I’m glad that Kevin Drum is pushing the lead-reduction explanation for the drop in juvenile violent crime. He’s right; the statistics suggest that the best crime reduction policy we could pursue is an aggressive effort to remove lead dust from the environment, especially in urban areas where people are closely concentrated. Reduced exposure to lead appears to lower people’s proclivity to commit violent acts, and it tracks better than changes in poverty levels, the unemployment rate, or anything else.
I gotta say, though, ever since I started paying close attention to gun violence in this country, I’ve been worrying that people are too satisfied about the reduction in violent crime. It’s a double-edged sword. The more it goes down, the fewer people are committed to bringing it down more. It is certainly not at an acceptable level.
Will Allen’s Growing Power in Milwaukee deals with both through expansion of urban agriculture on vacant lots that once had housing (and likely lead-paint) on them. The process creates a two-foot layer of soil directly over the lot to seal out the heavy metals in the existing soil layer. He trains youth, provides jobs, and provides something productive to do, and produces food and compost.
And Green Power has been working to figure out how to rapidly replicate and scale up what they are doing. But the limitations are financial resources (what hamstrings almost everything these days).
Another strategy would be to dial back the police from military policing strategies to the sort of community policing that got results beginning in the Clinton era. At a minimum that would reduce the number of kids killed by law enforcement. Dialing back police ‘roid use might also help.
There are lots of other strategies that are only lacking the will and the resources.
Raymond Kelly could be literally senile, misremembering or at least badly misunderstanding his role in the early 90s community policing movement. His authority and Bloomberg’s are huge obstacles at the moment in understanding this point.
Cops are using steroids? Holy shit, now you’ve got me seriously frightened.
The lead explanation is really inconvenient, because it doesn’t lend itself to writing off urban (read: non-white) youth as inherently violent, evil, and irredeemable. It suggests that things can be done, and that maybe somebody ought to, I dunno, do something. Violent crime is only the tip of the iceberg of what’s disadvantaging those kids: lack of living wage jobs (for the parents, let alone teenagers), less stable on average home situations (see above), terrible schools, poor availability of affordable nutritious food, ad nauseam.
There are a lot of really inspiring examples of people “doing something,” but it’s rarely coming from governments. The most common government investment in such neighborhoods seems to be SWAT team weapons and training for the occupying army. If we spent a fraction of that money on universal preschool, that alone would impact millions of future lives in a profound way.
Nah. They’re all thugs. The teevee told me so.
This is all well and good.
But how do we stop Republican politicians from drinking mercury?
Mercury? I thought it was end stage syphilis.
Obviously Republicans wouldn’t treat syphilis with antibiotics, because you’d have to believe in evolution to think that would work. So mercury is what they take.
HA!!