A Little Reality for Your Post-Equinox* Reading Pleasure

Via Kevin Drum at Political Animal, a few facts to stiffen your spine as the any-excuse-to-be-racist hordes gear up for the general election.

CRIMINAL INJUSTICE....Harvard law professor Bill Stuntz, after noting that the black murder rate is 7x hgher than the white murder rate, writes about the criminal justice system in the black community:

According to the best available data, blacks are 20% more likely than whites to use illegal drugs. But blacks are an incredible thirteen times more likely to be imprisoned for drug crime. (Data source here). In effect, Americans live under two sets of drug laws: the forgiving set of rules that mostly white suburbanites know, and the unfathomably severe rules that govern urban blacks.

If drug crime is overpunished in black neighborhoods, violent crime is underpunished....The bottom line is as simple as it is awful: When whites are robbed, raped, beaten, and killed, their victimizers are usually punished. When the same crimes happen to blacks, the usual result is: nothing. No arrest, no prosecution, no conviction. That is one reason why black neighborhoods are so much more violent than white ones.

In other words, the kinds of criminal punishment that do the most good are undersupplied in black America, and the kinds that do the LEAST good — so far as I know, there is no evidence that the level of drug punishment has any appreciable effect on the level of drug crime — are oversupplied. African Americans live with the worst of both worlds: unfathomably high crime rates, coupled with truly horrifying levels of criminal punishment.

But it's all good, because it has nothing to do with white racism!

What comes next, though, is odd. Stuntz takes a crack at explaining this state of affairs and says "two points are key — and neither of them flows from white racism." Here's point #1: policing in urban neighborhoods is underfunded. And point #2: these same neighborhoods have lost the local control they used to have. "On every front, the power of poor city neighborhoods has declined, and the power of middle- and upper-class suburbs has risen."

This seems to take an awfully narrow view of "white racism." Granted, these things are the results of long-term trends, not examples of individual whites mistreating individual blacks. But these long-term trends have been largely driven by, at best, white neglect, and at worst, active white hostility. Black migration to northern cities, white flight to the suburbs, underfunded urban police forces, and drug laws that are far harsher toward blacks than whites — if these things aren't at least partly the result of white racism, surely the term has lost all meaning? I'm not proposing sackcloth and ashes forever, but at least an acknowledgment that these aren't impersonal forces that just appeared out of nowhere.

In any case, Stuntz ends strong: "The sum of those trends is a system that produces large-scale racial injustice, and that deprives urban black communities of the power to remedy that injustice. One way or another, Americans of all races need to grapple with those facts, and soon."

I'm not as forgiving as Kevin - that last sentence is the same inexcusable hand-wringing mush that's been blathered by liberals for decades. Why not just Call For A (nother) Blue-Ribbon Study?

Whites blaming blacks for the seemingly intractable crime, violence and despair of black neighborhoods are like the kid who hits a littler kid, then when the littler kid bites back in retaliation, the first kid starts screaming bloody murder and forces the nearest adult to punish the littler kid.

Here's an idea: Enforce the same laws for everybody; put the cops where the crime is, and put our money where our lying, hypocritical, closet-racist mouths are.

* Equinox, not solstice.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

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Fact-challeged Rudy Pinocchio

Ah, impudent Pinocchio. Rudy can't help if he's so full of himself that he's bursting with false bravado. He's a self-aggrandizing Republican. And that's what wingnuts do -- mislead to glorify themselves, to make themselves bigger than life.

Today, Michael Cooper at NYTimes bluntly reports: Citing Statistics, Giuliani Misses Time and Again (with emphasis)

In almost every appearance as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination, Rudolph W. Giuliani cites a fusillade of statistics and facts to make his arguments about his successes in running New York City and the merits of his views.

Discussing his crime-fighting success as mayor, Mr. Giuliani told a television interviewer that New York was “the only city in America that has reduced crime every single year since 1994.” In New Hampshire this week, he told a public forum that when he became mayor in 1994, New York “had been averaging like 1,800, 1,900 murders for almost 30 years.” When a recent Republican debate turned to the question of fiscal responsibility, he boasted that “under me, spending went down by 7 percent.”

All of these statements are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong. And while, to be sure, all candidates use misleading statistics from time to time, Mr. Giuliani has made statistics a central part of his candidacy as he campaigns on his record.

For instance, another major American city claims to have reduced crime every year since 1994: Chicago. New York averaged 1,514 murders a year during the three decades before Mr. Giuliani took office; it did not record more than 1,800 homicides until 1980. And Mr. Giuliani’s own memoir states that spending grew an average of 3.7 percent for most of his tenure; an aide said Mr. Giuliani had meant to say that he had proposed a 7 percent reduction in per capita spending during his time as mayor.

Facts and figures are often the striking centerpieces of Mr. Giuliani’s arguments. He has always had a penchant for statistics — his anticrime strategy as mayor was built around a system known as Compstat that closely tracked crimes to focus law enforcement efforts. On the campaign trail he often wields data, without notes, with prosecutorial zeal to hammer home his points.

[Keep reading...]

Reality and facts aren't Rudy's forte but he sure likes to paint himself as a hero even if he must -- and he must -- bend the truth:

An examination of many of his statements by The New York Times, other news organizations and independent groups have turned up a variety of misstatements, virtually all of which cast Mr. Giuliani or his arguments in a better light. “He’s given us a lot of work up until now,” said Brooks Jackson, the director of Annenberg Political Fact Check, which is part of Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania that has corrected statements by candidates in both parties.

But, of course, Rudy can't be blamed for polishing his mayoral performance into a shining presidential facsimile if you believe his cheerleading squad. After all, that's what an ambitious Pinocchio does. Oh, Rudy so wants to grow up to be a real president! He's so desperate to come to life in the Oval Office that he'll say anything even if it's untrue.

On cue, Rudy's Geppettos defended his hyperbolic tendency:

Aides to Mr. Giuliani dismiss questions about his use of statistics as nitpicking, arguing that no one can dispute the big points he makes by using the statistics: that crime dropped significantly during his tenure, say, or that he worked to restrain spending in New York.

Au contraire! First, crime was already dropping significantly long before Rudy took office as Greg Sargent illustrated in a handy chart covering 1994--2004. Harper's quoting criminologist Franklin Zimring found:

...Giuliani’s claims to be self-serving. First, [Zimring] said, during Giuliani’s time as mayor criminal activity was declining nationwide. Homicide, rape, burglary and automobile theft all dropped between 37 and 41 percent in the 1990s, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports—all the result of social and policy changes that were taking place in New York and in the nation at large. Thus, according to Zimring, at least half—and as much as three-quarters—of that drop in New York crime “would have happened if Rudy Giuliani had never been born.”

And why, if Rudy was so fiscally responsible, did Mayor Bloomberg inherit a $4 billion deficit?

Will Giuliani repent his fuzzy math and serial exaggerations?

I doubt it. John W. Dean wrote in Conservatives Without Conscience (p. 26):

A close study of conservatives reveals an interesting trait: These people do not see themselves as they actually are, but rather as something very different. In short, they seem to have little facility for self-analysis.

Rudy has too much invested in his towering image and friends in high places who pull strings to fashion him into a leading GOP presidential contender.

Furthermore, the Beltway press loves to perpetuate myths during their cocktail weenie parties where they can sample hot hors d'oeuvres: "WMDs anyone?" They love dramatic story lines regardless whether they're true or not. Just like Rudy.

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Opportunist, thy name is Rudy

You know that reduction in violent crime in New York City that Rudy is always crowing about presiding over, as if he arrested every perp in New York personally?

Yeah, well, hold the phone. He was in the right place at the right time. The real reason that the crime rate plummeted was neurochemical, not the hoo-ah, head-crackin’ police state and “zero tolerance” policies that the authoritarians authoritarian instituted.

It turns out that the declining crime rates that Rudy is so fond of standing on are actually the result of (liberal) social and environmental policies enacted in the sixties and seventies that reduced lead exposure and lead poisoning in children.

Lead is a potent neurotoxin, and can have devastating effects on neural development even at low levels. There is a direct causal link between lead exposure and learning and developmental disabilities, decreases in I.Q., and behavior problems. It has also been adequately demonstrated that lead poisoning correlates with a lack of impulse control, and a lack of impulse control is a factor in many criminal acts.

Even tiny amounts can cause reduced IQ, reading and learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder and behavioral problems. As a result, childhood lead poisoning is associated with lower educational achievement, higher rates of high school drop-out and increased behavioral problems. In the long run, children who are lead poisoned may be less likely to be positive contributors to our communities. It is estimated that lead poisoning has tripled the number of children needing special education.

Now…back to Rudy and his chest-thumping assertions that he enacted the policies that reduced crime in New York City. "I began with the city that was the crime capital of America," Giuliani, now a candidate for president, recently told Fox's Chris Wallace. "When I left, it was the safest large city in America. I reduced homicides by 67 percent. I reduced overall crime by 57 percent."

Well – crime did fall during the Giuliani era, but science says Rudy is claiming the entire pie as his when he really only deserves a sliver.

The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children's exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

"It is stunning how strong the association is," Nevin said in an interview. "Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead."

I have not been able to track down the original studies, but I want to see them, and I want to go so far as to write an Excel worksheet and look at the data in my own format. You see, this issue is right up my alley. I have spent my career straddling medicine and academia. I have volunteered many hours in public health clinics, and in that capacity, I have tested thousands of children for lead levels; and in academia I have done neural research.

What I know about the effects of lead on neural development, and what I have read so far about the studies, I am inclined to believe that Rick Nevin is right on. The obvious questions that were raised in my mind as I was reading the Post article, were answered.

Now we already know what I think of Rudy – that is to say that I have scraped more appealing things from the bottom of my shoe after a visit to the dog park. So I really find it quite delicious that he is claiming the credit for a phenomenon that is actually due to those liberal social programs of the past that he and his ilk have tried mightily to undo.

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