Riots and the Underclass; The View from America

In the ebb of the great post-World War II economic boom, one simple question lies on the government agenda of every industrialized nation amid vast structural unemployment and diminished social expectations: How best to assuage the alarm expressed by Chief Constable of Greater Manchester James Anderton in 1980? Anderton gave his considered opinion that "from the police point of view ... theft, burglary, even violent crime will not be the predominant police feature. What will be the matter of greatest concern will be the covert and ultimately overt attempts to overthrow democracy, to subvert the authority of the state."

Britain had its Notting Hill Gate riots in 1958, and Justice Salmon sent nine white Teddy Boys to long terms in prison, saying, "We must establish the rights of everyone, irrespective of the color of their skin... to walk through our streets with their heads erect and free from fear."

Twenty years later, Judge McKinnon ruled that Kingsley Read, head of the fascist National Party, was not guilty of incitement to racial hatred. Read had said publicly of 18-year-old Gurdip Singh Chaggar, who was stabbed to death by white youths, "One down, one million to go."

In the interval, both British Conservative and Labor parties, falteringly and with occasional remissions and bouts of bad conscience, proceeded down the path to racism. Prime Minister David Cameron's recent pronouncement of its death, between the late 1940s and the late 1960s, squandered the chance of establishing a multiracial society. In 1981, after the Brixton riots, Lord Scarman remarked in his "Enquiry into the Brixton Disorders" that "The riots were neither premeditated nor planned. Each was the spontaneous reaction of angry young men, most of whom were black, against what they saw was a hostile police force."

In the 1960s, America saw fearsome ghetto riots from Newark and Detroit, to the city of Watts in Los Angeles. The state's response was a three-fold strategy: First, buy your way out. Money sluiced into "urban renewal schemes" basically aimed as various forms of ethnic cleansing and the wholesale destruction of black neighborhoods. Gentrification and deindustrialization assisted in this process. For example, across the next twenty years, the manufacturing base of Los Angeles simply disappeared.

Since these shifts involved the creation of new ghettoes, the second strategy was ever more stringent policing. With federal money pouring into city law enforcement, across the country, police created heavily armed SWAT teams, even in tiny communities. The third strategy was the conversion of a political threat, political activists like the Black Panthers and other national organizations (many of whose leaders were murdered by the police) into a crime problem — aka the "war on drugs." Richard Nixon, who launched the "war on drugs," emphasized to his chief aide, H.R. Haldeman, in 1969, "That the whole problem (drugs) is really the blacks.

There is plenty of evidence that the strategists of the state's response to black political insurgency were far from unhappy to see poor neighborhoods demobilized by drugs and black-on-black violence as gangs fought bloody turf wars for street corner concessions.

Across the next 35 years, the U.S. prison population rose relentlessly, the cells disproportionately filled with blacks and Hispanics. The "system" had devised a useful sentencing differential that saw blacks and other poor people serving vastly longer terms for possession of crack, rather than powder cocaine — a middle class preference.

The last major race riot in America was in 1992, following the video release of Rodney King, a black man, being savagely beaten by Los Angeles cops. By the 1990s, the "buy out" strategy had evolved into vast programs of prison construction, paralleling the rise of gated residential communities replete with walls and armed guards to keep the bad guys out.

America, this year, has been waking up to two increasingly self-evident truths: violent crime rates — for murder, robbery, aggravated assault and rape — have been falling and are now at their lowest level for nearly 40 years. Fears that the 2008 crash and indisputably harsh economic times for poor people would produce a new crime wave have proved to be baseless. In 2010, New York saw 536 murders — 65 more than in 2009, which was the lowest since 1963.

All crime rates in Los Angeles have been dropping for two decades. Homicides plunged 18 percent last year. Violent crime is roughly the same in LA as in Portland, Ore., the whitest major city in America. It is also the same as it was in the lily-white LA of the early 1960s. When crime rates rose, in the '60s, LA had roughly the same unemployment rate as the late 1990s and early 2000s, when crime fell.

Twenty years ago, conservative criminologists here were drawing up graphic scenarios of cities held hostage by gangs of feral black youth. City police forces compiled vast computer data banks of "gangs" and suspects linked to a gang drew heavier sentences, shoved into a penal system where remedial counseling and post release job training had vanished.

Simultaneous to the drop in violent crime rates, has come the discovery that America can't afford to lock up 2.3 million people for years on end. It's too expensive. When he's not praying to a Christian God to save America, Governor Rick Perry of Texas is trying to save the state's budget, in part by getting convicts out of prisons and into various diversion programs.

So after a near 40-year detour into a gulag Republic with 25 percent of the world's prisoners, America is retrenching towards softer solutions. Emergency laws, rushed through by panicked politicians, are always bad. It will take America many decades, if ever, to restore civil liberties, approach crime rationally — and this will only come with courageous and inventive political leadership in the poor communities. Britons should study carefully the lessons of Americans' 40-year swerve.

Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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