Crime rate on the rise worldwide

By Jonathan Power

ISTANBUL, Turkey (JP): In this UN conference on cities, Habitat, held in one of the world's oldest and most durable of cities, not to say visually arresting, no subject comes more quickly into focus than crime.

For the modern world as it was for the ancients, the city is the epicenter of civilization. Yet it is now being threatened by a tide of theft, rape and murder, driving people off the streets and parks and into the ever-severer protection of their own locked homes and automobiles.

Children, in particular, are no longer free to roam -- indeed, a number of American cities are prohibited by curfew laws from perambulating at will.

At least once every five years, more than half the world's population are victims of crime. Only in Asia does the proportion fall below 50 percent and in Africa and the Americas it is two- thirds or more.

The picture, however, is more subtle than these aggregates suggest. Everyone knows that America's murder rate is astronomical, Europe's lower but still large and Japan's not far from minimal. Less often appreciated is that America's is less than Japan's and that in Latin America, while in Columbia and Mexico the rate is soaring, in Uruguay it is stable and low. Or that in two of the largest, most overcrowded and poverty stricken cities of the world, Calcutta and Cairo, crime is astonishingly rare. Or that -- crime syndicates aside -- ordinary everyday crime is falling in most Asian cities. Sometimes we journalists need to ask why do the trains arrive on time?

All in all, the press does an appallingly bad job of reporting on crime, focusing almost to the point of exclusiveness on the sordid details of the latest outrage -- which, perversely, raising our fears, drives ever more people off public spaces, making them even more prone to takeover by criminal elements. What is ignored is the whys and wherefores and the long-term solutions. A complex debate is trivialized down to its most sensationalist elements.

But to judge from a meeting of the world's mayors there are more sober inquirers. "Urban growth," they say, "with the marginalization of the underprivileged and the isolation of groups at risk, qualitative and quantitative insufficiency of social housing programs and community amenities and the growing unemployment of young people" are the basic causes of growing violence in most cities. To which I would add, if we are to make sense of the violence-free atmosphere of cities as diverse as Vienna and Cairo, the absence of coherent family and social pressures (which without question, in my mind, include what is shown on television) and the presence of easily available firearms.

Of all the materials thrust at journalists by the Habitat organizers nothing makes more sense to me than an essay written by a UN bureaucrat, Franz Vanderschueren. This is someone who starts from the conviction that "violence is not a spontaneous phenomenon but, above all, the product of a society characterized by inequality and social exclusion." In a critique that faults both liberal and conservative opinion he observes crime's causes as being "stimulated by a social environment dominated by consumerism, competition and by the mass media which propagate and legitimize violence."

Imprisonment, he argues, is not very effective for the straightforward reason it does not reduce much the number of offenses committed. In England, for example, a 29 percent rise in the prison population has produced only a 1 percent drop in crime, a figure which last month led the Lord Chief Justice and other senior judges to publically challenge the "lock 'em up" policy of the Conservative government.

And he points also to America, where the Clinton Administration, with its mistaken emphasis on heavy punishment of non-violent drug crime, is creating a prison population numerically exploding like never before.

Since violence is learned behavior for the most part, prisons are becoming ever more effective schools for turning petty drug dealers and consumers into hoodlums. The legalization of drugs, combined with the outlawing of the advertising of alcohol, the single most influential cause of violence, would do more to bring down the western crime rate (and the slaughter on the roads) than any conceivable mix of punitive measures.

All this goes to demonstrate that violence and crime are a public health problem. Drug and alcohol legislation apart, they can be reduced as a number of cities have shown by addressing underlying causes.

This has long been done in Japan with its 15,000 small neighborhood police stations, 9,000 of which are also police residences. It is being done in Cali, Colombia, one of the most murderous cities in the world, with its municipal security council. It is being done in Brussels with its "securities contracts" where municipalities get given special government grants. It is the public health approach in Richmond, California, which has produced America's most significant drop in firearms deaths.

For the city to become again, as its old Sanskrit etymological origin "siba" suggests, the place of civility and civilization, a lot of reflexive and reactive assumptions have to be rethought. Crime does not have to run away with our cities. But both liberals and conservatives have to start questioning some of their outdated assumptions.