built in the 1920s and even further back. You have to wonder who lived in these homes originally. Businessmen. Doctors. Bureaucrats. Anacostia was part of outer DC for a long time and semi-rural. Frederick Douglas lived in a house in Anacostia after the Civil War.
I lived in DC for a long time and bought my first house in one of those NE black neighborhoods you mentioned. It did gentrify slowly, but the Post had a piece a couple of years ago about how H Street went from one of the hottest places to eat and for entertainment to stalling out after 2020 - gee, what happened? The article did mention crime seemed to be increasing but obviously didn’t include the decision to relax policing and prosecutions. I went on Zillow and saw that my former house basically doubled in value in the ten years leading up to its most recent sale in 2019, but the estimated value today is only about 10 percent higher over the last five years.
H Street was a big slum for a long time. In the 80s, the 8th and H Street Crew tortured and murdered a woman. But as Capitol Hill expanded, H Street began to change as well, especially after 2005. But H Street's problem is it abuts Trinidad, one of Washington's worst neighborhoods. Until Trinidad is gentrified, H Street will have problems.
H Street was once one of my favorite ways to get home. H Street to Benning to Kenilworth Avenue to Route 50 and home. I've seen a lot of change in those years.
What brought so many Latinos to Chicago (and when)--the cool, breezy winters?
At the height of the crack wars, a special time, the WaPoo published a map of DC homicides, and there was some concentration at two intersections in SE and NE, but they still had plenty elsewhere. White/foreign NW had all of one.
I grew up in nice suburb of Chicago and it was getting loaded with immigrants from Mexico by the mid 1980s. In 1985 I got a free order at McDonald drive-thru because one of the guys from the AP classes had a summer job there. When I got back from college four years later it was all Mexicans.
Population replacement. Otherwise, large areas would have been ethnically cleansed of whites.
My wife grew up in the Chicago area (Oak Park and Hinsdale) and I've been there numerous times both in conjunction with family visits and in my profession as a corporate pilot. I never had any problems. However, I understand why Chicago has shootings. as does every other city with large black populations whose families moved there from Mississippi and other Deep South states starting in the 1950s as cotton farming became mechanized and black families were forced to move to town, with many moving north. Chicago has the same problems as St. Louis, Detroit, Memphis, Birmingham and Atlanta as well as L.A. Jackson, Tennessee, near where I grew up has major problems in certain areas. Violence was common among blacks in the South after the Civil War (and before, although they were kept in check by the patrollers who patrolled the plantations at night to make sure the slaves weren't engaging in mischief.) Put blacks in concentrations and you're going to have problems, some of it violent.
I think blacks moved to Chicago because the levee broke.
Atlanta got a statistical bump in crime from New Orleans expatriates. It turned out there were about 10 NO thugs trying to carve out new territory. I also remember seeing Ray Nagin campaign billboards in Atlanta.
I read an article with some white NO old money-types and one of them was quoted as saying they had met with Nagin and said they would stay and help rebuild but if things reverted to the status quo ante, they were gone and not coming back. Here's the NO murder rate, showing a trough after Katrina when everybody left, then a sharp, high spike in 2007. Did everyone come back? WTF? I know Sandra Bullock left so I guess the old bluebloods did too.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/us/la/new-orleans/murder-homicide-rate-statistics
Don't teachers say if they could just get their two worst students booted out the door most of their problems would be solved? It would be helpful to the cause if we could show that a really small non-transient number of people are the only ones holding civil society hostage.
The long-run downtrend is good news, but it's because we're getting older and the birth rate is cratering.
Chicago received much of its black population from Mississippi, West Tennessee, Alabama and Louisiana. Just yesterday, I was listening to The Animals on CD and the tune "Send Her Back to Walker", an old blues tune, was played. The South in the tune was the South of Chicago, the heart of the black diaspora to Chicago. Walker is just the small town in the South where the girl in the song comes from. Many of the blues musicians made Chicago a home.
So, per Gladwell, all we need to do is eliminate the shooty blocks. How so? When there is a shooting, just remove the block from the map. Keep it up for a few years and all the shooty areas will disappear from maps. Then, when we look at crime heat maps, we can all breathe a sigh of relief.
Hard to argue with this guy's logic.
Perplexity says the number for the Near West Side last year was 18.
Had he written, as many of us initially thought he did, that "A Tiny % of Urban Blacks Accounted for an Overwhelming Number of a City’s Crimes," Gladwell would have been accurate. A relatively small percentage of the black population accounts for most of the killing. Considered the low resolution rate of gang murders, I would suspect that a killer rarely kills only once. Surely there are a number of Urban Aces.
Plenty of Red Barons. Or should they be called Black Barons?
On "The Wire," Wee-Bey Brice handles a lot of the killings for Avon Barksdale's gang. When he's finally arrested, he confesses to some additional murders he didn't commit in order to protect other gang members, knowing it wouldn't make any difference to his already-maximum prison sentence.
Black criminals aren’t like that in real life. In real life they’re like the 17 year old black kid that stole a car last week in Philadelphia. There was a 12 year old girl in the car, unbeknownst to him. When he realized what he’d done, he raped the 12 year old girl, just because.
That’s how black criminals behave, not by sacrificing themselves for others.
So they're not an urban nobility.
If municipalities open up their databases to the AI-assisted number crunchers the data could get pretty granular. I actually wouldn't be surprised if it turned out two thousand individuals are a way outsized part of Chicago's problem, and lots of other cities' problems.
Maybe Gladwell is being Straussian here? He's my age, 61, and my impression is men start resigning themselves to the fact that reality > ideology in their late 50s.
Yes. That was demonstrated a decade ago. Then they destroyed the gang database/hotlist.
Roll the die and move your game piece forward into the next neighborhood. You can be a BMW ZU8, a Mercedes Maybach, or a Cadillac Celestiq! Friends and family will love playing Blocks or Blacks, coming next year from Hasbro! Chicago, Newark, and Baltimore editions available for Christmas!
"that those same few blocks remained violent year after year, and that this observation was true everywhere—"
Year after year could be two years. This contention obviously breaks down if you try to place those years in the 1960s. I don't even need to check to know my dad's neighborhood on the south side was not shooty when he was young.
As a young man (late 50s or early 60s I'd guess) he took piano lessons in Cabrini Green. Had he tried that when I was a young man, he'd only have got the one lesson.
Will you never stop noticing stuff??
Austin should share a little with Lake View. Perhaps a little Section 8 Housing will help Lake View catch up to Austin. Michelle Obama Gardens. Refrigerator Perry Dwellings. Javy Baez Towers.
Hey Jackass has some interesting data. It would be interesting to know such statistics for other cities and counties. Having grown up in Prince George's County MD, I can guess which towns have more murders and which towns have less. Same with Washington DC.
The common denominator in the murders of Chicago appears to be blacks. I would guess that the Chicago of Richard Daley, Ernie Banks and George Halas had much fewer murders. Wives could walk to the market without fear in the olden days. Hospital emergency rooms would have been less active. But we're not going back. That would be reactionary. Parts of Chicago are barely livable but they vote universally Democratic and that's what's important.
One reason there is a lot of push, especially in Europe , to 'regulate' AI is that AI programs would be good at noticing these patterns, which would be racist.
I asked Perplexity. 'Are homicide rates in major US cities correlated with percentage of Black residents?'
A simple yes/no question.
It said 'The correlation observed in the data does not imply a direct causal relationship, but rather reflects the intersection of race with concentrated poverty, segregation, historical disadvantage, and other social determinants.'
It reminded me how these blocks were redlined.
Am I forced to go out and kill people , because so many of my ancestors died in a coal-mining disaster that many of my family decided to emigrate in search of safer work?
No, because I am white.
Way back when, I was listening to "All Things Considered" when they were covering a study that had come out finding that black women a had far higher rate of STDs than did non-blacks. The host asked the journalist if there was an explanation for such a disparity. I thought, "My god, what are you asking this man to do, commit career and social suicide?!" After a moment's hesitation, he answered, "It probably has to do with housing." Quick thinking.
Very funny. Why do black women have far higher STD rates? Could it be...............................................
My mother also grew up in Oak Park, moving away in 1933 during the depression to upstate NY. Oak Park was still an attractive neighborhood when we visited during the 1960s. Today’s streetscapes are somewhat marred by the many cars that families accumulate today. The garages on hidden alleys can’t handle the challenge. The trees are really nice. Big.
Maybe it’s trees that make the dirt magic and inhibit the urge to kill the fellow who has “dissed” you in an unacceptable manner?
Think what the murder rate would be if the shooty folks were good at aiming handguns?
In 1983 I took my uncle for his first visit to Oak Park since he was 8 in 1929. I asked him if the trees were much bigger now. He replied, "Much smaller."
Relative to his height, that could well be.
The hills of my childhood also got smaller. Not many hills in Oak Park.