What caused the dramatic rise of crime and blight in American cities from 1950 to 2000?

What caused the dramatic rise of crime and blight in American cities from 1950 to 2000?

"On Reddit’s most lauded history subreddit (/r/AskHistorians) someone asked “What caused the dramatic rise of violent crimes and urban decay in the mid-to-late 1960s?”

Crime rates in many northern and western American cities skyrocketed during the middle of the 20th century. Here is a table showing the change in homicide rates. Keep in mind, the low homicide rates of the 1910s were before the invention of antibiotics, modern surgery, or wound sterilization techniques!

In addition to rising crime, these cities suffered from an increase in single parent families, joblessness, drug abuse, riots, disorderly schools, and boarded up buildings...

The most upvoted answer on the /r/AskHistorians thread blames deindustrialization, surbanization, and racial segregation...

Another commenter adds in:

Don’t forget to mention the practice of blockbusting. Real estate agents would scare whites in urban neighborhoods into thinking that the neighborhood was “becoming black.” Sometimes, they would accomplish this by actually selling a house in the neighborhood to a black family. Sufficiently scared, the white families would sell their houses for below-market prices and move to the suburbs.

The answer given by these two commenters is the answer I was taught when I was in university...

But since I graduated, I have done more reading and research, and was exposed to viewpoints that were never included in my class reading lists. And as I have read, it became more and more obvious that the standard academic narrative was simply wrong. Statistics, memoirs, and ethnography all contradicted the mainstream view. The problem with blaming the rise on crime as being caused by middle-class people leaving, is that the crime came first. While there was a gradual move of whites from the city to the suburbs starting the 1950s, this flow turned into a flood only after rising violence...

If job loss and deindustrialization caused the homicide spike, we should expect black populations in these cities to have a low homicide rate in the 1940s and 1950s and then a ten-times higher homicide rate in the 1980s, after the job loss.

But that is not the case – the homicide rates in black populations were high all along. At least half of the 1,000% increase in crime can be explained purely by the statistics of composition. If you have group A that commits crime at 35 per 100,000, and group B that commits crime at 2 per 100,000, and if your population goes from 10% to 60% A, then homicide rates will go from ~5 to ~20.

The problem of high homicide rates among black Americans did not start only after they moved to the city and white people left the city. The problem goes back all the way to the years after the Civil War. Nor are the high crime-rates among black people in the south a myth of neo-Confederate historians – it is documented and undisputed by many liberal and African-American historians...

W.E.B. Du Bois himself acknowledged the problem of crime in his 1899 book The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study...

In the Philadelphia of 1950, before white flight and employer flight, the black homicide rate was around 23 per 100,000 while for whites it was around 2 per 100,000...

In the middle of the 20th century there was the Great Migration of blacks from the south to take advantage of manufacturing jobs. As manufacturing employment saturated, the northern cities continued to attract migrants by offering very generous welfare payments. Black people often moved north and then soon went on public assistance, and were converted into a voting block for the local politicians...

As Michael Jones notes in his book Slaughter of the Cities, much is written about the FHA and red-lining, while the USHA efforts to integrate are forgotten...

There were also many local efforts to move blacks into white neighborhoods ...

It is not entirely clear what the motives were of the political leaders pushing these projects. Certainly, some earnestly believed in the idea of integration being good for all. But Michael Jones argues in his Slaughter of the Cities that the WASP elite at the time had more cynical reasons. In his account the elite feared the political, social, and demographic power of the ethnic, Catholic Poles and Irish. The W.A.S.P.’s elite wanted to obliterate the ethnic white tribal identity by breaking up their neighborhoods.

When the black population moved into white areas, whites noticed a stark rise in crime and disorder. In response, numerous whites would fight back and shout slurs. This lead to a hardening of feelings on both sides. At the same time, both white leftist elites and black leaders started pushing black power. This era saw the rise of Malcolm X preaching about “white devils.” It saw the rise of the Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, the Black Liberation Army, the Family, and the Symbionese Liberation Army...

Some young black men started deliberately preying upon the white folks who lived near by. Those whites who could afford to, fled to the suburbs to escape the violence. As the numbers turned, the remaining whites were outnumbered, and they too eventually fled, often at great financial loss.

The above story is repeated over-and-over again, in memoirs and ethnographies.

Jonathan Reider, a Yale educated liberal sociology professor, did an ethnography of Canarsie, Brooklyn to try and understand why the working class residents had started voting Republican. He found that the residents were terrified of (black) crime...

Purcell’s story contradicts the narrative that white people were primarily enticed out of the city by government subdized mortgages. Many of the people did not want to leave and suffered considerable financial losses when they did leave. Nor is blaming the block busting real estate agents sufficient – block busting only worked because the threats were backed by real violence. Blame the block busters, but also blame the people perpertrating and enabling the violence.

Norman Podhoretz grew up in a Jewish family in Brownsville, Brooklyn. His “family was leftist, with his elder sister joining a socialist youth movement.” He later went to Columbia and became a leading neo-conservative thinker. His experiences growing up were central to his rejection of the leftist worldview. He wrote about these experiences in a 1963 essay My Negro Problem and Ours...

Unfortunately, as the neighborhood and the local school continued to transition, problems of crime and disorder became worse. The children her school went to – the Lewenberg – became infamous throughout the city for its disturbances. Janice Bernstein went from “baking cakes for her new black neighbors” to chasing their children with bats...

Moving on to Detroit, journalist Ze’Ev Chafets, who grew up in Detroit and wrote the excellent first-hand account Devil’s Night, reports that the riots of 1967 destroyed a Jewish community of 80,000 people almost overnight...

In city after city the firsthand accounts show that the violence came first. It was the violence that caused white people to leave the city so rapidly...

While any predatory violence is a terrible thing, this white-on-black violence was not a direct cause of the blight of the cities, which is the topic of this post. The uncomfortable truth might be that this violence in some cases prevented “white flight” and urban decay. Southie and Charlestown are both flourishing neighborhoods in 2017. One thesis is that it was the ethnocentric, “stick together, fight together” militancy of the Irish in these neighborhoods that prevented an exodus, whereas the Jews in Dorchester were more used to moving on in response to trouble, and thus left rather than fight. (See the books Urban Exodus and Chapter 6 of Boston Against Busing for more on this thesis). However, in other accounts, such as Kevin Purcell’s accounts, white violence seemed to lead to cycles of retaliatory violence with ultimately the white people leaving.

It is also fair to say that the motivation for the worst black-on-white violence originated in part from a history of white-on-black violence that generated a general anti-white animus among some black people. However this history neither explains nor justifies the black-on-white violence. A large number of the targets of the black-on-white violence in northern cities (the elderly Jewish men in Dorchester, an Italian truck driver in Carnasie, a Kevin’s childhood friend Doug in Philadelphia) had no conceivable moral blame for the history of white-on-black violence in the American South.

There is a habit among many historians where if there is a negative pattern in behavior in the black population, the historian goes back in time a little bit before to find examples of bad white behavior, and then posit that bad white behavior is the ultimate cause. But in many cases, this just does not make logical sense. Again, it simply does not follow that white-on-black violence in the American south, or that white-on-black race in Chicago in 1919, would inherently cause violence against white people in 1970 in Chicago or Carnasie or Boston or elsewhere. Nor can white violence logically explain the high levels of black on black violence or the dramatic rise of illegitimacy in the black population. We have plenty of examples from history of oppression and grevience that did not result in violence against the oppressors, much less against violence against people who were not oppressors but happened to share the same race as the oppressors. I have argued before that in general, it is not the oppression that triggers a violent response, but it is people with megaphones fanning the flames of grievance that causes the violent response...

The “lack of jobs causes crime” thesis was most famously argued by the sociologists William Julius Wilson and Thomas Segue. I certainly agree that there exists some correlation – the neighborhoods with the highest crime tend to have high rates of joblessness among the young men who live there.

But which way lies the causation?

It could be that government welfare both causes crime and joblessness – welfare allows men to mooch off their woman and it obviates the need for woman to withold sex until a man can prove that he is a provider. If a man can mooch off his girl, and loaf around at the street corner, that’s a lot more fun than getting a job as a line cook at the local restaurant.

Or it could be that institutional breakdown (the decline of churches, the decline of the authority of the police and school teacher, the decline of authority of fathers) causes both crime and unemployment.

Or it could be that a deficit of “human capital” and a prevalence of anti-social attitudes causes both crime also cause unemployment. If a population lacks the ambitious people able to start and operate businesses and has too many of the people who are anti-social, violent, and distrusting of authority, then it’s going to both lack employers and employable people.

The most obvious problem with the “lack of jobs causes crime theory” is that the crime came first. The crime came before the white people moved out and took their jobs and money with them. Now it could be argued that that the black population already suffered from joblessness due to discrimination. But if we trace back the history of the higher black crime rates, it dates back to times after the Civil War in which black laborers were very highly in demand.

Overall, there are many reasons why I do not think that joblessness causes higher violent high crime (and in particular – joblessness does not cause homicides and predatory assaults):

1. There was no great rise in homicide during the Great Depression. In fact, violent crime went down. In general, there is no correlation between violent crimes and the unemployment rate in the history of the United States.
2. Poor, rural white areas have much of the same problems of joblessness and drug abuse, but without the homicide. Peter Moskos writes about one such county in Ohio: “But here’s the thing. No matter how hopeless and messed up things might be in East Liverpool and Columbiana County, Ohio; no matter how the jobs are gone; no matter how loose the gun laws are; no matter where junkies are shooting up; no matter how much crime there is; no matter how forgotten by the government and mocked by east-coast elites they might be, the good folks of Columbiana County somehow manage not to murder each other. Best I can tell, this entire county of about 100,000 has maybe one homicide a year. Some years there seems to be none. Other years maybe two. (I’m basing this on Columbiana County, East Liverpool, and Salem City police departments). This homicide rate, 1 per 100,000, is about 1/4th the national average. Meanwhile, Baltimore City has a poverty rate lower than East Liverpool. Baltimore’s median household income is higher than East Liverpool.” And Baltimore has a murder rate 55-times as high.
3. Much of the crime and violence noted in the accounts I have cited were committed by teenagers. Much of the violence that drove people away and made these ghettos notorious happened in the schools. Joblessness doesn’t explain why in some places bored teenagers without jobs play sports and horseplay among themselves, while in other places teenagers prey upon innocent people and commit crimes.
4. Cities and regions that did not face economic hardship had similar rises in crime. The ghettos in Washington DC, Oakland, Boston, or South Central LA were every bit as bad as those in Detroit. Yet those regions were the great economic winners of the last fifty years. A liberal professor at CUNY recently performed a few regressions and found: “The data suggest that violent crime rates in American cities primarily reflects a subculture embraced by a small core of black men and has little to do with employment opportunities. For 34 of the largest cities, the figure below indicates the relationship between each city’s share of black men, 20 to 34 years old, and its 2014 violent crime rate. Using multiple regressions, the correlation is highly statistically significant, while the citywide jobless rate is not. These findings indicate that the racial composition of young men is a strong predictor of a city’s violent crime rate than labor market conditions.”
5. Even in a region that did lose jobs – such as Detroit – the job loss was gradual from 1945 to 2010, whereas the murder rates exploded in a very short time period. Homicides rose from 125 to 714 in nine years.
6. How does deindusrialization explain why poor Asian immigrants in the Bay Area have none of the social problems of blacks in Oakland? How does it explain why employment rates are so much higher among Hispanic immigrants than blacks, when looking at the same cities?
7. Deindustrialization doesn’t explain why 60% of convenience stores in Detroit are owned by Middle Eastern immigrants. It doesn’t explain why in several of these ethnographies you read statements like, “The Jewish stores owners tried to transfer their businesses to blacks as they moved out, but for various reasons these efforts failed.” These stories are more consistent with the idea that characteristics of the population cause both the lack of jobs and the crime.
8. In almost all these cities, even after the residents and factories moved out, the day time population was substantially higher than the night time population. That is, people were net commuting into the city for jobs. The notion that all the jobs were in the suburbs was simply false. Even after many jobs had moved out, the city homes were still on net more proximate to employers.
9. The descriptions of murder and violence in the ghetto do not really fit the joblessness thesis...

People, jobless or not, always seek enjoyable diversions. That is why we do sports, play cards, tend gardens, set off firecrackers, or go dancing. Testosterone fueled young men play football, wrestle, or other such sports. And yes, there can be a certain enjoyment to mayhem and violence. But for people to resort to violence as entertainment, requires far more than just some extra time on one’s hands. There has to be a complete breakdown in morals, attitudes, mores, community control, and law enforcement for predatory violence to become a recreation. Joblessness is not the primary cause of violence.

The “drug war” caused the crime theory

This theory has been popularized by The Wire creator David Simon, and it has a few variants: 1) drug prohibition gives incentives for a black market and these black markets tend to produce crime because participants cannot rely on the legal system to ajudicate disputes. 2) locking up black men for petty drug crimes creates fatherless communities, prevents them from re-entering the legitimate workforce, and thus creates more crime 3) police resources that could be spent tracking down killers and preventing violent crime are instead wasted on drug arrests.

The problem with these theories is that the crime came first. The drug war was a response to the rise in crime. As I wrote in another piece, it’s hard for the police to catch killers, so going after drug dealers is sometimes used as a proxy for getting the gangs and the criminal element off the street. This is not ideal, but this is hardly causing the crime. While Nixon first called for an offensive against drugs in the early 1970s, nothing much changed after that. Drug laws actually became slighly more lax and drug arrests did not rise. Yet crime was on an upward swing all through the 1960s and 1970s. Crime was approaching its apex before any real implementation of the drug war. The notorious crack cocaine laws were passed in 1986 as crime neared its peak. And then crime started falling around 1993, as incarceration rates rose.

Furthermore, through the early 1980s, drug prohibition was not more severe in the United States than in many other developed countries with much lower crime rates. And it is still less severe than in many countries with far less crime (such as Singapore). Nor was it more strict in the black ghettos than in parts of the country with far less crime and gang violence. If anything it is more lax – open-air drug dealing is permitted in the black ghettos in a way that it is not permitted elsewhere. Nor does black market activity inherently lead to crime – for instance in the book Dreamland about the opioid crisis the author documents how the Mexican heroin dealers shy away from crime because murders draw police heat and thus are bad for business. Nor are most crimes committed in the ghetto directly connected to black market drug selling.

The problem with drug incarceration causing fatherless families which begets crime is that again, the timeline does not match. Among blacks, the out-of-wedlock birthrate was 20% in 1955. It then skyrocketed toward about 56% by 1980. Again, this was before the “War on Drugs” really began. It continued to rise to about 67% by 1990, but since then has leveled off a bit, and has not risen as much (even as the number of incarcerated black men continued to rise). The other problem with variant #2 is that no one has produced a number telling me what percent of these imprisoned black men were actually living with the mother of their children before they were jailed. Based on my reading of ethnographies and memoirs, I suspect the proportion is very low. 

The original question posed on Reddit asked if the decisions by the Supreme Court under Warren handcuffed the police and caused the rise in crime. The commenters are dismissive of the notion...

The low point for incarceration was 1970). And yet at that same time crime was out of control in the American cities...

While the perception is that police today are overzealous, there remains a big problem of over policing/under-policing – that is, police are bullies to young teenagers who have not committed an offense, while they fail to deal with real crime. They go around jacking up corners and making arrests, while everyone ends up right back on the street a few hours later. No violent criminals are put in jail, the police are just hassling people...

In recent years Baltimore’s murder clearance (arrest) rate has hovered at around 45%, while the conviction rate is around 30%. Multiply the two together and you get that only in ~15% of murder cases does a suspect end up getting caught and convicted.

Compare to Japan where the clearance rate was 96% and the conviction rate a disturbingly high 99.8%.

The murder rate in Japan was .3 per 100,000. The rate in Baltimore was 1,000 times higher, at 37 per 100,000.

Baltimore solves a pitifully small percentage of its murder cases, has a thousand times more murder, and thus multiple orders of magnitude more incarceration.

Jill Leovy reports in Ghettoside that most homicides and violent crimes in the LA area go unsolved...

David Simon in his ethnography The Corner reports that there is a lot of police harassment – but little actual punishment sufficient to deter future crime...

In addition to reduced policing, there was also reduced discipline in the schools...

The stories from Hamilton High are similar to stories told from other schools around the country. And these stories are still so frequent there is practically a genre of writing – the urban teacher’s confessional about how their students are unruly and they lack the tools to discipline them ...

Overall, I think the evidence is very strong that there was a decline in discipline and punishment during the 1960s and 1970s at all levels – from school to the streets to the courts. And that decline lead to a substantial rise in disorder and bad behavior.

There since has been some reaction, with more strict policing. But unfortunately the problems in the school have not been addressed. Thus often students go through the school system, committing bad deeds without serious punishment, only to reach adulthood, commit the same deeds and end up in prison. The “school to prison” pipeline is almost certainly due to a lack of punishment in the schools, rather than there being too much punishment in the schools.

It may make readers uncomfortable that this essay has put so much emphasis on violence committed by black people. People who focus too much on selecting anectdotes of black crime are often accused of cherry-picking facts to further a racist narrative. I can only hope you believe me when I say that when I first started reseaching the problem of urban decay over a decade ago, the analysis in this post was not something I set out to prove. Rather, I set out to find as many first-hand, narratives accounts of urban decay and “white flight” as I could. I wanted to learn the story from the people who were actually there, or from the people who interviewed the people who were actually there. And these are the stories I found, over and over again. And these were the stories that were almost completely ommitted from my college courses – we only ever heard that white people left because the suburbs were so much better – without hearing why people thought the suburbs were better. We heard about block busters promoting fear – without learning that the fears were justified, not irrational.

It should also be pointed out that it is erroneous to single out violent young black men as the villains in this story. I think a lot of American politics is basically manipulating enforcement of the law in order to steal turf from other people. A fair amount of blame goes to the liberal WASP establisment, who in their battle with the ethnic white political power, relaxed enforcement of the law in black areas, hooked them on welfare, and used black people as a tool for claiming political power.

Right now we are in a vicious cycle. In academic and policy wonk circles, any criticism of “black crime” is considered victim blaming and possibly racist. The problems of the black community are instead pinned on segregation and racist policing. Yet it is not segregation that causes the crime. And every time we try to integrate, without fixing the crime problem, integration fails because white people flee the violence. And while police misbehavior is a problem, under-policing is also a big problem. When we cannot honestly describe the problem, when we cannot propose proper solutions, the problem only becomes worse."

I find that those who level accusations of "cherry picking" are usually the ones who cherry pick themselves. So it can be seen as Freudian projection.