Comment on Douglas S. Massey's 'Getting away with murder: segregation and violent crime in urban America.' (in this issue, p. 1203) (Symposium - Shaping American Communities: Segregation, Housing & the Urban Poor)

• Author: DiIulio, John J., Jr.

INTRODUCTION

I am very pleased to comment on Professor Douglas Massey's fine article on segregation and violent crime in America. I have long been an admirer of his work, and I welcome this opportunity to explore his present research on the correlates of homicide patterns and trends. I am especially glad to visit the University of Pennsylvania, my economics and political science undergraduate stomping grounds. Penn can be blamed for launching my career as a scholar of American politics, public management, and, last--and many would say "least"--crime policy.

Over the last few months, I have been doing some thinking, essay writing, op-editorializing, and congressional testifying on crime in America, with a focus on black-on-black, inner-city crime.(1) In conjunction, the question of what, if anything, can be done to prevent or reduce violent crime, in particular homicide, is one that is very much at the center of the work of a dozen leading criminologists whom Professor Joan Petersilia and I have brought together for a multi-year research and writing project at my non-Princeton base of operations, the Brookings Institution, under the hopeful banner "The New Consensus on Crime Policy."(2)

So it was with great eagerness and enthusiasm that I received and read Professor Massey's article. Needless to say, I was not the least bit disappointed. As I understand it, his theory is that high rates of black crime in America are strongly linked to high rates of black poverty and high levels of black segregation. He arrives at this view primarily by means of a fascinating hypothetical-statistical exercise which enables him to test the validity of several explanatory propositions which have emerged from two rich, and richly relevant, ethnographic studies, one of which was conducted by Penn's own Professor Elijah Anderson.

Professor Massey finds that the "wave of crime in urban black America is not simply a product of individual moral failings; it is an inevitable outgrowth of social conditions created by the coincidence of racial segregation and high rates of black poverty."(3) He also finds that "poor whites experience significantly lower crime rates by imposing racial segregation, because crime follows poverty" and that "racial segregation provides another benefit to whites in the form of lower taxes."(4) Massey makes reference to "the federal policy initiatives that would need to be undertaken to end the legacy of American Apartheid."(5) Yet his final words are anything but hopeful. Instead he conjures up a vision of the future (or is it more nearly a mirror of the present?) in which urban black communities "continue to deteriorate," and all Americans pay a heavy economic and social price for this shameful "retreat from American democratic ideals."(6) In short, Professor Massey has the dubious distinction of being even more depressing than I am on this subject!

In my view, the only sins committed in his stimulating article are small but significant sins of omission. I do not take issue with the broad outlines of his analysis, least of all his emphasis on the social costs and consequences of concentrating crime, poverty, and other problems in politically powerless pockets of urban America. But with complete fidelity to the empirical research on the subject, statistical as well as field-based, I do think it is possible to arrive at a more highly textured, if only slightly more optimistic, understanding of the inner-city, violent crime problem and how best to address it.

1. CRIME STATISTICS AND INEVITABILITY

   First, let us add to our stock of pertinent facts and figures. Nationally, between 1973 and 1992 victimization rates for most crimes of violence dropped 1.5%.(7) Over the same period, however, the rate of violent victimizations of black males ages twelve to twenty-four increased by about 25%;(8) between 1985 and 1992, the murder rate for black males ages twelve to twenty-two tripled.(9)

   Most street crime in America is intraracial. About 84% of single-offender violent crimes committed by blacks are committed against blacks, and some 73% of such crimes committed against whites are committed by whites.(10) This intraracial crime pattern holds with great force on homicide rates as well. National data tell this tale, but let us bring it close to home. In 1994 Philadelphia experienced 433 murders. Blacks composed 39% of the city's population but 78.5% of its murder victims. Only five of the eighty-nine homicide victims under age twenty were white. Twenty-nine kids under age seventeen, most of them black, were killed by gun blasts. The citywide murder rate was 27.6 per 100,000. But in parts of predominantly black North Philadelphia, murder rates ran over 100 per 100,000. In just one North Philadelphia neighborhood, an area known to local police and residents as "the Badlands," fourteen people were...