14th Amendment concerns

From What Ails the City? by Aziz Huq, a review of a pair of books and a general meditation on our capacity to effectively and productively coach change in otherwise stagnant geopolitical locales. Lots of interesting information and perspectives.

Huq provides some comparative context.

The violent urban crisis is a hardy perennial from America’s last century. Riots sparked in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, by the deaths of Freddie Grey and Michael Brown find precedent of a sort as early as 1919. In the late summer of that year, more than twenty-five cities across the United States, from Elaine, Arkansas to Chicago, Illinois, to Omaha, Nebraska, witnessed mob violence, lynchings, and arsons. The origins of these riots were surprisingly varied. In Elaine, black workers protested peonage-style employment relations in the cotton fields. In Chicago, a young black boy crossed an invisible line on a south-side beach—thus violating the city’s unwritten racial protocols. In Omaha, news reports that a 19-year-old white girl had been raped proved the spark to the tinder of long-simmering labor unrest between white and black stockyard workers.

As today, it was largely African-Americans who bore the brunt of the damage in 1919. In Chicago, the poet Carl Sandburg reported, 23 of the 38 people who died were African-Americans. Most of the hundreds left homeless on the city’s south side due to arson were also African-American. Yet unlike today, the violence of 1919 was not a self-inflicted wound from within the black community. Rather, it was white civic leaders and organizations that often organized the violence; it was white mobs that torched tenements of migrants newly arrived from the south; and it was whites who strung up the accused rapist Will Brown from a telegraph pole at the corner of Eighteenth and Harney in Omaha.

So back in the old days we had race riots and nowadays it is simply riots. Progress of a sort but how do we get to the point where we don't riot at all? Is that even a reasonable expectation, rioting being, historically, one of the more effective manifestations of popular will against entrenched interests?

Huq offers up a statistic I had not seen before.

Of course, from the perspective of today’s rioters, the difference is one of degree and not of kind: Rather than the ‘old Jim Crow’ of the lynch mob, they would point to, and condemn, the ‘new Jim Crow’ of police treatment of black men. Although national statistics on deaths resulting from police shootings or custodial action are startling exiguous, even the limited data collected by the federal Department of Justice might raise an eyebrow among those disinclined to endorse the Jim Crow analogy. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, for example, reports that 51.5 percent of arrest-related deaths in the United States between 2003 and 2009 involved African-Americans or Hispanics (who make up roughly 30 percent of the population).

Huq appears a victim of the common practice of comparing apples to oranges. If you are interested in arrest-related deaths, then you shouldn't be comparing to the racial makeup of the entire nation but to the racial makeup of the those likely to be arrested. There is a funnel here that is being alluded to but not made explicit. If I recall correctly, African-Americans and Hispanics account for some 75% of homicides (as a proxy for violent behavior likely to elicit police intervention). That being the case, you would expect a disparate arrest rate and death-in-custody rate from that of a simple extrapolation from population figures.

This is an interesting paragraph to unpack.

No single cause explains the persistence of violent urban crisis, or the real shifts in the vectors and locations of urban violence across the American century. Perhaps the most important discontinuity is the absence of white residents in communities such as Ferguson and Mondawmin in Baltimore. Even by 1950—that is, before Brown v. Board of Education and its long-fused desegregation command—a quarter of Americans had decamped from the city for the suburbs. By 1990, this migration was a solid majority. Suburbanization operated differently across racial lines. By 1980, 72 percent of blacks in metropolitan areas lived in central cities, as opposed to 33 percent of metropolitan whites. The same federal government that in November 1953 filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the NAACP in Brown subsidized this demographic transformation via the construction of the interstate highway system and the promulgation of racially discriminatory appraisal standards deployed by the Housing Ownership Loan Corporation.

No single cause for urban violence. Got it and agree.

But what does where people elect to live have to do, in a causal fashion, with urban violence? Nothing, I would have thought. This part of the paragraph feels like a non sequitur meant to impugn people's choices rather than explain urban violence.

It is the last part of this murky paragraph that caught my eye.

The same federal government that in November 1953 filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the NAACP in Brown subsidized this demographic transformation via the construction of the interstate highway system

I have often seen this allegation raised but have never seen it defended. I am no highway or traffic historian but my understanding has always been that there was never a racial component to the interstate highway system, that it was always about increased transportation flexibility, cheaper transportation and improved national logistics, and that the primary motivation arose from military concerns regarding the capacity to quickly move large quantities of material in the event of war and the desire for logistical resilience.

It is a popular claim, but as far as I am aware there is absolutely no evidence that the federal highway system was initiated or designed with any view on where citizens chose to live and commute. No doubt there were lots of incidental consequences that did affect those issues but they were just that, incidental. Consequently, there is no paradox, as Huq seems to suggest, between providing amicus curiae briefs in support of the NAACP and also constructing an interstate highway system for increasing national logistical capabilities.

Huq also refers to the the demographic transformation as being subsidized. Again, this seems a peculiar way of looking at the facts. The interstate highway system was built with a mix of funds from federal and state but was substantially funded by the Federal government. It wasn't subsidized, it was funded. We don't refer to the government as subsidizing K-12 education or subsidizing streets or subsidizing the courts and police departments. Those are fundamental responsibilities of government (local, state or federal) which are funded by the government. What point is Huq trying to make by twisting this to impugn the funding of a national highway system as being "subsidized"? There is some sort of odd thinking, signalling, or writing going on here.

Setting all that aside, here is the passage that I found revealing. It is consistent with other research I have seen and yet is rarely discussed.

But the cliché that predominantly black central cities are policed more intensely than suburban counterparts is not quite true. Even though the federal government has expended massive fiscal subsidies on local policing since the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, there are still striking fiscal disparities between local jurisdictions. As one recent econometric analysis found, the whitest cities comprising 5 percent of the population had ten times as many police per index crime as the least white cities comprising the 5 percent of the population. Further, within cities, the distribution of policing resources can exacerbate that inequality. In Chicago, requests for police assistance are roughly negatively correlated across precincts with the number of police: Predominantly minority neighborhoods, that is, have the highest demand for police services, the lowest number of police per capita, and the longest wait times in relation to 911 calls.

Somewhat paradoxically, the substitute for an effective infrastructure of educational and economic opportunity—as well as robust protection of public order—is not the absence of a state presence, but a style of policing that aggressively penalizes the symptoms of urban decay without producing much by way of felt security among African-American residents. A familiar finding in urban sociologies from Elijah Anderson and Philippe Bourgois onward is that young African-American men cannot and do not turn to the police when victimized. Exclusion from equal protection of the laws rather breeds alternative systems of dispute resolution involving private violence. In this fashion, exclusion breeds violence, which in turn justifies the styles of policing that bred exclusion in the first instance.

I am a big 14th Amendment enthusiast. I think it is a foundational principle in any effective democracy that all laws ought to apply equally to all citizens and should not be applied to some and not to others based on any of the common issues of status or class or geography or wealth or race or religion. People will support laws they don't like as long as they know the law is equally applied. The edifice begins to crumble and people lose faith in law when they believe that laws are preferentially applied. We are deep in that hole right now and need to climb back out. A wealthy person with a speeding ticket pays a $1,000 to a lawyer to represent them in court, get their speeding ticket set aside in return for safe driving classes and has points omitted so that their insurance rates don't go up. A poor person goes to court to fight the ticket and loses, pays the fine, maybe loses their job for missing work, gets points against their record, pays more for insurance etc. I don't have a problem with there being consequences to unsafe driving. My problem is that those consequences are unequally applied.

We tend to think in stereotypes and abstractions to our great detriment. Wherever crime occurs, and regardless who is committing it, we want police to protect and effect arrests against perpetrators. It is a well worn claim that police departments are unduly punitive to African-Americans and across the several thousands of governmental authorities in the US it is no doubt true that there are some locations where there is a degree of racial animus driving punitive behavior. But I suspect that incident rate is pretty small. The root issues are not racial. They are much more complex. Ferguson was not a product of racial animus, it was a consequence of predatory municipal government trying to shore up budgets through police enforced fines. Baltimore was not a product of racial animus (virtually the entire civic corpus being African-American), it was a consequence of poor police training and management.

Ferguson's problems are real and they are not rooted in race. Baltimore's problems are real and not rooted in race. The more we try and force fit all problems into an abstract concept, the more we allow the real failures to continue unaddressed. I find Huq's statement, "that young African-American men cannot and do not turn to the police when victimized" to be likely true and an horrendous abandonment of our civic responsibilities to all our citizens.

We know, roughly, how to police in a fashion that reduces crime commission while increasing crime punishment. That is a bedrock responsibility of the state that needs to be done well. And needs to be done well for all citizens. What we don't have a good grasp on, and no one realistically has any real propositions, is how to police in a fashion that reduces crime commission while increasing crime punishment AND do so in a fashion that fosters an equal confidence among all citizens in the fairness of the law.

Our critical race theory ideologues are very effective at reining in police departments so that they are no longer extending the protection of the state equally to all citizens, a consequence now being referred to as the Ferguson Effect. This reduces the number of clashes between African-American citizenry and the police but at the cost of increasing lawlessness for citizens in predominantly African-American neighborhoods who most need protection from crime.

Constructing public policy so that policing both defends and protects all citizens and is seen as a service to all citizens is the challenge we face. Right now, we have too many bad faith actors harkening to long discredited academic theories such as critical race theory and who are pandered to by a too weak political class. Our citizens, all our citizens, deserve better.

UPDATE: I spotted this research paper, The Distribution of Police Protection by David Thacher, which reinforces the dilemma above. Current critical race theory provocateurs argue that African Americans suffer disproportionate attention from the police. This is not a well founded argument based on known patterns of violence and crime which elicit police attention. Indeed, in cities using CrimeStat programs (which encourage residents to call 911 for any suspicious behavior) police resources are carefully allocated based on empirical evidence of reports rather than on police perceptions of where they ought to spend their time. Under this model, it is the citizens themselves who materially drive police allocation of resources.

But not everyone uses CrimeStat type programs and of course not every community is equally concerned about crime (as reflected in the extent to which they are willing to tax themselves to support their local policing efforts). Thacher provides the evidence that undermines the assumption that African-American communities are over-policed. Based on Thacher's evidence, they are dramatically under-policed.

So now, depending on one's cast of mind, you can choose to be outraged in the false belief that African-Americans are over-policed or you can appropriately be outraged that, despite progress with empirical allocation of police resources to areas of high crime, in general, African-American neighborhoods are dramatically under-policed compared to white neighborhoods and therefor miss out on the benefits of secure environments.