While violent crime has been at historic lows nationwide and in cities like New York, Miami and Los Angeles, it is rising sharply here [in Milwaukee] and in many other places across the country.
And while such crime in the 1990's was characterized by battles over gangs and drug turf, the police say the current rise in homicides has been set off by something more bewildering: petty disputes that hardly seem the stuff of fistfights, much less gunfire or stabbings.
Suspects tell the police they killed someone who "disrespected" them or a family member, or someone who was "mean mugging" them, which the police loosely translate as giving a dirty look. And more weapons are on the streets, giving people a way to act on their anger. . . .
The police say the suspects and the victims tend to be black, young – midteens to mid-20's – and have previous criminal records. They tend to know each other. Several cities said that domestic violence had also risen. And the murders tend to be limited to particular neighborhoods. Downtown Milwaukee has not had a homicide in about five years, but in largely black neighborhoods on the north side, murders rose from 57 in 2004 to 94 last year.
"We're not talking about a city, we're talking about this subpopulation, that's what drives everything," said David M. Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "When they calm down, all the numbers go down. When they heat up, all the numbers go up. They hurt each other over personal stuff. It's respect and disrespect, and it's girls."
It doesn't strike me as new. The criminal element (and that's the demographic at issue in the NYT article) has always been willing to kill others over petty things. The best example in the movies is probably found in GoodFellas, when Tommy shoots the boy waiter for justifiably insulting him.
The movie is based on a true story. Whether that particular scene is true, I don't know, but I'm willing to bet it is. Similar examples can be found in Herbert Asbury's The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld, such as the 1909 gang-land slayings over the underworld beauty, "Ida the Goose." A member of Chick Tricker's gang seduced Ida and brought her to Park Row. Ida was the pride of Hell's Kitchen's notorious Gophers. They demanded that Tricker return Ida, but he refused. A few weeks later, three Gophers walked into a Tricker hang-out and ordered beers. The Tricker boys were amazed at the audacity of this turf invasion, but didn't do anything. The Gophers finished their beers, then whirled around and shot all the Tricker boys, filling Ida's seducer with a lot of lead. Ida followed the killers back to Hell's Kitchen, "glowing," Asbury says, "with pride that such a great battle had been fought for her favors."
For whatever perverse reason, I've been reading a fair amount lately about the criminal element in America, and I'm increasingly getting the impression that today's criminal element shows the same traits as earlier ones. The Irish criminals, for instance, couldn't speak the English language with much proficiency (quotes from the turn-of-the-century famed gang leader, Monk Eastman, are downright comical), just as today's Hispanic and black criminals can scarcely speak it. Also, notwithstanding the movie portrayals of Mafia types who only killed each other, the criminals of old hurt and killed innocent people, just as today's criminals do. It's true that the vast majority of Mafia killings were among themselves, but I also believe that holds true of today's gangs.
There are, however, a few differences between yesterday's gangsters and today's:
1. The weapons used today are far more powerful, though I don't know if they are more powerful, relatively-speaking, vis-a-vis what the police had. The gangsters of old used Tommy machine guns, for instance, when cops often only had shotguns and revolvers. I don't know what the fire power ratio is today, but I suspect the police have better fire power than they did in, say, the 1920s.
2. The gangs are spreading to semi-rural areas (according to new reports, which might be alarmist--it's too early to tell). I've never read of the old-style gangsters doing such a thing, unless you count semi-retired gangsters going to Hot Springs, Arkansas, or to Florida.
3. In the old days, no "urban studies" programs at universities or similar intellectual bastions celebrated the criminal element or justified their low-class ways. Starting in the 1960s, a whole segment of our intelligentsia, from criminal defense lawyers to black leaders, tried to legitimatize the underworld ways that lead to crime and often the crimes themselves (think of the praise heaped upon the Oakland, California-based Black Panthers).
