SOCIETY | POLICING
Life Without Police
The grand unintentional experiment
First off, I’m not a criminologist, social worker, police union rep, or mayor. This is going to be largely anecdotal and local to New Orleans. Qualitative rather than quantitative, if you know what I mean. But before you bite my head off, know that I don’t have a dog in this fight either, and I won’t be advocating strong policy positions here.
A few rules, though. I can’t stand it when people straight out lie, cherry-pick statistics, and quietly shift from logical reasoning to emotional appeals when their arguments are weak. Be clear, be honest, and change the theory to fit the facts and not vice versa.
Crime in the United States, broadly speaking, was bad in the 70s and 80s and seemed to be getting worse heading into the 90s. Powerful street drugs like PCP and crack, economic deterioration in the working class, racial tensions, and the extreme proliferation of guns all helped make violent crime a top issue for many Americans.
Violent crime dropped significantly in the 90s and has stayed relatively low ever since. The sheer weight of the scholarship and journalism that has gone into explaining this decline is staggering and more than I want to touch today. Suffice it to say that the 2020s are very different from the…
