7. Fear of Crime in American Cities (1979)
Crime soared during the 1960s and 1970s. According to estimates from the Congressional Research Service, violent crime rates tripled and homicide rates doubled between 1960 and 1980 . Property crime rates also more than tripled in the same time frame. This crime increase surely had many causes (and the precise nature of those causes remains debated by scholars), but one important ingredient was surely the urban decay of the era. Sociologist William Julius Wilson famously argued that the “jobless ghetto” provided an environment that encouraged criminal behavior. With high rates of unemployment and underemployment, many poor urban dwellers turned to robbery and drug dealing to make a living and used guns to settle disputes. For a younger generation growing up in these communities, criminal activity was normalized as a feature of their lives, while relatively few adults they knew had stable remunerative jobs in the formal economy.
The steep rise in crime in cities across the country was joined by a rise in the fear of crime. This clip, from a 1981 The MacNeil/Lehrer Report episode entitled “Living with Crime in America,” illustrates how crime fears shaped the behavior of residents of Tucson, Arizona. Some scholars argue that the public fixation on crime was a natural byproduct of crime rates that were undoubtedly on the rise. However, some scholars (like Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow), argue that concerns about crimes were manufactured by politicians using fear to attract voters and media outlets sensationalizing crime to attract consumers. Regardless of the legitimacy of these fears, they undoubtedly accelerated the movement of largely white, middle- and upper-class residents to presumably safer suburbs. They also encouraged a “tough on crime” political agenda that positioned increased policing and incarceration as an urgently needed solution to growing crime.
7. Fear of Crime in American Cities (1979)
AV File 1
Annotations
07:17 - 07:24
This clip documents fear of crime in Tucson, Arizona. Notably, Tucson is not an example of the “fading industrial center” discussed in much of this set; instead, it was a growing city in the “Sun Belt,” a region in the southern portion of the United States that didn’t suffer the same economic problems as the “Rust Belt” in the Northeast. While the population of many cities stagnated or shrunk in this era, Tucson was exploding: between 1950 and 1980, the city’s population grew from 45,000 to over 330,000, an over 600% increase. This shows that the rise of crime was not simply a mechanical result of economic dislocation associated with deindustrialization; the crime wave of the 1970s and 1980s had myriad causes. It also shows that social problems intensified in urban centers across the country, even in cities that were not facing significant economic hardship.
07:24 - 08:27
The enhanced home security efforts depicted in this segment provide just one example of how communities sought to protect themselves from rising crime. For example, in 1972, the National Sheriffs Association founded the National Neighborhood Watch program, and communities across the country formed local organizations devoted to staying vigilant about the threat of crime and coordinating with local law enforcement
09:42 - 10:08
This minister describes how individual churchgoing were withdrawing from social service efforts based around generosity, as the rise in crime had created an “us” versus “them” mentality that distanced parishioners from poor people in the city. This trend parallels a broader national trend identified by historians like Julilly Kohler-Hausman, who argues in her book Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America, that the rise of a “tough on crime” politics coincided with the rise of welfare retrenchment policies. At a local, state, and national level, she argues that there was a shift away from social service programs and towards more intensive policing and incarceration.
10:08 - 10:47
It is somewhat difficult to gauge the effect of rising crime on gun ownership and gun attitudes because data in the early 1960s (before the rise in crime) is sparse. But one interesting data point can be found in a Gallup polling question that has been asked periodically since 1959: “Do you think there should be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by police and other authorized persons?” In 1959, 60% of Americans surveyed registered support for such a ban. Just over 30% Americans polled in 1980 supported a ban. One possible interpretation of this shift is that a growing number of Americans, like the people interviewed in this section of the clip, wanted to a own a gun for self-defense.
11:30 - 11:32
This quote—“be scared, that’s the way you should be”—apparently delivered by a mother to her child, illustrates the climate of fear that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as the crime rate climbed in American cities.
The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Living With Crime in America | NewsHour Productions | March 23, 1981 This video clip and associated transcript appear from 7:20 - 11:36 in the full record.