For Carib News 10/26/16
Another fortnight and the American people will choose who will be the 45th President of the United States. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have addressed the issue of criminal justice. Clinton has been judicious in speaking out against systemic racism in the criminal justice system but also expressing the need for police departments and the black community to work towards some kind of rapprochement.
Trump as has been typical of his presidential campaign has made wild charges about the state of violent crime in America. According to Mr. Trump, crime is out of control and if you walk down any street in the black community, you are likely to be shot. The billionaire businessman and inexperienced politician in his appeal for the black vote, bellows that we are all jobless, uneducated and living in communities overrun with crime and thus the black community has nothing to lose but to rally to his racist campaign.
Trump has presented himself as the law and order candidate who if given the opportunity will magically fix everything that is wrong with America.
On the question of crime, Trump is poorly informed as he is in most policy matters. This law and order candidate appears oblivious to the phenomenon of mass incarceration. The United States has 1.4 million inmates locked up behind bars and another 700,000 in jail awaiting trial. When this includes people on parole and probation, there are approximately seven million Americans under some kind of correctional supervision. That amounts to 716 per 100,000 incarcerated, vastly greater than other nation. Rwanda has 492 per 100,000 largely driven by the genocide of 1995 and Russia with 475 per 100,000.
What is remarkable is that this exponential increase began in the 1970s and exploded after the 1980s. Even though crime began to decrease in the 1990s, the mass incarceration continued unabated.
What Mr. Trump is not aware of is that since the 1990s, the United States has witnessed the most prolonged crime decline in the nation’s history.
The F.B.I.’s Uniform Crime Report shows that in 1991, there were 24,703 homicides committed in the United States at a rate of 9.8 per 100,000. That figure slowly declined in the last decade of the twentieth century and continued in the twenty-first century. In 2010, there were 14,748 murders at a rate of 4.8 per 100,000.
What the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have discovered is that in 2015, there has been an increase in murders compared to 2014, an increase of 10.8 percent. That jump in murders was largely concentrated in cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Nashville, Cleveland and Houston. That yearly increase is significant but there are already signs that 2016 will not be as ravenous as 2015. But the decline that began in the 1990s is tapering off.
Nationally, New York City led the decline but even in New York City the decline appears also to be tapering off. Nonetheless, to analyze the data in some historical perspective, New York City has experienced a spectacular decline in violent crime from the 1990s to the present. In 1990, there were 2,262 murders in New York City and in a 25 year span the murder rate in 2015 was 352. Murders for 2016 are on a slight decline, 281 in 2016 in comparison 287 in 2015. Also, for rape, there has been an increase of 2.6 percent and a decrease of 7.3 percent vis-à-vis robberies.
In communities like the South Bronx such as the 40th Precinct which covers Melrose and Mott Haven, communities where there is a large concentration of poverty, with over 45 percent of residents living below the Federal poverty line, crime has begun to inch upward. Again, to place the crime statistics in some historical perspective, in 1990 there were 72 homicides committed in the 40th Precinct. In 2001, that figure for murders were placed at 27 and in 2015, it had been reduced to 9 recorded murders. Thus far for the year 2016 (Comstat 10/16/16), the Precinct has recorded 12 homicides. There are increases in Rape, Robbery, Felonies, Assault, Burglary and Grand Larceny. The only exception where there is no increase in these felonies is in automobile theft.
From a national perspective, the increase in homicides is not comparable to where the country was in the 1970s and 1980s but there are signs that the party of rapid decline is over.
It is obvious that 2015 has been a peculiar year. Not only has the homicide rate increased by 10.8 percent in comparison to 2014 but median household incomes have increased and 3.5 million people have been taken out of poverty. Nonetheless, the poverty rate for black families is disproportionately high. Since the civil rights movement of the 1980s and 1960s, the black community has become increasingly class differentiated. In the educational and professional ranks, black women and men have made significant progress in the world of work despite having to struggle with the obstacles of racism.
Trump has run a destructive campaign. He has presumed that he has to tear down America in order to become President. He has even refused to clearly state that if he loses on November 8, he will not necessarily accept the results of the election.
The rise of Trump has made decent Americans aware of the alternative right movement that trumples on truth on a daily basis. A classical example of this propaganda chicanery is how Fox News, as pointed out on the Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC), how that media organ manufactured the preposterous untruth that a couple of Black Panther Party members were intimidating white voters. Fox News has always engaged in race-baiting. Running in the same lane, Trump makes the baseless charges that the election is rigged and the whole system in Washington is corrupt. The ALT Right movement has always been in the vanguard of way out conspiracy theories.
Trump is a product of a system of class inequality and he has used that system to avoid the payment of federal income taxes. The historical forces in America have been moving towards the arc of Justice to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It will be befitting if Trump on November 8 is defeated by the first female President of the United States. That will allow Mr. Trump the time to sue all his accusers and get his facts straight on questions of crime and criminal justice.
