Much progress in cities since the ’70s
ONLY THREE YEARS AGO, America was safer than ever before, dating all the way back to 1776.
That’s not just a feel-good, chestthumping, flag-waving conclusion. Three years of research found the nation’s cities had rebounded from a violent rock bottom, with life improving steadily as crime decreased.
Author Patrick Sharkey, in his new book, maintains the decline — despite recent angry protests over police shootings of black men — produced real benefits for African-American males.
Sharkey, an NYU professor and chair of the sociology department, is also scientific director of Crime Lab New York, an organization that studies crime, violenceandpoverty.
And he makes his case in “Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence,” due in mid-January.
“The drop in the homicide rate is one of the most important public health breakthroughs in the past several decades, saving tens of thousands of black lives and reducing the racial gap in life expectancy,” Sharkey writes.
As violence dropped, schools improved in neighborhoods that became safer. Safer neighborhoods meant more people returned to cities and neighborhoods became less segregated by income. No one could argue this logic, but the real surprise is how some cities rebounded and what he advocates for now.
In 2014, when Sharkey started the research for this book, American cities were the safest they had ever been.
But Sharkey sees early signs that since 2014 longstanding problems have begun to reassert themselves, threatening these gains.
Sharkey begins with a moment seared into most people’s memories — at least those watching the 1977 World Series, when the Yankees hosted the Dodgers.
And blocks around the Bronx stadium were on fire.
Incidentally, Howard Cosell never said “the Bronx is burning” — his on-air partner Keith Jackson first talked about the flames beyond the stadium’s famous facade.
It was a terrifying if familiar scene for Bronx residents accustomed to buildings torched for insurance money in their downtrodden borough.
Sharkey uses the Bronx as a backdrop, much as Presidents Jimmy Carter and later Ronald Reagan did when they stood on Charlotte Street, using it The perfect storm arrived as a symbol of urban blight. when crack exploded across the
“The horror of the South inner cities. Even for those who Bronx was sensationalized and survived the fires and the drug exploited, used as a prop by filmmakers wars, the statistics illustrated and novelists and politicians how deadly those days were. to capture the nightmare of At the start of the 1960s, New urban America,” Sharkey writes. York City had fewer than 500 homicides
“But the reality was equally terrifying. a year. By the early The descent started with 1990s, that number had more abandonment, destitution, joblessness than quadrupled. Yet in 2014, the and hopelessness that number of homicides had fallen were symbolized by the 12,000 or to 328, the lowest since the first so fires that were set in the South half of the 20th Century. Bronx over the course of the New York wasn’t alone. Atlanta, 1970s. But over time the epidemic Dallas, Los Angeles and Washington of arson turned into a plague of also saw their murder violence.” rates plummet by 60% to 80%. Even in cities with continued rates of high violence, such as Oakland and Philadelphia, the rate still dropped by one-third.
Touching on different years in different cities, Sharkey reminds readers of the constantly shocking bloodshed in Chicago and pinpoints one case that should never be forgotten: the murder of Derrion Albert.
The 16-year-old honors student was leaving school at dismissal in September 2009 when he became caught up in a brawl — and beaten to death with a railroad tie.
The carnage was all caught on camera.
During that year, 459 people were murdered in Chicago, with young black men comprising 75% of the victims.
While Sharkey uses statistics and cites other scholars, he doesn’t lose sight that violent crime “fundamentally ... is about young people who never get to see adulthood ... It is about human life that is wasted.”
Sharkey made a point of spending time in Franz Sigel Park as he began his book.
Kids were playing and adults relaxing in this park in the shadow of the Bronx County Courthouse and Yankee Stadium — new life in what was once a desolate, scary place.
Sharkey notes this peaceful scene unfolded mere months after Eric Garner died from a police chokehold on Staten Island while being arrested for selling loose cigarettes, helping to spark the Black Lives Matter movement.
Sharkey also cites John Crawford, who was fatally shot in an Ohio Walmart while carrying a BB gun from the store’s shelves. Days later, Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Mo., and the protests started.