Mugged (17 page)

It wasn’t ordinary blacks searching the world over for a single white person who would use the N-word—those were self-aggrandizing journalists.

It wasn’t ordinary black people defending violent black cults and black cop killers, such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, John Africa’s MOVE, Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple, and the Black Panthers—that was the Democratic establishment.

It wasn’t ordinary black people begging Jesse Jackson to be their leader. He was the black leader for white people. As black writer John McWhorter put it, Jackson’s “self-aggrandizing machinations have left behind not a single successful project that would improve black lives beyond the boardrooms of his friends.”
¹

It wasn’t ordinary black people depicting every suspect ever shot by the cops as a victim of racism, every riot as the police’s fault, every hoax hate crime as absolutely true, Al Sharpton as a respected spokesman for the black community, all cops as redneck racists. That was Jim Dwyer, the
New York Times
, Anna Quindlen, Hollywood scriptwriters, and John Lindsay.

Not only journalists, but the legal community did its part wreaking havoc in the black community. Starting in the sixties, ordinary people, black and white, watched in stupefaction as liberal social reformers came in and jettisoned thousands of years of human knowledge to rewrite criminal laws and government welfare policies. Liberals living in monochromatically white suburbs or doorman buildings in the cities said,
Let’s try these new ideas that sound really cool, like school busing and deemphasizing prison!

As Thomas Sowell describes the changes in his book,
The Vision of the Anointed
: The old view was to put criminals in prison. The new view, held
by, for example, Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general Ramsey Clark, Supreme Court justice William Brennan, and DC circuit judge David Bazelon, was to avoid sending criminals to prison and instead spend all our resources focusing on the “root causes” of crime. In the august words of Judge Bazelon, “poverty is the root cause of crime.”
²

The basic idea that liberal judges and politicians began to push on the country in the 1960s was that society should be nice to criminals so they would repay us with law-abiding behavior. As Attorney General Clark said: “The theory of rehabilitation is based on the belief that healthy, rational people will not injure others, that they will understand that the individual and his society are best served by conduct that does not inflict injury.”
³
Of course, if that were true, they wouldn’t have committed crimes in the first place.

Despite being completely insane, the reformers won out. Their policies were put into place and the stage was set to test two fundamentally opposed views of public policy and human nature. As Sowell writes:

Based on their having no understanding of human nature, the smart set turned American cities into petri dishes for crime and degenerate behavior without punishment. Thousands of Americans died, were raped and disfigured in criminal acts entirely made possible by the Warren court, the ACLU, liberal professors and activists, whose single-minded policy objective was to return criminals to the street.

In response to liberals demanding that we stop sending criminals to prison, normal people asked, “
Why would that work
?” But they were dismissed as unenlightened. Liberals had built a perfect system that had to be inflexibly imposed on the country. They got angry and sarcastic when anyone pointed out it wasn’t going to work.

Sowell describes a former New York City police commissioner objecting to lenient Supreme Court rulings on criminal law at a 1965 judicial conference. He was “immediately met with ridicule by a law professor who asked, ‘I wonder what rights we’d have left if we always yielded to the police hysteria.’”
⁵

One of the first places to try out these advanced ideas in criminology was New York City, in the person of liberal celebrity, Mayor John Lindsay. Lindsay was the Obama of his day. For simply announcing his 1965 mayoral candidacy, Lindsay made the cover of
Look
,
Newsweek
and
Life
magazines. A
New York Times
editorial on his candidacy titled “A Man Who Can Be Mayor” hailed Lindsay’s “good judgment,” calling him “youthful, intelligent, energetic, liberal,” “diligent,” “courageous” and “conscientious.”
⁶
When his victory was announced on election night, the
Times
’s deputy managing editor Abe Rosenthal and metropolitan desk editor Arthur Gelb embraced, cheering “We’ve won!”
⁷

While it’s difficult to capture the totality of the destruction wrought by Lindsay’s administration, his
New York Times
obituary is a start: a doubling of the welfare rolls; constant strikes by transit workers, teachers and sanitation workers; skyrocketing crime rates; a tripling of the city’s debt; epic racial conflicts; demoralized police; and nonstop race riots.
⁸
The
Times
might have added: “He screwed up by taking our advice.”

In a crowded field, Lindsay’s greatest damage to the city was shackling the police. Civilian complaints against the police dropped, but citizens being mugged shot through the roof. Between 1962 and 1967, robberies quintupled. Although it may have seemed as if the crime rate couldn’t climb much higher, robberies doubled again from 1967 to 1972.
⁹
The left’s official position was that crime was inevitable as long as there were inequities and if you really wanted to do something about crime, you’d support the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act.

After a while, the police learned to coexist with the new regime, soon discovering that not doing their jobs had its plus side. Life was better, they had fewer headaches and their work was a lot easier. Crime went through the roof, but guess what? There were no civilian complaints! Instead of
great year—we solved 129 crimes!
it became
great year—we had only 12 complaints!
The murder rate was higher than Mexico City’s, but the police were heroes because no criminals were complaining about them.

There aren’t a lot of ways the government can make things better, but the sixties and seventies proved that there are a lot of ways government can make things worse. It took decades to roll back the horrors imposed on the country by activist judges, beginning in the sixties. The battle was hindered by Johnson- and Carter-appointed judges honeycombing the judiciary for many decades to come. Some of these lunatics still walk among us today.

Meanwhile, the empirical evidence kept pouring in.

A 1982 Rand study of prison inmates in Michigan, Texas and California, found that each one committed a mean of between 187 and 287 nondrug crimes per year while out on the street.
¹⁰
A decade later, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms found that criminals with at least three convictions for a violent felony committed about 160 crimes per year.
¹¹
By keeping career criminals in prison, the 1992 ATF study concluded, society would save $323,000 per year in actual monetary costs, not including physical and psychological damage to the victims of crime.

In 1994, the
Los Angeles Times
conservatively calculated the cost to taxpayers of a single quick gang shoot-out in which no one died, but a twelve-year-old girl was struck and paralyzed. Among the excluded costs were: Legal aid attorneys (the defendants hired private attorneys), jurors’ time away from work, missed work by the injured girl’s family, and the paralyzed girl’s limited employment prospects. The shooting, in broad daylight in front of many witnesses, didn’t require a lot of investigative time or court costs. One shooter pleaded guilty to a lesser offense, saving the costs of a trial, and the other was convicted after a quick five-day trial.

Still, the bare minimum costs came to well over $1 million—$1.7 million in 2010 dollars.
¹²

Putting criminals in prison to prevent more crimes like that is a fantastic bargain for society. But for decades, America suffered under the delusional fantasies of liberal judges, mayors and attorneys general committed to the idea that punishing criminals was outmoded.

In 1970, not a single prison was under a court order. By 1990, more than five hundred municipalities had their prison systems being run by judges.
¹³
As a result, by 1993, the average time served for violent felonies, including murder and rape, was three and a half years.
¹⁴

In 1994, Princeton professor John Dilulio looked at the consequences of a prison cap put on the Philadelphia prison population by a Carter-appointed judge, Norma Shapiro. In a single eighteen-month period, 9,732 prisoners released pursuant to Judge Shapiro’s order were re-arrested for committing new crimes, including 79 murders, 90 rapes, 701 burglaries, 959 robberies, 1,113 assaults, 2,215 drug offenses and 2,748 thefts.
¹⁵

It goes without saying that most of the victims were not well-heeled residents of Philadelphia’s Main Line. In the country at large, blacks were becoming the victims of crime more than ever before. In 1992, black youths were nine times more likely to be murdered than white youths. Liberals lied, black kids died.

Despite pious assurances that locking up criminals wouldn’t work, the prison-building boom that started to come online in the 1990s—as well as the gradual replacement of Democrat-appointed judges with Reagan and Bush judges—had an amazing effect on suppressing crime. Maybe by liberals’ definition it didn’t “work” because putting criminals in prison didn’t help them become valued members of society. But it did keep them from killing people.

Much like doctors bleeding their patients, today we look back and say: “There was a time when people believed
that
?” These were judges, university professors and politicians imposing theories they had dreamed up at some all-night bull session at Harvard, ignoring policemen screaming at them, “
It doesn’t seem like a good idea here on the ground
!”

Tut, tut, you must be one of those unsophisticated rubes worried about property values.

Even liberal historian Sean Wilentz has since said that liberal Democrats’ reaction to criticism of their policies was “always to blame the people who were resisting for being narrow-minded or racist, not up to their own enlightened idea of the way Americans ought to be. There was a contempt, there was an elitism.”
¹⁶

Whenever we pause to think about great Americans, we should also pause to remember there were rotten Americans, too, such as John Lindsay, Justice William Brennan, Ramsey Clark, Norma Shapiro and countless other liberal activists, who, in life, never stopped getting their butts kissed. In death, they deserve to have their graves desecrated.

With a few shining exceptions (Jesse and Al), blacks have long been among the leading proponents of a strong police presence in their neighborhoods. No less an authority than Martin Luther King complained of the absence of police in poor black neighborhoods, saying crime was “the nightmare of the slum family” that had turned the ghettos into criminal “sanctuaries.”
¹⁷

In 1964, a Harlem riot raged for two days in response to a white police officer’s shooting of fifteen-year-old James Powell. And yet, a
New York Times
poll in the wake of the riot showed Harlem residents ranked crime as a more important issue than police brutality.
¹⁸

Two years later, in 1966, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins took a confidential survey of Harlem residents’ opinions about police brutality. Fifty-seven percent said there was “none at all” or they were “not sure”; 31 percent said there was “a little” police brutality and only 12 percent said there was “a
lot.”
¹⁹
In 1968, the Harlem branch of the NAACP was calling for mandatory five-year sentences against muggers, ten-year sentences for drug pushers and thirty-year sentences for murderers.

But no one cared what blacks wanted. Liberal zealots were on the march. There were dissenting voices to the left’s celebration of black criminals, but they were dismissed. When blacks rioted in Baltimore following Martin Luther King’s assassination, Maryland governor Spiro Agnew invited more than a hundred black leaders to a meeting and gave an eloquent speech about rising black militancy. If more political leaders had had Agnew’s moral authority as a civil rights champion to give a speech like this, the country, especially blacks, could have advanced in that moment by leaps and bounds.

Agnew began by noting that everyone in the room was a leader and contrasted them with “the ready-mix, instantaneous,” “circuit-riding, Hanoi-visiting” “caterwauling, riot-inciting, burn-America-down”
²⁰
type of leaders. Those, he noted, had not been invited to the meeting.

Then he said: