Understanding Differently

Here are words of truth that many will not allow themselves to read let alone acknowledge. These are facts that challenge us to understand differently and maybe even consider taking a step toward repairing our society. Thank you, Bill McGraw and Bridge MI. – RB

The War on Crime, not crime itself, fueled Detroit’s post-1967 decline,
By Bill McGraw, Bridgemi.com, 18 Oct 2016

“In the mid-1960s, crime appeared to be rising in Detroit, homicides were ticking up, then 1967 happened. Crime became a big issue, and in 1974, Detroit Mayor Coleman Young took office and homicides hit an all-time high, 714. A lot of people see crime as one of the major reason people left Detroit. You have a different explanation.”

“I think across the nation, the idea is that cities are emptied out, particularly of their white residents and their more affluent residents because crime goes out of control. And certainly Detroit is seen as Ground Zero where that happened. But as a historian, I had the chance to really go back and unpack this, not just decade by decade, but actually year by year and really ask the question, for example ‘Was crime really on the rise prior to the rebellion of ’67? And was that the reason for why we see an outflux of residents?”

“And in fact, it was not. We see very clearly that, certainly under Mayor Cavanagh, it looks for a moment, especially after 1965, that crime is ticking up, but there is whole back story here, which is, number one, the Johnson Administration had incentivized counting crime in such a way with its new war on crime measures, to incentivize showing that you had an uptick in crime.”

“The mayor himself, the head of the police department himself, both went public and said, ‘No, it’s actually not that we have a rise in crime … we’re now reporting it differently.’ And so the irony of ironies is that we begin this intensive policing that will really lead to the rebellion and we begin these really corrosive practices in cities like in Detroit – in advance of a crime problem. But then, of course, we really do get a crime problem because we get a war of drugs, which, like Prohibition much earlier in the century, illegal economies are dangerous economies, they are economies of desperation, they are accompanied by violence, they are accompanied by crime.”

“But, notably, when urban Detroiters are most suffering the crime problem, white residents are already long gone. They had already long left the city. So it is a bit of a chicken and egg question, and it’s an important one as to what happens when.”

Mass Incarceration of Detroit | DJC Clip

Please go here for the full story:
The War on Crime, not crime itself, fueled Detroit’s post-1967 decline, Bill McGraw, Bridgemi.com, 18 Oct 2016