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October 12, 2009
Exclusive: Dependency Forever?
The recent brutal killing of Derrion Albert, a 16-year-old Chicago honor roll student, caught on a cellphone video and splashed across the internet via YouTube has yet again pushed black-on-black crime to the forefront (Attorney General Eric Holder even plans to visit Derrion’s family). Though he is “only” the 67th Chicago student to die violently since the 2007-8 school year, and hundreds more of his Chicago classmates have survived horrific beatings, these grim statistics are only the beginning. From 2008 onward, homicide is the number one cause of death among black males aged 10 to 24 generally and the second leading cause of death among African-American females in that age group.
What is to be done, at least in Chicago? Remarkably, a quick unchallenged consensus regarding a solution has emerged, namely spending a $60 million two-year federal grant (part of Obama’s stimulus package) to concentrate on the most vulnerable students. Ron Huberman, the city’s new public school chief specifically calls for targeting 10,000 at-risk students via jobs and paid advocates available 24/7 to protect students.
The enterprise is deceptively huge – assuming a 40 work week, 4.2 advocate per student will be necessary, and with, say, just three students to be supervised per advocate, this requires 14,000 new government positions plus all the extra police expenses. Further add the outlays of finding jobs in a sluggish economy, necessary training and supervision of those previously unemployed, plus all the customary federal bureaucratic overhead and one has a “Save the endangered student” program than might rival rescuing spotted owls.
That this solution is totally untested and off-the-cuff is obvious. How, for example, will working after school job make one safer when leaving the school building? (This is where Derrion was murdered.) The administrative obstacles alone guarantee failure. The funding is, after all, only for two years and quickly finding 14,000 “advocates,” some of whom will have to work graveyard shifts and weekends, and training them (just how is unstated) and performing the necessary background checks requires multiple miracles before funds expire. Even if these counselors and more attentive police officers materialized tomorrow, the chaotic nature of the mayhem counsels pessimism. What, moreover, will these counselors tell these vulnerable youngsters? Be careful? Stay away from gangs? Move to rural Iowa? And just wait until the intensive policing generates an “unfortunate incident” to inspire local community activists to reclaim their “No Justice, No Peace” placards from storage.
But, far less important than dwelling on yet one more Washington stupidity are the enterprises’ underlying assumptions. This is what should be garnering attention. As a fish lacks a concept of water, these policy-makers seem oblivious to the narrowness of their nostrum menu though, as the New York Times reports, Mayor Daley told Huberman to think outside the box. In a nutshell, everything said occurs within a long-honored, nearly sacrosanct box, namely the Great Society Dependency-for-Life Box that provides repeated, expensive failure. The Chicago rescue is yet one more example of doomed Big Government horrifically expensive paternalism.
Absolutely nothing entails neighborhood residents doing anything to help themselves. Even the term “paternalism” may be too weak; “colonialism” might be more accurate. Outsiders will do the heavy lifting though some lucky (or politically connected) residents may be hired as mentors. Recall the Western movie The Magnificent Seven, in which a Mexican village threatened by bandits brought in paid gunslingers to protect them? Though in this case, Chicago’s “gunslingers” will resemble social workers. To be a tad comic, imagine a besieged town when some Gabby Hayes-like lookout hightails to the town saloon and shouts “Fear not, help is on the way, 14,000 role models and mentors are on the horizon!”
The self-help menu is hardly difficult or obscure. Since many residents own cell phones with a photo capacity and can forward pictures to the police, and these can be used as evidence to convict perpetrators. How about a “thousand eyes” program where residents monitor suspicious activity and instantly report it. What about creating a volunteer “neighborhood watch” program that has succeeded in thousands of localities? Or hand out buttons with “Yes, I will snitch.” Going one step further, the law allows ordinary citizens to intervene to stop criminal activity and all states (save North Carolina) permit citizen’s arrests. Of the utmost importance, if a few self-designated baseball bat wielding school guards stop an attack on innocent kids, a jury must convict them, but try imagining a guilty verdict if jurors live in crime-infested neighborhoods? The vigilantes will be heroes. The neighborhood protectors also enjoy an immense advantage over outsider police when it comes to recognizing good guys from trouble-makers.
What if Mayor Daley’s “think outside the box” advice was taken seriously and crime fighters cast a wider net for solutions? Better yet, the quest sought remedies fit for an independent, free people. In a phrase, an anti-crime solution befitting a Republic, not one appropriate to a people habitually mired in dependency.
The “Wild West” of the latter 19th century offers one treasure chest of effective ideas. Contrary to Hollywood, the “good town folk” were unlikely to be victims-in-waiting easily terrorized by black-hat marauders wildly shooting six guns into the sky. Settlers where typically well-armed Civil War veterans eager to dispatch the desperadoes long before they, as per Hollywood, came crashing through the saloon door to extort the cowering town folk. Remember that “wanted” posters advertized “dead or alive” and many criminals probably preferred to be arrested by the Sheriff versus being corralled by angry pistol-packing vigilantes.
A related “Republican model” is Switzerland with is universal male military service and all former soldiers are required to keep a military automatic weapon at home and 72 rounds of ammunition (and as military veterans they can hit a target). Rifle (but not pistol) ownership is also extensive and unregulated (a few Canton also permit unregulated pistols, too). Israel offers a second example of a heavily armed population – it is no accident that bystanders quickly cut down Arab terrorists. Though homicide rates in both Switzerland and Israel are miniscule, gun totting civilians are the anti-gun lobby’s worst nightmare, but widespread packing of weapons does curb criminal violence. And when combined with a law permitted concealed weapons, this is a violent criminal’s worse nightmare. Indeed, given that gang-bangers are such cowards that they usually attack only in groups against outnumbered victims, and such lousy shots that more bystanders than intended targets are killed, one might predict that these measures would reduce serious neighborhood violent crime to nil.
So, with legal changes in place, all law-abiding South Side Chicagoans would be given six weeks of small arms training, allowed to purchase handguns (even shotguns) which could be kept hidden from view. Permits would be renewed annually along with mandatory target shooting to achieve a “marksman” certificate. The pièce de résistance would be large conspicuously placed signs:
WARNING. You are now entering a neighborhood of peaceful, law-abiding people, nearly all of whom are armed with automatic weapons and annually pass rigorous tests in target shooting. Those who use their weapons to stop crimes may be tried by a jury of their peers and most jurors will be their law-abiding neighbors disgusted with the violence. If this is not your lucky day, do try and HAVE A NICE DAY instead.
Needless to say, fighting fire with fire, guns with guns, is unlikely to occur in today’s wimpy climate where parachuting in social workers seems the “obvious” anti-crime solution. But this is not the purpose of our analysis and we admit, proliferating gun ownership may exacerbate crime. Our central point is that citizens are being transformed into subjects who, after awhile, passively look to others to solve their woes. Nobody first asked these Chicagoans what they wanted; far distant experts blithely just imposed their half-baked panacea. Maybe Derrion Albert’s mother would have preferred Dirty Harry patrol the schoolyard, not after-the-fact condolences from Eric Holder. To use extremely politically incorrect language, Washington is inculcating what has been called a “slave mentality” (and this has nothing to do with race and everything to do with individual responsibility).
In the final analysis, all these one-on-one “advocates” and more focused policing will not cut crime but such measures are guaranteed to deepen dependency and a dependency is antithetical to Republican government, i.e., a government of free people. It is no small irony that a $60 million “stimulus” package will beget lethargy.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Robert Weissberg is emeritus professor of political science, University of Illinois-Urbana and currently an adjunct instructor at New York University
Department of Politics (graduate). He has written many books, the most recent include The Limits of Civic Activism, Pernicious Tolerance: How teaching to "accept differences" undermines civil society and the forthcoming, Bad Students, Not Bad Schools: How both the Right and the Left have American education wrong (early 2010). Besides writing for professional journals, he has also written for magazines like the Weekly Standard and currently contributes to various blogs.
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