"WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT these kids (monsters) who kill with guns??? Line them up against the wall and get a firing squad and pull, pull, pull. I am volunteering to pull, pull, pull."
That's not a rap lyric. It's from an anonymous letter to a judge in Dade County, Florida -- part of the shared unconscious talking. And suddenly we're all ears. In one of the most startling spikes in the history of polling, large numbers of Americans are abruptly calling crime their greatest concern. Confronted by clear evidence of a big issue, politicians everywhere, including the one in the White House, are reaching for their loudest guns: prisons, boot camps, mandatory sentences. Months before the start of baseball season, the air is full of shouts of "Three strikes and you're out."
Why are so many people suddenly preoccupied with crime? For one thing, anxiety hates a vacuum. With worries about the cold war and the economy evaporating, the fear of crime has reared up in their place. For another, every few weeks the headlines resupply our worst imaginings. Randomly, irrationally, crime pounds at the door of a slumber party. It pulls up beside a tourist at a highway rest stop. It catches the 5:33.
What cannot be used to account for the sudden uproar is any commensurate increase in crime generally. The FBI figures for the first six months of 1993, the latest available, show violent crime down 3%. Crime overall was down 4%. But the national psyche doesn't make seasonal adjustments. Whatever the latest backlash owes to hype and hysteria, it is also a response to a festering problem. Most crime is down or leveling out, but only when compared with the high plateau it reached in the late '70s. It's hard to take comfort from the news that the murder rate, though lower than three years ago, is twice what it was three decades ago. And over the past 10 years the incidence of violent crime generally has risen more than 23%.
Because much of that increase reflects the daily shooting spree in the nation's inner cities, the fear of crime also cuts across class and racial lines. Republican whip Newt Gingrich may find a receptive audience when he talks about wanting to build stockades on military bases to house prisoners, but so does Jesse Jackson when he urges African Americans to examine the cost $ of black-on-black violence. One day after a group of teenage boys sprayed bullets down the halls of Dunbar High School, in a mostly black neighborhood of Washington, visiting Vice President Al Gore was confronted by student Alenia Fowlkes. "What are you going to do?" she asked bluntly. "And when are you going to do it?"
But does Gore, or anyone, know what to do? Crime control is complicated, expensive and frustrating. When people want action now, it doesn't help much to tell them the "root causes" are even more intractable problems like joblessness, family disintegration or drugs. But the solution they are most inclined to reach for, more prisons, has a dismal record when it comes to reducing crime. (See following story.) So Congress and the states grope for the mixture of punishment and incentive that will take the pressure off for a while.