Riots and the Underclass - the view from America

On the government agenda of every advanced industrial nation, in the ebb from the great post-World War Two economic boom, is the simple question: amid vast structural unemployment and diminished social expectations how best to assuage the alarm expressed by James Anderton in 1980, when he was Chief Constable of Greater Manchester.  

Anderton gave it as his considered opinion that "from the police point of view… theft, burglary, even violent crime will not be the predominant police feature. What will be the matter of greatest concern will be the covert and ultimately overt attempts to overthrow democracy, to subvert the authority of the state."
 
Britain had its Notting Hill Gate riots in 1958, and Justice Salmon sent nine white Teddy Boys to long terms in prison, saying: "We must establish the rights of everyone, irrespective of the colour of their skin... to walk through our streets with their heads erect and free from fear."

Twenty years later, in 1978, Judge McKinnon ruled that Kingsley Read, head of the fascist National Party, was not guilty of incitement to racial hatred when he said publicly of 18-year-old Gurdip Singh Chaggar, set upon by white youths and stabbed to death, "One down, one million to go."

In the interval, British governments, both Conservative and Labour, falteringly, with occasional remissions and bouts of bad conscience, proceeded down the path to racism. Between the late 1940s and the late 1960s the chance of establishing a multiracial society was squandered.

In 1981, after the Brixton riots, Lord Scarman remarked in his 'Enquiry into the Brixton Disorders' the riots were neither premeditated nor planned. "Each was the spontaneous reaction of angry young men, most of whom were black, against what they saw was a hostile police force."

In the 1960s, America saw fearsome ghetto riots from Newark to Detroit to the city of Watts in Los Angeles. The state's response was a three-fold  strategy: first, buy your way out. Money sluiced into "urban renewal schemes" basically aimed at various forms of ethnic cleansing and wholesale destruction of black neighborhoods. Gentrification and de-industrialisation assisted in this process. Across the next 20 years, for example, the manufacturing base of Los Angeles simply disappeared.
 
Since these shifts involved the creation of new ghettoes, the second strategy was ever more stringent policing, with federal money pouring into city law enforcement across the country, including the creation of heavily armed SWAT teams, even in tiny communities.  

The third strategy was the conversion of a political threat – political activism by the Black Panthers and other national organisations (many of whose leaders were straightforwardly murdered by the police) - into a crime problem, aka the  "war on drugs" launched in 1969 by Richard Nixon who emphasised to his chief aide, H.R. Haldeman, that "the whole problem [drugs] is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognises this while not appearing to."

There is plenty of evidence that the strategists of the state's response to black political insurgency were far from unhappy to see poor neighbourhoods demobilised by drugs and black-on-black violence as gangs fought bloody turf wars for street-corner concessions.

Across the next 35 years the US prison population rose relentlessly, the cells disproportionately filled with blacks and Hispanics. The 'system' had devised a useful differential in sentencing that saw blacks and other poor people serving vastly longer terms for possession of crack, rather than powder cocaine – a middle-class preference.

The last major race riot in America was in 1992, following the release of a video of a black man, Rodney King, being savagely beaten by Los Angeles cops.  By the 1990s the 'buy-out' strategy had evolved into vast programmes of prison construction, paralleling the rise of gated residential communities replete with walls and armed guards keeping the bad guys out.

America this year has been waking up to two increasingly self-evident truths: violent crime rates – for murder, robbery, aggravated assault and rape - have been falling, and are now at their lowest level for nearly 40 years. Fears that the 2008 crash and indisputably harsh economic times for poor people would produce a new crime wave have proved to be baseless. In 2010, New York saw 536 murders - 65 more than in 2009, which was the lowest since 1963.

All crime rates in Los Angeles have been dropping for two decades. Homicides plunged 18 per cent last year. Violent crime is roughly the same in LA as in Portland, Oregon, the whitest major city in America, the same as it was in the lily-white LA of the early 1960s. The 1960s, when crime rates rose, had roughly the same unemployment rate as the late 1990s and early 2000s, when crime fell.
 
Twenty years ago, conservative criminologists here were drawing up graphic scenarios of cities held hostage by gangs of feral black youth. City police forces compiled vast computer data banks of 'gangs' and suspects linked to a gang drew heavier sentences, shoved into a penal system where remedial counseling and post-release job training had vanished.
 
Did crime fall because all the bad guys were locked up? No one claims this beyond 25 per cent of the reduction – itself a very high estimate. Another theory is that by the mid 1990s the crack wars were over, and the victors enjoying their hard-won monopolies under the overall supervision of the police. [Yet another theory is that the banning of lead in gasoline and paint in the mid-1970s was having an effect; high levels of toxic lead dust in the bloodstreams of Americans had been linked to sociopathic behaviour.]

Simultaneous to the drop in violent crime rates has come the discovery that America can't afford to lock up 2.3 million people for years on end. It's too expensive. When he's not praying to a Christian God to save America, Governor Perry of Texas is trying to save the state's budget in part by getting convicts out of prisons and into various diversion programmes.
 
So, after a four-decade detour into a gulag Republic with 25 per cent of the world's prisoners, America is retrenching towards softer preventive solutions.  

But a generation's worth of 'wars on crime' and of glorification of the men and women in blue have engendered a culture of law enforcement that is all too often viciously violent, contemptuous of the law, morally corrupt and confident of the credulity of the courts. In Chicago, police ignored witnesses and discounted testimony as they bustled the innocent onto Death Row. In New York, a plain-clothes posse of heavily armed cops roamed the streets, justifiably confident that their lethal onslaught would receive official protection, which it did until an unprecedented popular uproar brought the perpetrators to book.

These aren't isolated cases. There isn't a state in the union where cops aren't perjuring themselves, using excessive force, targeting minorities. Those endless wars on crime and drugs have engendered not merely 2.3 million prisoners but a vindictive hysteria that pulses on the threshold of homicide in the bosoms of many of our uniformed law enforcers. Time and again one hears stories attesting to the fact that they are ready, at a moment's notice or a slender pretext, to blow someone away, beat him to a pulp, throw him in the slammer, sew him up with police perjuries and snitch-driven charges, and try to toss him in a dungeon for a quarter-century or more.

The price for decades of this myth-making and cop boosterism? It's summed up in the absurdity of the declaration of the US Supreme Court in 2000  that flight from a police officer constitutes sound reason for arrest. Actually, it constitutes plain commonsense.

Emergency laws, rushed through by panicked politicians, are always bad. It will take America many decades, if ever, to restore civil liberties and approach  crime rationally - and this will only come with courageous and inventive political leadership in the poor communities. Britons should study carefully the lessons of America's 40-year swerve. ·