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What Price Protection?
The Diallo affair seems to have simmered down a bit. As usual, after watching and listening to mainline and conservative reporting and commentary, it seems a couple of crucial points have been completely overlooked.
To hear Al Sharpton and the lads go on, one would have to conclude that minority, inner city communities are bearing the brunt of police zealousness. This is undoubtedly true in that these areas are hotbeds of crime. If you want to fight crime effectively, it helps to focus on the areas in which crime is a problem. I suppose the cops could crack down on the folks in Westchester, but I don’t think that would make much of a dent in the stats.
Conversely, no one, and I mean no one, is asking who benefits from the dramatic reduction in crime effected by the Mayor’s policies. This is a very important piece of information without which a discussion of this topic cannot hope to get anywhere. Everyone who sets foot in New York benefits to a degree. My most recent trip to the city stunned me with the change in "feel", in atmosphere in the city. But an increase in comfort among tourists must be counted a minor benefit at best. I am also sure that day trippers from Westchester and Long Island find New York a slightly more pleasant place, but not much more so.
Logic would lead one to deduce that the primary beneficiaries of the huge drop in crime are the very same people and areas who seem to bear the brunt of the enforcement techniques. The huge drop in crime in New York is not a result of foiling commuter muggers on the upper east side. It is a result of reducing gang violence, drug-related violence and the law of the streets in New York’s worst neighborhoods. It is the minority communities in which people fear to walk the streets that have benefited. The "quality of life" improvement has been overwhelmingly in the "worst" areas. Pretty obvious if you think about it for a minute. So why do we never hear Al, or Hillary, or Al, or Jesse or Dan or Tom mention this? I suspect it is partly because "nothing happening" is a lot harder to report on than very visible mistakes or rare violations of civil rights. But it also highlights a willing blindness on the part of those who define the culture to the concept of trade offs. A reduction in crime is not achieved at no cost. Finding the balance between tolerating crime and tolerating police restrictions ought to be one of the fundamental debates in a healthy democracy. It is very worrisome that nobody seems to want to debate it honestly or completely.
The second point is a caution to conservatives. While our instinctive reaction to things like this is to rally the troops against demagogues and charlatans, as personified by the likes of Al Sharpton, we must never forget that the police forces are an extension of state power and coercion. I very much doubt that any of us would feel comfortable with the idea that we could be confronted in our driveways by a mass of police who might blow us away if we fail to respond appropriately. There can be no doubt that the officers in the Diallo case are not murderers. But to write it off as simply a "mistake" is insufficient. It is a mistake only in the sense that the deliberate and forceful imposition of state power went awry. In the debate over trade offs we should understand that whatever can happen in the Bronx can also happen in Schenectady, or Anoka, MN.