Sending the wrong message on crime

New York City in the 1970s gained a global reputation as “the ungovernable city” in response to the complete failure of Mayor John Lindsay’s idealistic but misguided leadership. Crime worsened. Welfare costs blasted holes in the city’s budget. Eventually, New York faced near bankruptcy and declining living conditions accompanied by a real physical threat.

Many people who grew up in the city during the period remember childhoods in which muggings were not unusual and crime was rampant. New York’s apparent lack of any will to act led to voluntary efforts to protect citizens such as the once highly regarded Guardian Angels. In addition, one citizen, Bernard Goetz, took the law into his own hands and killed his assailants, which resulted in a national controversy in the mid-1980s. His actions seemed to symbolize the growing frustration of New Yorkers tired of a permissive environment that bred intimidation and theft.

And then things changed. The famed Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson wrote a seminal essay about the “broken windows” theory of crime. In essence, the idea was that the more chaos and disorder an urban community tolerates, the more likely crime is to proliferate in response. Rudy Giuliani became the first Republican mayor of the city in two decades (having built a reputation prosecuting cases against the Mafia) and applied the broken windows philosophy with energy. As a result, the city’s environment for ordinary citizens improved dramatically as crime declined in response to vigorous enforcement.

It was as though the city’s leaders suddenly came to terms with the Biblical nature of government at its core. There are many things we hope to achieve through government, but the most fundamental is order and safety bounded by justice. Martin Luther regarded the Sermon on the Mount’s admonitions against violence with the strictest exactitude. Christians are commanded to follow Christ’s commands. But Luther thought there were not many Christians in the world, and thus evil would multiply. Because many would do evil, Luther believed God gave us the state to restrain and punish those who visit wrong upon their neighbors.

When there are members of the community who would engage in assaults, theft, and robbery, there is certainly room to try to understand and investigate causes and motivations. But to engage in such important work should not result in an abandonment of the need to provide real order and protection with urgency.

Talk with anyone you might find now working at a local store, for example. The stores regularly suffer losses as employees are instructed to do nothing to stop organized groups of thieves. Likewise, social media regularly features store videos of robbers breaking in to smash display cases and leave with merchandise. Walgreens has closed five stores in San Francisco because of regular, organized theft.

Social predators are taking advantage of the nation’s crisis of conscience over policing (which is a legitimate area of inquiry) to attack, believing that such crimes can be carried out with impunity. Somehow, we seem to have cultivated a belief in many members of the public—not just criminals—that to vigorously enforce legitimate laws is too costly and a wealthy society can tolerate more crime. We are learning that the opposite is true, and we are learning that sad lesson in real time.

If we continue in that direction, we will find more and more parts of the United States suffering from the pathologies of New York City in the years before restored order. Leaders will fail to take care of the most basic, most fundamental parts of their job. Police officers will feel unsupported and maligned. In the same way that weeds and undergrowth will sprout up and cover every inch of steel and concrete if left alone, our communities require vigilance regarding the enforcement of necessary laws. Having an orderly, peaceful, and safe place to live can easily be taken for granted until it slips away. Do you want a social justice issue? How fair is it for wealthy people to move ever farther out from the troubled cities while those with lesser means live in communities without fundamental law and order in place and lose the merchants who serve their areas?

Political leaders (and the rest of us) must learn to walk and chew gum at the same time because the stakes are high. We can and should have a healthy debate about safety in policing and the problem of overincarceration. But it is critical not to send a message that theft, robbery, and social chaos will be extended some kind of license while we work through our problems. God gives us government as an important way of restraining dangerous sin. It’s time for government to do its proper work.