Chicago Reaches 500 Homicides

[divakat]

Originally Posted by C. Maurio

So where did they go? Long Island?

Staten Island and the Bronx. NYC is safe because the average price of. 1 be apt is 1 million dollars. Manhattan is only for the uber wealthy, hence, there is little crime. It used to be more economically diverse. Also there is a zero tolerance attitude towards crime unlike here. Guliani introduced a different method of treating crime back when he was mayor that completely changed the crime stats of the city. Basically, his theory was that people committing small crimes were also likely to commit larger crimes. He started busting people for stuff like loitering, public drunkenness, pan handling, etc. when he ran background checks on those folks, turns out they were more likely to have committed things like rapes, murders, etc. so he locked them up. And it worked.

[ChiNaan]

Originally Posted by divakat

Staten Island and the Bronx.

If that were the case the overall stats for NYC would be unchanged, since those are boroughs within the city.

[LakeShoreSoxGo]

Originally Posted by andrew61

Actually, the black family unit was in much better shape before the "War on Poverty" and all the welfare programs came along in the 1960s. Those dependency programs did as much damage to black families as slavery ever did. Look at how out-of-wedlock births soared since then.

That sounds more like a Newt/Rush myth. I would wager the black family unit was in much better shape, before they were enslaved and sold/birthed into property. To pretend that black family units were some how magically "coherent" (during the Jim Crow era) after hundreds of years, strikes me as off.

[emathias]

Originally Posted by LakeShoreSoxGo

That sounds more like a Newt/Rush myth. I would wager the black family unit was in much better shape, before they were enslaved and sold/birthed into property. To pretend that black family units were some how magically "coherent" (during the Jim Crow era) after hundreds of years, strikes me as off.

Being poor and disenfranchised didn't necessarily hurt the family unit. Lots of groups are poor and disenfranchised, but it instilled a "we're all in this together" community spirt.

I would guess that it was not the "War on Poverty" that hurt the family unit as much as it was the war on drugs and the war in Vietnam. And, to a certain extent, the sexual revolution, which decoupled sex and marriage, which tends to have a harder effect on lower-income groups regardless of race but since Jim Crow-era black families were nearly universally low-income, it hurt them a lot.

The other thing that was very destructive was the Great Migration, because of the disruption of established community support. Blacks in the South may have been poor and discriminated against, but they knew who they could trust and had a whole community of other black people they'd known for their whole lives. When people moved North for factory jobs, the first people had it hard as they fought to get hired, the next wave did quite well for themselves, then things got really crowded and factory jobs started leveling off in number meaning more workers competing for the same number of jobs, while being constrained in where they could live. That sort of thing puts strains on any family and when you're in a strange new community and not sure who you can trust it can be a disaster waiting to happen. Where the "War on Poverty" comes into play with this is with rules that dis-allowed assistence to go to families with men in charge. That was such a dumb move, it's not unreasonable to think that some racist white person high up in the government was thinking, "How can we really incentivize these families to self-destruct?" and came up with the idea of only giving mothers money if the fathers became scarce. I like to hope it was just dumb and not intentional racism, but, honestly, it's hard to be sure. Intentional or not, it is damage done by government policy.

[nei]

Originally Posted by ChiNaan

If that were the case the overall stats for NYC would be unchanged, since those are boroughs within the city.

Agreed. Checked numbers...

The Bronx had a murder rate of 8 per 100k last year; Staten Island 2.1 per 100k. Most of Staten Island has the demographics of a middle-class suburbs. I don't think any precinct in The Bronx had a murder rate higher then Chicago's average last year.