Interview de Heather MacDonald

HEATHER MACDONALD, SENIOR FELLOW, MANHATTAN INSTITUTE & CONTRIBUTORING EDITOR, THE CITY JOURNAL: Thank you, Paul. Glad to be here.

GIGOT: So some good news, crime rates have begun to fall. What kind of magnitudes are we talking about?

MACDONALD: Extraordinary magnitudes. In the first six months of 2009, homicides dropped 10 percent nationally.

GIGOT: Wow.

MACDONALD: Property crime, which is what you would really expect to go up if the root cause of crime theory is true, a response in inequality and property, property crime went down over 6 percent. And violent crimes went down almost 5 percent.

GIGOT: So we're back at levels not seen since the 1960s, and that's extraordinary.

MACDONALD: It is extraordinary. And I credit the spread, ultimately, of efficient policing and incarceration, but this is the exact opposite of what criminologists were hoping for, really gleefully hoping for, that the crime drop began in the '90s nationally would finally reverse itself and they could reclaim the dominance of the root cause of serious crime.

GIGOT: Tell us about that, the development of this root cause, this theory. That developed in the 1960's. And it's taken hold in the widespread elements within the academy.

MACDONALD: The academy and the media, of course. The idea was that crime really was a form of social criticism, that youth in inner cities came to understand that the American dream was a myth and a cruel dilution. And when they found that the society was blocking their advance, they would turn to crime as a form of social protests.

GIGOT: And that really became widespread not just — and did begin to influence public policy, how so?

MACDONALD: Extraordinarily, police chiefs bought the theory as well, that they couldn't affect crime. And the FBI, in its annual crime reports through the late 1980s, said that homicide is a societal problem that police could not respond to. The root causes theory of crime was the big motivator for the war on poverty. It gave the government an excuse to engage in massive redistribution of wealth and social programs because it could say, well, these have public safety values since the police cannot bring crime down. The way we have to bring crime down is to take money from the rich and give it to the poor, otherwise they will cause social havoc in the streets.

GIGOT: So this means that — whatever you think of welfare programs, whatever you think of job creation programs or food stamps, whatever their utility as redistribution and income maintenance programs, what you're saying is that those have almost zero utility as crime fighting programs?

MACDONALD: We should have known this after the 1960s, Paul.

GIGOT: That makes sense.

MACDONALD: Because the 60s saw a 43 percent increase in homicides nationally. At the time, when the economy was growing, and what was really growing were government jobs. You had massive government jobs programs in the inner city to try and stop crime, but, in fact, it had no effect whatsoever.

GIGOT: So this dramatic change, what does this tell you about policing policy going forward? What should we focus on?

MACDONALD: It's a very optimistic story, Paul. It shows that the government can create safety for its citizens by enforcing the rule of law. But it's also a cautionary tale. If crimes starts going up, it will be because cities rashly cut their police force and start emptying prisons. We've had a five-fold incarceration increase since this...

GIGOT: You think that incarceration — there's no question in your mind that increasing incarceration has made a big difference?

MACDONALD: It incapacitates people and gets people off the streets.

GIGOT: Off the streets.

MACDONALD: We keep hearing a myth that the only people — that we're sending more and more innocuous people to prison. That's not the case. The profile of the people going to prison today is not radically different than three decades ago. It's still a lifetime achievement award for crime.

GIGOT: So who are the heroes in this story, if you will? By that, I mean intellectual, but also political. Who ended up — who has changed the thinking here that has caused police forces to go back to actual crime fighting and has— and have helped to blow up this social theory of the last 40 years?

MACDONALD: Without being too parochial, I would claim New York City as the seed-bed of this revolution. In the 1990s, William Bratton was police commissioner under Rudolph Giuliani.

GIGOT: Went on to be police chief in Los Angeles.

MACDONALD: In Los Angeles, which has, like L.A., has seen double- digit crime drops since the recession. Both chiefs Bratton in L.A. and New York City's commissioner, at the start of the recession, were the only chiefs in the country that said, we are going to keep lowering crime because we know how to do it. They've been proven absolutely right. Homicides in New York are down 19 percent, in L.A., 17 percent.

GIGOT: Wow.

MACDONALD: We have started, in New York, that has spread across the country, a policing revolution that uses crime data obsessively and that holds local precinct commanders accountability. It's an accountability revolution as well as an information revolution.

GIGOT: All right, Heather MacDonald, thanks so much. Some good news for a change. Thank you