It's not about the cops

My hometown of Flint is gripped by something, not a crime wave, for that implies an unusual spike. Crime in Flint is high, and it has been high my entire life. We just made a list that called us the fourth most violent city in America. I think. These things come out all the time, and though it's hard to tell them apart we always dutifully get upset about them.

At last count, 60 people had been murdered in Flint in 2010. That's a lot. Up from 36 for all of 2009. It's been like a bad dream all year, you keep expecting it to stop, because it has to, and it doesn't.

The response to all this has been predictable. Earnest Concern from the Mayor and City Council, wailing and gnashing of teeth at God and the Devil from civic and church leaders, anger and fear from the citizenry. If you read, as I unfortunately do from time to time, the message boards and the comment sections, you'll find a lot of blame tossed around. Flint has, as we know laid off many police officers this year. I don't wish to delve into the argument surrounding that other than to say the exigencies of the budget being what they are, it probably could not have been much different. And since this murder spree coincides so neatly with the drawdown in police, it is easy to call correlation causation.

Likewise, you hear a lot of coded language about "parenting" and "values". If only, they say, those people cared about being good parents and instilling good moral values in their children. This argument, I would argue, is almost always rooted in racism or, at minimum, the sort of vague classism that drives white collar employees to despise the unionized blue collar workforce that they never actually interact with.

The issue, of course, is economic. That's really all it is. Short of a cop sitting on ever front porch, you're not going to stop crime like this with force. When you have a large concentration of poor people with no prospects, you're going to have crime. That's what Flint has. Not only that, deindustrialization has stripped out the city's internal social safety net. In the good old days, when Johnny's Cutlass Supreme wouldn't turn over and he needed $200 for a new alternator, he probably had family that had resources. Cousin Roy worked at Buick, and Cousin Roy would front him the money. Now Cousin Roy doesn't work at Buick anymore, Cousin Roy probably doesn't even live in Flint anymore. Now Johnny needs to find that $200 by other means.