Hi folks. I hope everyone is well. I've been really busy but saw a blog entry on Boston.com by former Massachusetts attorney general Scott Harshbarger that is so profoundly stupid, I just had to write. In it "YES WE CAN Reduce Urban Violence Part 1" (kind of reminds me of Archie Bell and the Drells "Tighten Up (Part 1)"".. we're from Houston Texas and we can dance just as good as we walk!") Unfortunately, the stupidity that Mr. Harshbarger is trying to pass off as logic, makes Archie Bell, et al sound like Miles Davis or Art Tatum. It's really unbelievable to me that someone like Luther is still talking about nonsense that thinking people dismissed a decade ago.
There a million different theories on how to reduce crime and each proponent can drag up statistics to support their own cause. But when Mr. Hashbarger drags up a theory and presents it as fact, and it is patently wrong, it just casts doubt on everything else he said.
He drags out of the wastebasket, the "Boston Miracle"!! Once again he's taking credit for the methodology (he describes in the article), and carried out by many agencies, community and religious groups to bring down violent crime by as much as 66-75% from it's Boston peak in 1986. And yes, crime did drop in Boston over that period of time.
There is just one problem, crime also dropped in New York City, further and faster than Boston, but Mayor Giuliani used a very different tactic .. the "Broken Window" theory. But there is more, crime dropped in Philadelphia, Chicago, St Louis, Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington DC, Los Angeles, and in every major and mid sized city in the country. Even traditional crime basket cases like Detroit, Newark, and New Orleans saw huge drops in violent crime. So, either every city did something equally effective as Boston and New York or, crime dropped no matter what you did. That's hardly an endorsement for the "Boston Miracle". Metaphorically, "the tide went out", and Harshbarger is still taking credit for it.
Part of the irony is that Giuliani's supporters in New York still blame the previous mayor, David Dinkins, for being soft on crime. But the rate of crime in New York started dropping during the last two years of Dinkins' administration ... it was still within the range of variability and just wasn't obvious at the time.
So what happened? Here too there are plenty of theories of what REALLY took place. In "Freakonomics", Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner suggest that Supreme Court's 1974 decision "Roe vs Wade" legalizing abortion as the cause. In a February 2004 Scientific American article by Richard Rosenfeld suggests that all the theories are wrong (or incomplete) because there were actually two different drops in crime ... first a drop in crime by young perpetrators (under 25) followed several years later by a drop in crime by older "lifelong" criminals. No theory could yet explain both.
Needless to say, for any reasonable person (clearly that leaves out Scott Harshbarger) the cause of the nationwide drop in violent crime that began in the mid 80's is still open for debate. But if the best Harshbarger can bring to the table is the long since refuted "Boston Miracle" (refudiated to Sarah Palin) ..... then he truly has nothing to add.
