The Outstater
Keeping the Peace
The King’s Peace (pax regis) — Prior to the English Civil War, the common-law concept of maintaining public order.
CRIMINOLOGISTS TELL US that only a sliver of humanity is inherently “criminal,” that is, persons with a pathological disregard for others or their property. In New York City, for instance, just 327 offenders among 8 million citizens were responsible for nearly one-third of the city’s shoplifting arrests.
We can agree that it is important that recidivists, especially the violent ones, be separated from the law-abiding. So how do we distinguish them from those who have committed lesser crimes of, say, youthful indiscretion?
Easy. The one group keeps committing crimes and the other doesn’t. The New York figures above parse to 18 repeat arrests per shoplifter. Members of the second group often right themselves, and do so with or without grants to the sociology department for midnight basketball, gang interdiction and other silliness.
Statewide, Indiana’s recidivism rate is only about 30 percent. Not bad, as these things go. That percentage reflects the fact most of us in a functioning society, even those who have run afoul of the law, eventually acknowledge right and wrong.
A number of progressive judges and prosecutors, however, have thrown such discernment out the window. They treat every lawbreaker as if they were mere hooligans in need of “a good talking to.”
To understand how insane that is, we need to back up for a moment. We agreed it was important to keep those few dangerous individuals separated from society — locked up. What is not so well understood is that it is not only to protect the rest of us individually but to protect us aggregately. If such criminals are routinely released back into a neighborhood as some sort of perverse social statement, that neighborhood is doomed. (Black Lives Matter could have spent its millions protesting that instead of defunding police.)
The late sociologist James Q. Wilson put his finger on it in his classic work, “Thinking About Crime”: “If we are to make the best and sanest use of our laws and liberties, we must first adopt a sober view of man and his institutions that would permit reasonable things to be accomplished, foolish things abandoned and Utopian things forgotten.”
That sanity begins, Wilson argued, in the neighborhood, in conversations across backyard fences, at the laundromat, pool hall, corner bar, in beauty and barber shops: “The essence of the police role in maintaining order is to reinforce the informal control mechanisms of the community itself. The police cannot, without committing extraordinary resources, provide a substitute for that informal control.”
Instead, entire categories of crimes that should be subject to this informal control are dismissed as things the public must learn to tolerate — loitering, panhandling, disorderly conduct, open-air drug and alcohol abuse, prostitution, unruly crowds, gang fights, vagrant camps, ignoring traffic laws, vandalism and so forth.
“Who is harmed by such ‘victimless’ crimes?” asks Charles Lehman of the Manhattan Institute in reviewing Wilson’s work. “The answer is clear: the community itself and the normative process by which it remains functional and safe.”
But if the community’s own leadership — playing racial, cultural or ethnic cards as is so often the case these days — doesn’t want to support the police in this effort, there is a limit to what even the National Guard can do. Sadly, such leadership, purposively or not, is signaling the rest of society to keep its distance. That will not work out well for anyone. — tcl
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