U-M Professor: War on Crime Fueled Detroit's Decline

[Wesley Mouch]

I think she is putting the chicken before the egg.

She blames the decline to loss of high paying jobs, white flight and over policing of black neighborhoods.

If high paying jobs left that employed black and white workers, i.e. auto plants, why did only the white workers leave and follow those jobs and not their black co-workers?

She implies the over policing of black neighborhoods is the reason there are so many single parent black families when that can be traced to the welfare system encouraging / rewarding single moms for getting pregnant because it guaranteed a monthly income. Btw the same thing happens overseas where single moms get council houses and a monthly stipend.

The explosion of the prison population can be traced to the increased use of narcotic drugs that somehow became the drug of choice over alcohol that previous was the standard destroyer of lives before.

Then the nail in the coffin is to normalize the deviant behavior of these actions and entrench that in the next generations mind.

The one thing I agree with is that policy makers unintentionally encouraged
the distribution of jobs through out the region by making it cheaper to open a new factory in a suburb instead of re-investing in established locations.
Open land is cheap. Tear down, remediation and rebuilding is far more expensive. The same logic that makes it cheaper to invest in poorer countries and ship the product thousands of miles to market.

The problem with that is we are spreading the toxic waste time bomb across the region, causing logistic and commuting headaches which all cry for federal dollars to correct the situation that the original policy created in the first place.

But we all have our opinions.

I think we have a social obligation to invest in poorer countries. Its one of the only ways we'll truly find peace in the world.

Beyond that, I'll just add that the writer's view that the 'war on crime' was a major factor seems myopic.

So the writer hates 'over-policing', and finds that its the cause of Detroit's decline, as well as that underground noise near Zug Island. I'm tiring of all the world's problems being reduced to the single issue some writer supports.

Detroit's decline is super-complex, and there are hundreds of causes. I think 'over-policing' is about #200 on the list. Social decline caused by the welfare state, about #15.

My candidate for #1 reason: The assassination of Martin Luther King. Black America would have done better with his vision of the world than the black nationalist version that won the debate -- even if MLK treated women like Donald Trump did in 2005.

[GMan]

I think we have a social obligation to invest in poorer countries. Its one of the only ways we'll truly find peace in the world.

Beyond that, I'll just add that the writer's view that the 'war on crime' was a major factor seems myopic.

So the writer hates 'over-policing', and finds that its the cause of Detroit's decline, as well as that underground noise near Zug Island. I'm tiring of all the world's problems being reduced to the single issue some writer supports.

Detroit's decline is super-complex, and there are hundreds of causes. I think 'over-policing' is about #200 on the list. Social decline caused by the welfare state, about #15.

Interesting rankings wesley, I never attempted to rank the issues.

Yes we should invest in poorer countries. That said, We shouldn't dis-invest in this country to do it.

That is the problem with the current global setup. It allows players to move about the globe in the guise of spreading prosperity while walking away from previous commitments.

[Wesley Mouch]

Interesting rankings wesley, I never attempted to rank the issues.

Yes we should invest in poorer countries. That said, We shouldn't dis-invest in this country to do it.

That is the problem with the current global setup. It allows players to move about the globe in the guise of spreading prosperity while walking away from previous commitments.

I agree that we shouldn't dis-invest in our own country. But I don't see disinvestment. I see massive investment in our cities.

That isn't to say we don't have big-time problems. And I do think that we did rely on incarceration and criminalization too much. But I just don't see a strong connection between the 'war on crime' and, say, the failure of urban schools. We spend, spend, spend... we invest, invest, invest. Same results. No connection in my mind.

[Hermod]

I agree that we shouldn't dis-invest in our own country. But I don't see disinvestment. I see massive investment in our cities.

That isn't to say we don't have big-time problems. And I do think that we did rely on incarceration and criminalization too much. But I just don't see a strong connection between the 'war on crime' and, say, the failure of urban schools. We spend, spend, spend... we invest, invest, invest. Same results. No connection in my mind.

We "spend on" our domestic urban problems. I am not sure we "invest in" solutions to those problems.