On one of the lifeless, uniform streets of the US capital, a bulky former crack cocaine dealer who goes by the nom de guerre of Tiny laments the passing of the old Washington.
“Back then they called it the murder capital of the world. These few blocks here were the murder capital of the murder capital of the world, and right here’s where I did my business. Made a lot of money, too,” he said, hovering on a corner in the mostly black Trinidad neighborhood a few blocks north of that largely white citadel, the Capitol.
“Even sold it down by the White House,” he said. “Could do anything back then. We owned this city. Now it’s like everywhere else. One giant coffee shop.”
Illustration: Mountain People
Tiny long ago moved on to the more legal, if less lucrative — and certainly less adrenaline-pumping — enterprise of parcel delivery, which is why he is reluctant to give a name other than the one he used to be known by on the streets.
Two decades ago, Washington had the highest murder rate in the US. Now the drive-by shootings that claim the lives of innocent teenagers are infrequent enough to shock, and make the newspapers.
Criminologists and sociologists have spent years grappling to explain the dramatic slide in violent and other serious crime in the US capital, but it is not unique to Washington.
The latest FBI figures show that murder, rape, robberies and other serious crimes have fallen to a 48-year low across the country.
In Washington last year, 131 people were murdered, the lowest number in half a century. Two decades ago, there were 482 homicides in the city amid turf wars among drug gangs and crack-driven violent robberies.
It is a pattern replicated across the country. In 2009, New York City had the lowest number of murders since detailed FBI records began in 1963. There was a small increase last year, but even so the total of 536 homicide victims was still well below the 2,245 murdered in 1990 when Times Square was infamous for peep shows and drug pushers, not the Disney Store.
Twenty years ago, the murder rate for the whole US was 9.8 per 100,000 people. It has fallen by nearly half, although it is still twice the rate in France.
It is not just murder. Robberies were down nearly 10 percent last year and 8 percent the year before.
There is a score of explanations offered by sociologists for collapsing crime figures, from theories that it is tied to legalization of abortion or the reduction of lead in fuel to the closing of mental institutions.
One theory is it that better medical treatment has reduced the number of murders by saving the lives of assault victims who would otherwise have died. However, that does not explain why overall violent crime is also down.
Anti-gun activists note that the cities with two of the sharpest falls in murder rates, New York and Washington, have enacted strict gun control laws by US standards. Yet Houston, where some regard it as criminal not to own a gun, has also seen a sharp drop in homicides.
One of the most widely accepted explanations is also one of the most politically and socially sensitive: that the imposition of sharply stiffer prison sentences since the early 1980s, which has resulted in the US having the highest rate of incarceration in the developed world, has kept large numbers of criminals off the streets.
The US imprisons 2.3 million of its citizens, a number that has risen dramatically since the 1980s when state legislatures began greatly increasing sentences out of fear of the surging crime rate.
“We now incarcerate four times as many people as we did 20 years ago,” said John Roman, director of the District of Columbia Crime Policy Institute, who has spent years studying crime trends in the city and the US. “Just by sheer size you’ve removed a lot of potential offenders from the street. I don’t think that’s very popular in many circles, but it’s very hard to argue with.”
Roman said that in parallel with an ever-expanding jail population was the peak and collapse of the crack cocaine epidemic in major cities. He said that the crack epidemic burned itself out, largely because a new generation saw the effect of the drug on older users and were discouraged.
On the streets of Washington, Tiny thinks there is something to both theories.
“There’s a lot of guys who were from around here in jail. If you’re black and you do crack you go to jail for a long time. There’s guys who were selling here with me in the 80s who are still locked up,” he said. “But I went out of business because nobody wanted to buy anymore. Crack got a bad name on the streets.”
Sociologists credit a couple of other important factors in falling rates of some crimes. It is considerably more difficult than 30 years ago to steal a new car given all the electronic security and houses are better protected.
An explanation favored by some politicians and police officers traces back to New York’s “zero tolerance” strategy in the early 1990s, which followed the theory that arrests for minor crimes deter people from committing major crimes, and that most serious crimes are committed repeatedly by a small number of hardcore criminals.
Roman is skeptical, saying the strategy went hand in hand with a large increase in the police force, which led to more people being arrested for crimes in general. Moreover, detaining people for minor crimes, such as jumping the turnstiles at New York subway stations, led to a significant number of wanted criminals being nabbed. So the real effect was not so much to deter as to lock up.
There is no shortage of other theories.
One is that the lead poisoning through paint and gasoline of a generation raised in the 1960s and 1970s caused violent behavior as people entered their teens.
The economist Steven Levitt has argued that the 1973 supreme court ruling legalizing abortion reduced the number of criminals by reducing the number of unwanted babies.
There are even those who believe the election of US President Barack Obama has inspired young black men to steer away from a life of crime, although that only works for the past two years and falls flat when trying to explain the past two decades.
With growing support for the view that lengthy sentences are a leading factor in reducing crime, the debate is now shifting to whether that is an argument for maintaining a policy that critics say is disproportionately applied to black men and causes other social damage, including taking fathers away from their children for much of their upbringing.
Roman thinks the policy might have served its purpose.
“You can make the case that mass incarceration hastened the end of the crime wave. You would have a much more difficult time making the case that a continuation of that mass incarceration is necessary ... We’re investing more and more in prison and getting a smaller and smaller return,” he said.
However, the public might not share that view. A recent poll showed most Americans feel crime is still getting worse.
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