The Ripple Effect of War

According to the FBI’s 2006 “Preliminary Annual Uniform Crime Report,” released in June 2007, 45 people were killed every day in the United States. The average annual rate from 2002 to 2006 is 16,399 murders. Philadelphia, a city of 1.5 million, ended 2006 with 406 murders. San Diego, a comparable city of 1.3 million, ended the same year with only 68 murders. Baltimore, a city of nearly 650,000, reported 276 murders, while Louisville, a city of 630,000, reported just 50.

The inconsistency in crime between similar-sized cities across the country has been the source of much speculation. Tracking crime data over the past few decades, criminologists agree that from the mid-1980s into the early 1990s, violent crime spiked universally, in part due to the advent of crack cocaine. From the early 1990s through 2001, almost across the board, urban crime seemed to drop suddenly. In 2001, however, the parallel rise and fall in crime rates across cities ended. Criminologists and statisticians began to see a divide as property and violent crime remain flat or even slightly decline in some cities, such as Los Angeles and New York, while they increase in other cities like Detroit and St. Louis.

As each city faces different crimes, the universal band-aid approaches of the past—such as higher incarceration rates—become less and less effective. But the need to invest in alternative and innovative solutions comes at a time when cities are seeing their federal resources redirected into Homeland Security for the War on Terror and are left fumbling to combat everyday street crime.

Police Chief Jack Harris remembers how his police department began routine surveillance of discount retail centers like Wal-Mart after several complaints of individuals shoplifting baby formula. His detectives, without realizing it, had stumbled onto a large ring of international bandits who were smuggling volumes of formula across the border and selling them for huge profits.

Harris credits his department’s success to a partnership with Homeland Security that has embedded ten new Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents among the nearly 3,200 officers of the Phoenix Police Department. The ICE agents, who have access to several multi-national databases, work side by side with detectives to expedite investigations of violent crime involving illegal immigrants. Similarly, Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) agents partner with gun squads to prosecute repeat offenders with harsher federal penalties, and the FBI agents work with the Department of Public Safety to fight rising gang violence.

While the partnership with Homeland Security has bolstered the department’s intelligence gathering capabilities, property and violent crime continue to pose new challenges to the Phoenix police. Over the past two years, the city’s violent crime rate has risen 2.5 percent, and the number of violent crimes committed has risen by 4.7 percent. (Violent crimes, as defined by the FBI, are comprised of murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.) Harris attributes the increase to drug trafficking, human trafficking, high use of firearms, and two serial cases that have since been solved. “The result [of this upswing in crime],” according to Harris, “is more of an emphasis being placed on crime reduction rather than crime prevention.”

The city’s growth rate, which often surpasses its ability to provide social services, adds to the problem. Slightly larger than Los Angeles, Phoenix covers 515.9 square miles; it is the fifth largest city in the U.S., with a population of over 1.5 million and an additional 3 million in the valley. In the last five years alone, the city has gained over 100,000 residents. According to Harris, police agencies are straining to accommodate the corresponding increase in service calls.

The city needs more officers on the street, says Harris. But not only is the department facing a personnel deficit from several officers nearing retirement, they also have no money to expand the force. Over the past ten years, a program called Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), run by the Department of Justice, had funded the salaries of 100,000 patrol officers across the country, including Phoenix, but that money has since dried up.

Phoenix receives significant grant money from Homeland Security owing to its strategic border location, but the city doesn’t control the funds and cannot direct them to other policing areas in need. Both Mayor Phil Gordon and Police Chief Harris are quick to acknowledge the positive relationship with Homeland Security but both agree it isn’t enough.

Over the past four years, Phoenix was forced to make a $125 million cut to the city budget. Those cuts, Gordon points out, were made from every department except public safety even though public safety comprises 40 percent of the total budget. The City voted to take all the cuts from other departments in order to compensate for the lack of federal funding, a move which has put a severe strain on all City agencies. And public safety services still can’t make do at current levels. In September, residents will vote on a ballot that would increase the city sales tax by two-tenths of one percent, with all revenue committed to adding 400 sworn police officers, 100 firefighters, and 100 civilian staff to the Department of Public Safety.

“The country focused on the immediate after-effects of 9/11 and the immediate war in Iraq, all of which significantly drained our forces, people, and time,” Gordon says. “It’s hard for a mayor 2,000 miles away to get the attention [of Congress], even for the fifth largest city.” Gordon hopes that last fall’s change in Congress, as well as increasing public concern over the efficacy of the Iraq war, will renew focus on the plights of local cities.

While the substantial Homeland Security aid received by key border cities like Phoenix sometimes overlaps with domestic crime protection, as seen in the baby formula case, other cities have no equivalent federal assistance with their day-to-day needs. “Under President Clinton, we had the COPS program,” says Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. “Under President Bush, that has since been decimated.” COPS had funded 55 officers for the city. According to Barrett, Homeland Security has also cut funding since it did not deem Milwaukee a high risk for terrorist activity. The small percentage of Homeland Security money still directed to the city has been earmarked for the Urban Area Security Initiative, which trains current public safety officers to respond to terrorism events.

Barrett, who served ten years in Congress, says part of the problem is that the administration is removed from the realities of urban cities. Only as mayor was Barrett himself close enough to understand the challenges the city faces. When its industrial period ended, this Rust Belt city did not transition smoothly into a service society; pockets of extreme poverty were created across the inner city. Entrenched gangs now plague the area where the manufacturing plants once operated.

Dennis Rosenbaum, director of the Center for Research in Law and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says the national focus on the Iraq war, in large part, diverted federal attention from urban crime. “In a few months of war, we spent more overseas than we did in ten years of providing federal support to law enforcement around the country,” he says. “We’ve been at war for a number of years, so what we are talking about is billions of dollars, which could make a substantial difference in inner cities.”

Rosenbaum acknowledges that there is no guarantee the government would spend money on cities if it didn’t spend it on Iraq. Part of the problem, he says, is our short attention span. Politicians vying for re-election find it hard to invest in programs that won’t produce results in a few years. They focus on the omnipresent threat of terrorism because it affects everybody, compared to the localized, entrenched reality of urban crime.

The biggest national shortcoming, many criminologists agree, is the government’s failure to invest in research. The National Institute of Science receives $46.5 million to research public safety, compared to $27.9 billion for health research.

Without research funding, criminologists can only hypothesize why crime has risen in specific cities and how to combat it. John Eck, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati who specializes in analyzing crime patterns, says several theories have been floated to explain the sudden decrease and subsequent increase in crime in select cities. The first theory identifies economics and wage rates as the primary drivers of crime. Some evidence supports this correlation, including statistics showing that the economic boom of the 1990s moved people out of the drug market into a legitimate low-income bracket; the crime resurged when the economy worsened in the 2000s.

Another theory suggests that crime decreased because the high incarceration rates of the 1980s and 1990s locked up repeat offenders. Evidence for this varies, with some criminologists attributing as much as 25 percent of the period’s decline in crime to incarceration.

The theory probably most scrutinized by criminologists correlates gun sales and violent crime. The strength of this theory lies in data that show that gun purchases and homicide rates from 1965 onwards do mirror each other.

One last theory has an ironic twist. Just as the anxiety of terrorism has fueled a national crackdown on immigration, several criminologists are finding that cities with high legal immigration rates—including Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Miami—have stagnant or declining crime rates, whereas crime has increased in cities with a low legal immigration rate, such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Detroit.

Among this last group of criminologists is Lawrence Sherman, director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. Sherman’s theory is essentially a psychological and sociological argument. Sherman argues that what drives immigrants to the country is hope for the future and that hope is infectious. The contagion of hope, hard work, and investing in education represents a new generation of people who are starting new enterprises or working for start-up companies. He sums up the problem of statistical riddles and national priorities this way: “How do we as a nation think about the future of different kinds of cities taking different trajectories as they age through time?”

Perhaps, as Sherman suggests, rather than tighten immigration laws making it harder for immigrants to come into the country, high crime cities should provide incentives for immigrants to inject their skills, start-up money and work ethnic into otherwise stagnant low-income communities.