conservatives.
There was a reason Americans felt that law and order were breaking down: They were. The crime rate more than tripled between 1957 and 1970. The rate of robbery, which
Why did crime surge? The short answer is that we don’t really know much about what causes crime to rise or fall, as demonstrated by the inability of experts to predict major changes in crime rates. The crime surge of the sixties, which confounded the expectations of liberals who expected growing social justice to be rewarded with better behavior, came as a complete surprise. So did the plunging crime rates of the nineties, which confounded conservatives who believed that no improvement in crime would be possible without a return to traditional social values. As Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago has pointed out, in the nineties “the crime decline was so unanticipated that it was widely dismissed as temporary or illusory long after it had begun.”[4]
Perhaps the most plausible explanation for the great crime wave rests on demography. After World War II millions of blacks left the rural South for Northern cities—and along with their white fellow citizens, they also had a lot of children. As the baby boom reached adolescence, there was a large increase in the number of young males, and young urban black males in particular. It’s true that the actual increase in crime was much larger than the increase in the number of people in crime-prone demographic groups, but there may have been a “multiplier effect” because the demographic changes overwhelmed the forces of social control. The proliferation of crime-prone young males created new, dangerous norms for behavior. And the increase in the number of people likely to commit crimes wasn’t matched by any corresponding increase in the number of police officers to arrest them or jail cells to hold them. During the sixties the number of people in prison remained essentially flat even as crime soared—a sharp contrast with what happened in the nineties, when the number of people in prison continued to rise even as crime plunged.
Other factors were at work, too. One was a lack of inner-city jobs. Millions of Southern blacks had moved to Northern cities in search of manufacturing jobs—jobs that were abundant in the forties and fifties, thanks to the wartime boom and the peacetime consumer boom that followed. In the 1960s, however, those same cities began turning into an economic trap. Thanks to changing technologies of production and transportation, manufacturing began moving out of crowded urban industrial districts to sprawling plants in the suburbs; as a result jobs became scarce in the inner-city areas where blacks lived. Yet the black population remained penned in those inner cities due both to segregation and the inability to afford cars. The result was high unemployment among urban blacks even in the face of a booming economy.[5]
And the lack of jobs in the inner city, as famously argued by the sociologist William Julius Wilson, probably helped foster a destructive culture. Wilson also argued that the beginnings of desegregation perversely worsened the problem, because middle-class blacks took advantage of reduced housing discrimination to flee the ghetto, leaving behind a population segregated by class as well as race.
Whatever the reasons for rising crime in the sixties, what people saw was that law and order were breaking down. Many of them were more than willing to follow Nixon’s lead and place the blame on purported liberal permissiveness. There’s no evidence that permissiveness—as opposed to, say, lack of prison capacity or sufficient employment opportunities for blacks—was a significant factor in the crime wave. But the public, confronted by rising crime at the same time the nation was attempting to correct past injustices, was all too willing to make the connection.
And in the public mind concerns about crime were inextricably mixed with fear of large-scale urban violence.
The era of urban riots that began with the Harlem riot of 1964 lasted only four years—that is, although there would be riots after 1968, like the 1992 Los Angeles riot that followed the police beating of Rodney King, they would never feel like a national wave. In the riot years, however, it seemed as if all of urban America was going up in flames.
The causes of the rise and fall of urban riots remain as obscure as the causes of the rise and fall of crime. Many, probably most, riots began with acts of police brutality. The 1964 Harlem riot, for example, began when a police officer shot a fifteen-year-old black youth. And during the riots the police often ran amok. Still, police brutality against blacks was nothing new. So why, for four years in the 1960s, did such acts provoke large-scale riots?
Social scientists have found that riots were most likely to happen in cities outside the South that had large black populations. The absence of Southern riots presumably reflected the tight level of social control. Or to put it less euphemistically, in the South blacks were too terrorized to riot. Repression was less total in Northern cities, and the great postwar migration ensured that by the sixties many of these cities had huge black populations, including an increasing number of younger blacks who had never lived in the South. These demographic trends, which were essentially the same demographic trends that helped cause rising crime, combined with the terrible living conditions in urban ghettos, probably set the stage for violent reactions against acts of brutality that would once simply have been endured.
Did the civil rights movement have anything to do with urban riots? The 1968 report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, generally referred to as the Kerner Commission, suggested that it did. “White racism,” it declared, “is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.” While placing the ultimate blame on white racism, however, the report suggested that the proximate causes of the riots lay in the expectations created by the civil rights movement:
Lyndon Johnson was deeply dismayed by the Kerner Commission report, which he felt played right into the hands of conservatives. Blaming white racism for urban disorder, no matter how true the accusation might have been, was no way to win white votes. Suggesting that attempts to diminish the heavy hand of racism might have catalyzed violence wasn’t likely to encourage further reform so much as to empower those who didn’t want a civil rights movement in the first place. And it certainly helped Nixon.
And in the minds of white voters, crime and riots merged with another widely publicized indicator of America’s breakdown: rising welfare dependency.
After his death in 2004 Ronald Reagan was eulogized as a lovable, avuncular fellow, devoted to the cause of freedom, defined by his victory over the Soviet evil empire and, maybe, by his devotion to tax cuts. But the Ronald Reagan who became California’s governor in 1966 was something quite different: the representative of and vehicle for white voters angry at the bums on welfare. In his autobiography Reagan described the groups who urged him to run for governor of California in 1966:
People were tired of wasteful government programs and welfare chiselers; and they were angry about the constant spiral of taxes and government regulations, arrogant bureaucrats, and public officials who thought all of mankind’s problems could be solved by throwing the taxpayers’ dollars at them. [6]
