The Neighborhood War Zone
By David Kennedy
Sunday, August 13, 2006; Page B01
....Not long ago, the United States was declaring "mission accomplished" on crime: Homicide rates were plunging, the crack epidemic was over, the broken windows were fixed. Now, preliminary FBI statistics show that homicides rose nearly 5 percent in 2005, and news from around the country suggests that 2006 is looking worse. Our many Iraqs at home are making it clear that the self-congratulation was premature. In reality, Americans were lulled into complacency about violent crime. And two new factors have emerged: Some of the law enforcement tactics used to fight crime in recent years damaged the social fabric in many communities and contributed to increased crime. More important has been the spread of a virulent thug ethos -- an obsession with "respect" that has made killing a legitimate response to the most minor snubs and slights. In parts of the District's Anacostia neighborhood today, a young man knows that the wrong kind of eye contact with the wrong person -- a "hard look" -- can cost him his life....We are used to thinking of the many factors that drive crime -- poverty, inequality, demographics, racism, and family and community problems. But to that list we should add the spread of a subculture once found only in the toughest urban areas: the culture of respect.
My research in Baltimore, Boston, Minneapolis, Washington and many other cities, along with that of colleagues at the University of California at Irvine and at Michigan State University, shows that in hard-hit neighborhoods, the violence is much less about drugs and money than about girls, vendettas and trivial social frictions. These are often referred to as "disputes" in police reports and in the media. But such violence is not about anger-management problems. The code of the streets has reached a point in which not responding to a slight can destroy a reputation, while violence is a sure way to enhance it. The quick and the dead are not losing their tempers; they are following shared -- and lethal -- social expectations.
I've heard shooters say, in private, that they wanted no part of what happened. But with their friends and enemies watching -- and the unwritten rules clear to everybody -- they did what they had to do....All of this is spreading as well as amplifying the street definition of what it means to have honor. In big cities, the quest for honor reignites existing conflicts; in small ones, it brings big-city behavior and big-city problems. Working recently on Long Island with the Nassau County Police Department, my colleagues and I found Bloods, Crips -- and violence. But the gangs were homegrown, and the violence was almost entirely personal....
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Tragically, the code of the street -- and the community disorganization and disenfranchisement on which it thrives -- has been helped along by law enforcement. Profligate arrests and incarcerations, many aimed at drugs, have destroyed the village in order to save it. As crime has dropped, zealous enforcement has continued. A staggering 2 million people are now incarcerated in the United States, and about 5 million are on probation and parole. They disproportionately come from -- and return to -- the same neighborhoods. The Justice Policy Institute recently determined that a shocking 52 percent of Baltimore's black men ages 20 to 29 were incarcerated, on probation or on parole; nationally, the lifetime chance of a black man being locked up is one in three....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/11/AR2006081101333.html
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