City Talk - The Strib,

City Talk - The Strib, in an editorial today, seems to have the answer for blighted, gang-ridden inner-city neighborhoods; more programs!

The recipe for violence, to the Strib, is simple:

Gangs and drugs, unemployment and limited youth and family support programs set the stage for increased crime and violence.

I'm a conservative - and when it comes to urban crime, I'm usually loathe to parrot some of the conservative dogma on the subject (urban conservatism will be a topic on this blog in the very near future).

And yet the Strib is missing a few key nuances to this story; namely, the role that unlimited youth and family support programs, along with Minnesota's notoriously lenient criminal justice system, played in creating the Gang and Drug problems. We'll leave aside the rather utopio-Libertarian notion of calling a truce in the "war on drugs", which is the biggest root cause of all.

No, to the Strib it's about money.

Still, while it's welcome, the $200,000 commitment of state officers for a few weeks does not make up for millions in state cuts to local government. Minneapolis suffered a $33 million cut in state aid this year; $7 million of that total was trimmed from the Police Department. State cuts also reduced summer employment and recreation for teens, and training programs for young adults. That correlation is important: Low unemployment and ample activities translates into less crime.

I'm not among the conservatives who scoffed at the Clintons' "Midnight Basketball" program - it was less noxious than most of the rest of the 1994 Crime Bill - but I think it's naive to think the hard-core bangers that have been destroying places like Jordan, in North Minneapolis, and the south side's Phillips, are going to be showing up at the rec center to be converted. Yes, providing incentives to play nice would help.

But during the high-flying, cha cha years of the nineties, money wasn't lacking (not in the sense any of us would recognize - the urban bureaucracy always wants more). Did the problem subside?

No, indeed, it peaked in the mid-nineties, and was only quelled by:

then-Gov. Arne Carlson [sending] state officers and helicopters to Minneapolis after the city was dubbed "Murderapolis" for a year that saw nearly 100 murders.

The Strib writer meanders around and around the point; in between calls for money, he/she notes twice that the only thing that's actually reduced crime in Jordan, ever, is an expanded, constant police presence.

Again - of course that's simplistic. You can't arrest a neighborhood into peace. There's more to it - just as there is much more to it than more programs.

More on this in coming weeks. Much more. Because as a conservative living in the city, the whole notion of conservative solutions to urban problems is not only fascinating - it's important.

Posted by Mitch at August 8, 2003 07:22 AM