I am a New Yorker but I rode the Charlotte Light Rail a few times last year during a business trip. I always use public transit when I can, even when outside my home city. Outside of rush hour, the Light Rail didn’t feel so safe compared to the NY City subway. A disproportionate number of people on it seemed really down and out and socioeconomically disadvantaged.
I think there is a chicken-or-egg issue with attitudes transit. If you live in a city like New York where transit is the most convenient form of transportation and driving really sucks, millionaires and poverty cases alike make heavy use of public transit, it is nearly always well attended, and you don’t generally feel insecure taking it. But in most cities in America, only the poor use public transportation, and this contributes to an air of unsafety.
I would love to see more dense city development, preferably with lower crime rates than NYC, but even that would be a start. I agree Chicago is not NYC, but the three years I lived there, I took the various trains everywhere, there were many places to live and lots of places to eat and shop easily accessible by foot or transit. It’s a great lifestyle if you want it. But if one doesn’t feel safe in those activities, eventually those activities wither on the vine. I remember when BART was great. Not any more. General not-safe-ness is a big reason.
The joy of dense public activities requires a perception of relative safety. You don’t get that without public order. Public order requires the enforcement of basic minimums of acceptable conduct. Pretty much the opposite of the progressive local DA agenda. It’s not just YIMBY-ism. It requires a willingness to insist on public order and to impose consequences for those who will not comply, even if life sux for people at the lower end of the income scale in those dense environments. As a country, we made fateful decisions when we decided to deinstitutionalize mental health, failed to account for (perhaps provide for) the homeless, shut down development in major urban areas (SF & LA), tolerated or even encouraged open air drug markets, and refused to enforce basic criminal laws.
But I’m just restating your piece Noah. None of this is rocket science.
Progressives are so obsessed with identity politics hokum and other idiotically racist ideas that they long forgot the moral reason for much stronger policing in public transportation is precisely because the poor use it. Instead they let public transportation go to shit and berate anyone defending themselves from robbery and assault as a racist. Deranged people have deranged politics.
Thank you for the gaslighting, but I was around for “Defund the Police”. The mealy-mouthed apologia by progressives followed after the emotional, idiotic slogan was picked up from the academic far left, where they get all their ‘moral’ cues. Nobody believed the “community policing” explanation attempt, nor could anyone articulate what that meant. As Noah pointed out, in Europe and Japan it’s noticeable, often heavily armed (militarized) national police, not some blue-haired lady in civilian clothing and a can of pepper spray that makes people feel safe. The far left meant less to no policing, and we got to see just how well that experiment went in the anarchy of CHAZ/CHOP. Please stop insulting our intelligence. Deranged is when you believe in such excuses, when you see the practical outcome (mayhem, riots, vandalism, assaults, rapes, murder) and in elections (‘progressive DAs’ getting their ass handed to them in the bluest cities, Trump’s second win). Less policing is a luxury belief of people who rush to call police at the first sight of a vagrant poor roaming their neighborhood.
Visible presence of highly militarized police is mostly limited to Paris, maybe some other parts of France. At the same time France also has a very widespread, and to a certain degree even accepted, culture of 'strikes' evolving into general riots. In general you don't see anything like this anywhere in Europe. Definitely not on an everyday basis. Taking the outlier as a rule is kinda silly, imo. In the UK, Ireland and Norway police don't even carry guns most of the time, but obviously that's an outlier in the other direction. But even if they have a gun, actually pulling it is often the last thing they'll do, unlike what you often see in the US (one of the reasons being that the possibility they're facing someone who's also armed is higher, but also because of training. Maybe banning guns would help, but that ship has long sailed). In Brussels the biggest guns you'll see is from the soldiers in front of the US embassy, by the way, but that's just detail.
But like I said before, I agree that defunding the police isn't a great idea (nor is it a very widely held position, although it did have some momentum, during BLM protests). I am merely suggesting that, considering where many black people come from in terms of experiences with the police and policing, which was based on legalized racism and apartheid, and the remnants thereof, and the many calls for reform that have failed before, you might see that a lot of that anger did come from personal experience, and not just the 'academic far left'.
Anyways, now that you're mentioning riots, who was it again that tried to overthrow the government and overtake the capitol, and who then received a presidential pardon? Ah yeah, no one on the left. So I guess selective justice is still alive and kicking. See why that might be upsetting to some people?
As an aside; You know what form of 'policing' has seen a lot of actual defunding in the US (both under left and right wing presidents, between 85 and 2020, and again since Trump got re-elected)? The one done by the IRS. Guess trying to police against tax fraud isn't that much of a priority either. Not getting the money you actually need to pay for the police is also a way to defund them of course.
You've constructed a straw man. Italian Carabinieri patrol with assault rifles, Austrian police carry Glocks, Spain's national police corp carry H&K USPs, Swedish police are armed while on patrol, Finnish police are armed on patrol, Polish police are armed and have access to assault rifles, Swiss police are armed with pistols and have MP5s in their vehicles, and the UK's Met has officers with assault weapons by government buildings and in airports. Police are armed in Germany. Israel obviously has security checks by armed guards and armed conductors, which helps make the affordable public transportation safe and widely used.
"Defund the Police" only had momentum with idiotic progressives, and like with most of their ideas, has been elections poison, because most people in the country, and especially the poor, want more policing, not less. It's a luxury belief of progressives, nothing more.
I do have to point out that, while progressives might be focusing slightly too much on 'identity politics', it is not all unlikely that this focus is a dialectical response to the identity politics of regressive forces in society who'd rather keep black people away, locked up or as slaves, or at least segregated and poor, and who consider that women shouldn't have the right to work or vote or have their own bank account, and consider them an object of their lust without the right to refuse.
Remember that the only from 64/65 onwards everyone in the US became equal in the eyes of the law, meaning that 'identity politics' before that was real and institutionalized racism, which means there are still plenty of people alive today who remember that they themselves were discriminated, not just by individuals, but by the law and all of society. So I do wonder if 'deranged' really is an appropriate term here, or that we instead should reserve that term for actually deranged people such as the pedohile/rapist currently holding the office of President of the United States of America...
If you'd listen to the arguments surrounding the 'defund the police' campaign, for example, you'd see that their problem was not investing in safety, but the fact that the investments in policing did not lead to more safety. That is not deranged, that is in fact a good observation and a reason to do something about it (even though defunding the police clearly is not a good solution). Their calls for more 'community officers', and things like that, you can see reflected in Noah's statements with regards to police officers in Europe who are just there 'on the streets'.
As a brilliant writer with a strong following do you need to use this picture? Please tell me what it adds to your important commentary.
As a survivor of a violent robbery I strongly identify with Iryana and I don’t think she deserves to be remembered for the terror of her last moments. Tell the story. It is important. Remind us how big cities have historically welcomed refugees & immigrants who have survived horror & overcome tremendous obstacles to add positive value to our country. Advocate for the changes we must make. You can do these things without using a picture that reduces her to a quivering victim. She was a brave, resourceful human who found her way out of war. Show us a picture that portrays who she truly was & sparks our imagination to mourn who she could have become.
Back in 2008 a similar, particularly horrific, unprovoked murder was committed on a Greyhound Bus in my home province by a schizophrenic man. To this day that attack is the primary thing I think of whenever I see a Greyhound Bus, however irrationally, and it significantly hurt their business.
In that case the man had no prior criminal history so there was nothing that could have been done to stop him, unlike in this one. And at least he was sent to a mental institution afterward. It would be nice if there were more mental hospitals still around and we were more willing to send people to them, both for our good and theirs. Some things are unavoidable, but so many problems could be fixed if we were just able to confine people we know are unable to function in civil society.
Great post Noah. People don't like it, but putting up with disorder doesn't make people or our cities better, and it isn't more humane if it makes most of us unsafe or creates a higher level of anxiety and crime amongst our populace. We shouldn't have to abide and put up with people who don't realize we live in a society and there is a social contract. Also we need to hire more police across the board, train them well and frankly bring back more levels of involuntary commitment. It sucks, but clearly what we are doing now isn't working.
"I'll wait to see if I'm wrong" is a bad and unprincipled reaction to Trump's military incursions on U.S. cities. Practically: it's not likely to promote respect for the rule of law by the residents of those cities.
Liked because I thought this was provocative but ultimately a very interesting and worthwhile question. Does “surging” the national guard into cities as a form of policing contribute to the same positive incidental effects?
Miko Yasu worked in a Japanese Police Box before she quit to become the manga author of Police in a Pod. The work was later turned into an anime and a live-action slice-of-life drama/comedy. A very refreshing presentation of police work in general and community policing in particular. Most cops don't work in homicide, nor do they hunt terrorists.
The anime is available on crunchyroll, the manga at Amazon, and the English subtitled live action series can be found on the high seas.
Systemically diverting the chronically mentally ill into newly built up mental institutions would be helpful. The community mental health model failed; if anything blue cities in blue states that spend oodles of money on safety net health systems are particular failures in this regard.
Looks like the NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation budget is $12.2 billion and the NYPD budget is $5.8 billion. $3.04 billion of the HHC budget is from direct city subsidy. So 110% bigger than the NYPD?
What does the size of the city subsidy have to do with anything? If Health and Hospitals suddenly could function without a city subsidy, do you think that means the services would disappear? If the city gave them another couple billion dollars a year to match the NYPD, HUC would be in significant surplus. HHC is over twice the operations size of the NYPD.
Usually I tend to complain that economists isolate their economic reasoning too much from socio-institutional dynamics, in this case I think you focused a lot on the socio-institutional dynamic of this issue, but I'd also like to emphasize the economic component: You need to invest in society, in order to make it work. And for that you need to tax, and spend money (on the right things though...) So yes, rule of law, policing, public transit infrastructure, but also healthcare for all, housing, etc.
I don't think it's a coincidence that Japan has one of the highest tax rates in the world, and Tokyo is one of the safest city. Even in the US there's somewhat of a relationship between state income tax rates and per capita crime in cities. Of course there are exceptions: Singapore has pretty low tax rates, but is very safe, likely because they have emphasized rule of law, and orderly conduct very strongly, at all levels (from littering to political corruption to drugs, etc.). France on the other hand has both high crime rates and high taxes. Although Paris seems relatively safe, as you suggest, that seems to be strongly about keeping the inner city safe for tourists and the wealthy, not so much it's suburbs (nor the rest of France). One good thing that France has, which I think helps preventing this kind of random violent attacks, is free healthcare. If you're poor and sick or in pain, in the US you might revert to drugs you buy on the streets (with all its risks), in France you go to the doctor and get helped.
The US, considering that your current president is a pedophile-rapist-psychopath-crypto swindler, overall crook and general arsehole, hellbent on destroying American society and all notions of rule of law, social security and care, and is reducing public investments, is probably going to get worse before it gets better.
I honestly find it so bizarre that you keep saying "progressives" want this and that when you are talking about things that zero progressives or liberals I know want and that are all basically ultra strong practically anarchist level libertarian positions. Where I live it's the right-leaning libertarians who are against cameras, reasonable gun restrictions, involuntary commitment, and everything else you listed here. Who hates cameras on roads and public areas the most? Young men and libertarians. Who doesn't want involuntary commitment or restrictions on crazy people getting guns? Same people? Who is totally unwilling to pay an extra $5 a year in taxes to pay for all of this stuff that would cost a ton of money? Libertarians and the right leaning.
Like what are you even talking about, I trust you are speaking in good faith but this is total bizarro land. Where are the right wingers demanding to pay more in taxes to build involuntary commitment facilities and pay for more police, exactly?? Nowhere to be seen. The police are so underfunded they have to spend all their time issuing traffic citations just to raise revenue, they don't even pretend to bother to investigate crimes or do anything else that doesn't increase their hourly fine rate.
I realize these are actual stupid and incredibly dumb arguments that supposed progressive millennials in cities made the past ten years, but is it anyone but them? And did they perhaps somehow just not notice that they were not in fact advocating for anything one could argue with a straight face to be socially liberal or progressive?? Like they just all adopted anarchist level libertarian talking points and didn't even notice? What is up with that and why is anyone describing it that way. By your simple cross-country comparison, it's obviously not what anyone could call liberal or progressive, it's anti-government anarchy loving extreme libertarianism.
“Who doesn't want involuntary commitment or restrictions on crazy people getting guns? Same people? Who is totally unwilling to pay an extra $5 a year in taxes to pay for all of this stuff that would cost a ton of money? Libertarians and the right leaning.
Like what are you even talking about, I trust you are speaking in good faith but this is total bizarro land. Where are the right wingers demanding to pay more in taxes to build involuntary commitment facilities and pay for more police, exactly?? Nowhere to be seen. The police are so underfunded they have to spend all their time issuing traffic citations just to raise revenue, they don't even pretend to bother to investigate crimes or do anything else that doesn't increase their hourly fine rate. “
Utter bogwater. The right wing libertarians prevent New York City and San Francisco from funding police and institutionalizing the sick? These municipalities spend billions on community health and have ongoing mental health crises.
There are other cities besides those two. In fact, Noah seems to be talking mostly about any city BUT NYC, which he holds up as being the only one that gets some of this right. But he's talking about places like Charlottesville where this murder on their rail occurred. Where I live there is literally no way conservatives would pay for any of this stuff, it was like a two decade fight to get a light rail at all and we already have some of the worst paid cops in the country. I assume Noah is talking about all the other cities across the country where no one wants density and partly that's because of their fears of disorder...he's not talking about NYC, that's his model.
Noah is specifically talking about cities OTHER than NYC, he's talking about all the other places that don't and won't do density and partly that's bc of public order fears. He obviously holds up NYC as a model and SF as an anti-model, in that regard. There were not serious demands to abolish police in every city, but regardless I'm not talking about a single year when everyone lost their mind bc they were cooped up and locked down. I'm talking about years and decades. Everything he's discussing here costs a lot of money. At least where I live, they won't even approve getting the cops cars that aren't dangerously old and can't drive in local weather, people won't vote for anything that raises their taxes, they sure as hell aren't going to vote to construct a bunch of buildings to house mentally ill people. I wish they would, and so does basically everyone else (honestly when is the last time anyone actually argued against involuntary commitment, lol like 1982??). No one wants to pay for it though, this stuff doesn't magically grow from the ground. Anyway, the point stands that in no way can someone with a straight face say that this time of public projects for public welfare and order is opposed by the left, it's very obviously mostly opposed by libertarians who do not like paying for public goods. They'll just use their private security guards and retreat behind fences and in the wilderness I guess.
Many good points here, but it is silly to blithely dismiss race at the top of the post when everyone knows young black men account for a shockingly high proportion of urban violence. The statistics are everywhere. You really have to drink a lot of progressive Kool Aid to believe the major reason why Japan and the U.S. have vastly different rates of crime and disorder is because Japan has more beat cops.
So is the recent increase in crime and disorder across Europe due to police budget cuts? Any other factors at play? I can think of one.
The hard question is, what do we do about black urban crime--how hardcore utilitarian do we get? We can pretend race is not a factor, per Noah, to promote racial comity. Then, sure, a massive investment in policing makes sense. But we might get better results at far less expense by simply arresting and convicting the relatively small number of urban males who do most of the shooting. Maybe post-Zarutska we are ready to trade some civil liberties and due process for Bukele-style law and order--Trump's stance against crime earns him his best approval numbers. And the inevitable accusations of racism might not stick when striving inner city blacks are the biggest beneficiaries.
But enforcement must get results. National guard deployments are for show.
As for mental illness, just ignore it. Stop asking why someone broke the law and medicalizing everything--simply arrest and prosecute. There is no need to do a deep dive into a perp's motivations, personal history or addictions. Elevate vagrancy, disorderly conduct, trespass, property crimes and public drug-taking into felonies with real sanctions, and, yes, hire enough police to enforce them. By treating mentally ill criminals as criminals, we stigmatize (instead of excusing) anti-social behavior, reinforce incentives, ensure equality before the law and avoid throwing non-criminal oddballs into virtual prisons.
We can’t destroy due process without amending the Constitution. A Bukele-style dragnet that scoops up the innocent with the guilty will not make people feel more secure if they have the wrong look.
Liberals' debilitating empathy will put Republicans in power everywhere. They have to go against their own instincts - a really hard thing for them to do, if they want to avoid that. They will need to rely on reasoned thinking, and override their liberal impulses, to implement reasonable policies to detain criminals and mentally ill.
As a physician who has worked in urban emergency departments for years, and has taken care of innumerable people with severe mental illness, substance abuse disorders, and homelessness, I strongly believe that we need more paternalism and coercion when dealing with these issues. Someone who is always either high or in withdrawal while hearing distressing auditory hallucinations and sleeps under a piece of cardboard between two dumpsters might be "free" in an abstract libertarian sense, but that freedom is leading to suffering rather than flourishing. Some people are, unfortunately, incapable of functioning independently in modern society. They need long-term institutionalization, with some ability to petition for release every year or every five years or something, is needed. The current system has failed terribly.
I lived in DC for a number of years without a car. While I loved many aspects of the urban environment, it was exhausting dealing with the smells, dirt, social disturbance and other issues. I live in a dense inner suburb now (sadly without public transit), which is extremely safe, and the improvement on my mood and general lower stress levels is profound.
I’ve been a liberal my whole adult life but there are times when I truly wonder whether I’m starting to lose touch with them. While I think Trump butchers everything he tried, I actually support the national guard demonstrations. Our cities are a mess. Virtually every large city has the same problem. I love the idea of police on the corner, funding them more and adding more bodies / training, but the ACAB side of the left is so loud and fierce. I think it may be literally impossible for the left to ever promote that kind of policy. Same with more force in the homeless and mental issue. I can’t think of an issue that has directly impacted me more than public safety, and it is an absolute shame that the party I identify with as the urbanism party holds us hostage on this point
I feel like we are moving the goal posts a bit when we go from talking about crime to talking about “smells” and “dirt.” You absolutely are better off not living in a city.
Great piece, Noah, and very important and thought provoking. Btw, I was quite startled by the fact that a lot of the problems which you listed as causes of public violence and disorder read almost like a list of prescriptions for an anarcho-capitalist society from Murray Rothbard’s books. Perhaps I am unfamiliar with the arguments of American liberals, but it seems that most of the bad policies you listed here are actually hard-core libertarian positions. Including of course the high tolerance for inequality, which is yet another difference between European/Japanese and American cities and which contributes to levels of crime and disorder.
Well, I guess to solve the crime problems in SF, DC, Memphis and other high crime cities, we just have to get rid of the hardcore libertarian city governments there that are obviously responsible for this situation. Oh, wait…
Well, from a European or Japanese perspective, all American cities are actually quite libertarian. In the sense that they don’t have very good public services, including strong and widespread public policing, wide coverage by CCTV cameras, widespread substance use treatments, psychiatric institutionalisation of homeless people with obvious severe mental health problems, gun regulations, etc.
What Americans see as progressive governance still operates within a narrower bandwidth of state involvement compared to Europe/Japan. While no U.S. city literally elects libertarians, the structural absence of strong public services makes American cities de facto more libertarian than their European/Japanese counterparts. In European or Japanese cities, the state does a lot more (and better) than in almost all American cities. As Noah is hinting at in his article.
I think that these things should not be about left vs right: cities just need good governance, widespread policing, well-funded public services including health services, and in Europe this is accepted by both the left and right.
From a Japanese perspective, your points on how city governments there are less libertarian don’t fit. Tokyo has less than half as many CCTV cameras per capita than NYC and 10 times less than London.
Drinking in public is allowed in Japan and there are lots of publicly drunk and passed out people on the streets after dark, however they are unusually strict about cannabis and meth compare even to Europe. Sex and gambling businesses (deliheru, host/hostess clubs, pachinko) are common and advertised conspicuously.
NYC and London have twice as many police per capita than Tokyo, though they may spend more time walking the streets. Japan does have less protections for accused criminal suspects than the US.
Free healthcare is not common in Japan, and there are low numbers of psychiatric healthcare providers, and low numbers of people committed to mental health institutions because of a societal stigma surrounding mental illness.
Japan is far from libertarian, but in some areas it is more free than US or European cities.
The libertarian position, in short, is that there shouldn't be government investments, nor too many rules because it's better if society arises 'naturally' (whatever that might mean, lots of problems with this position). Japan has one of the highest income taxes in the world, as well as the highest government debt, and is thus in no way 'libertarian'. It might be more free for individuals, as you say. That would be because freedom is only possible once the basics of society are in place. A well developed society, with clear norms that are respected, but also with a social safety net, can be more free exactly because people don't have to worry about figuring out the most basic things like survival, or how to get around in a city. It is exactly because Japan has been willing to invest in society, that individuals can be free. Japan might not have free healthcare, but it does have mandatory and universal health insurance (most people pay about 30% themselves, I read somewhere, at much lower total costs than in the US) and there often is additional financial support for people who can't afford it.
The problem with the US is that a lot of people are not willing to invest in society. Or at least is this the position of a strong political current. They are not willing to pay a little bit of taxes that would support a universal healthcare system, or a strong rule of law (including for the elite), or a well functioning city, and so it's just less likely to happen.
No, you're totally correct. It's insane anyone is attributing this kind of stuff to anyone other than anarchist libertarian type stuff. Where I live it is absolutely the libertarians who are opposed to all of this. But then it seems some people can't look past a few months in 2020 when adults let a bunch teenagers act like maniacs...I am looking at the past 30 years of policy and they have ALWAYS opposed this stuff on the grounds that it was the "nanny state". I suppose a big difference is where I live we have hardly any black population at all, and seemingly when there are black people causing crime, white dudes go hard authoritu state, but when they're the ones doing all the crime, they want no rules. Sorry to be crude, but that's the impression I'm getting from these comments, obsession with race and with a single year of insane politics that no one ever enacted, despite the fact mental facilities were shut down 45 years ago.
I think you both misread Noah's article as well as the evidence, but cities in countries that are more equal, and less like an anarcho-capitalist society, are in fact safer. If anything all of this is contra Rothbard, which isn't that difficult considering that Rothbard (& Mises), generally speaking, made up lengthy tracts void of logic and fact.
I might have expressed myself imprecisely, but I meant it exactly in the way you’re saying it - that to me Noah’s article reads like a very good evidence of why Rothbard was wrong: all of the libertarian prescriptions (no mental health institutions, no gun laws, no public health policies for substance use, no urban planning, no public funded police, no redistribution and thus tolerating high inequality etc.) just lead to worse and unsafer cities. I was just surprised that Noah attributed these (bad) prescriptions to progressives rather than the rothbardian libertarians.
In Europe (where I live), things like mental health care, including involuntary, gun regulation, frequent and visible policing, dense cities, substance use treatment, public transport, ticketing inspections, and redistribution to decrease inequality etc are all policies widely supported by our liberals and progressives (as well as conservatives). But I always thought that in America, it was the libertarians who opposed these things.
On inequality: I live in central Europe and always believed that one of the key reasons why our cities are one of the safest in the world is precisely because we also have one of the lowest inequalities in the world.
I am a New Yorker but I rode the Charlotte Light Rail a few times last year during a business trip. I always use public transit when I can, even when outside my home city. Outside of rush hour, the Light Rail didn’t feel so safe compared to the NY City subway. A disproportionate number of people on it seemed really down and out and socioeconomically disadvantaged.
I think there is a chicken-or-egg issue with attitudes transit. If you live in a city like New York where transit is the most convenient form of transportation and driving really sucks, millionaires and poverty cases alike make heavy use of public transit, it is nearly always well attended, and you don’t generally feel insecure taking it. But in most cities in America, only the poor use public transportation, and this contributes to an air of unsafety.
How we get from A to B is a big question.
I would love to see more dense city development, preferably with lower crime rates than NYC, but even that would be a start. I agree Chicago is not NYC, but the three years I lived there, I took the various trains everywhere, there were many places to live and lots of places to eat and shop easily accessible by foot or transit. It’s a great lifestyle if you want it. But if one doesn’t feel safe in those activities, eventually those activities wither on the vine. I remember when BART was great. Not any more. General not-safe-ness is a big reason.
The joy of dense public activities requires a perception of relative safety. You don’t get that without public order. Public order requires the enforcement of basic minimums of acceptable conduct. Pretty much the opposite of the progressive local DA agenda. It’s not just YIMBY-ism. It requires a willingness to insist on public order and to impose consequences for those who will not comply, even if life sux for people at the lower end of the income scale in those dense environments. As a country, we made fateful decisions when we decided to deinstitutionalize mental health, failed to account for (perhaps provide for) the homeless, shut down development in major urban areas (SF & LA), tolerated or even encouraged open air drug markets, and refused to enforce basic criminal laws.
But I’m just restating your piece Noah. None of this is rocket science.
Progressives are so obsessed with identity politics hokum and other idiotically racist ideas that they long forgot the moral reason for much stronger policing in public transportation is precisely because the poor use it. Instead they let public transportation go to shit and berate anyone defending themselves from robbery and assault as a racist. Deranged people have deranged politics.
Thank you for the gaslighting, but I was around for “Defund the Police”. The mealy-mouthed apologia by progressives followed after the emotional, idiotic slogan was picked up from the academic far left, where they get all their ‘moral’ cues. Nobody believed the “community policing” explanation attempt, nor could anyone articulate what that meant. As Noah pointed out, in Europe and Japan it’s noticeable, often heavily armed (militarized) national police, not some blue-haired lady in civilian clothing and a can of pepper spray that makes people feel safe. The far left meant less to no policing, and we got to see just how well that experiment went in the anarchy of CHAZ/CHOP. Please stop insulting our intelligence. Deranged is when you believe in such excuses, when you see the practical outcome (mayhem, riots, vandalism, assaults, rapes, murder) and in elections (‘progressive DAs’ getting their ass handed to them in the bluest cities, Trump’s second win). Less policing is a luxury belief of people who rush to call police at the first sight of a vagrant poor roaming their neighborhood.
Visible presence of highly militarized police is mostly limited to Paris, maybe some other parts of France. At the same time France also has a very widespread, and to a certain degree even accepted, culture of 'strikes' evolving into general riots. In general you don't see anything like this anywhere in Europe. Definitely not on an everyday basis. Taking the outlier as a rule is kinda silly, imo. In the UK, Ireland and Norway police don't even carry guns most of the time, but obviously that's an outlier in the other direction. But even if they have a gun, actually pulling it is often the last thing they'll do, unlike what you often see in the US (one of the reasons being that the possibility they're facing someone who's also armed is higher, but also because of training. Maybe banning guns would help, but that ship has long sailed). In Brussels the biggest guns you'll see is from the soldiers in front of the US embassy, by the way, but that's just detail.
But like I said before, I agree that defunding the police isn't a great idea (nor is it a very widely held position, although it did have some momentum, during BLM protests). I am merely suggesting that, considering where many black people come from in terms of experiences with the police and policing, which was based on legalized racism and apartheid, and the remnants thereof, and the many calls for reform that have failed before, you might see that a lot of that anger did come from personal experience, and not just the 'academic far left'.
Anyways, now that you're mentioning riots, who was it again that tried to overthrow the government and overtake the capitol, and who then received a presidential pardon? Ah yeah, no one on the left. So I guess selective justice is still alive and kicking. See why that might be upsetting to some people?
As an aside; You know what form of 'policing' has seen a lot of actual defunding in the US (both under left and right wing presidents, between 85 and 2020, and again since Trump got re-elected)? The one done by the IRS. Guess trying to police against tax fraud isn't that much of a priority either. Not getting the money you actually need to pay for the police is also a way to defund them of course.
You've constructed a straw man. Italian Carabinieri patrol with assault rifles, Austrian police carry Glocks, Spain's national police corp carry H&K USPs, Swedish police are armed while on patrol, Finnish police are armed on patrol, Polish police are armed and have access to assault rifles, Swiss police are armed with pistols and have MP5s in their vehicles, and the UK's Met has officers with assault weapons by government buildings and in airports. Police are armed in Germany. Israel obviously has security checks by armed guards and armed conductors, which helps make the affordable public transportation safe and widely used.
"Defund the Police" only had momentum with idiotic progressives, and like with most of their ideas, has been elections poison, because most people in the country, and especially the poor, want more policing, not less. It's a luxury belief of progressives, nothing more.
I do have to point out that, while progressives might be focusing slightly too much on 'identity politics', it is not all unlikely that this focus is a dialectical response to the identity politics of regressive forces in society who'd rather keep black people away, locked up or as slaves, or at least segregated and poor, and who consider that women shouldn't have the right to work or vote or have their own bank account, and consider them an object of their lust without the right to refuse.
Remember that the only from 64/65 onwards everyone in the US became equal in the eyes of the law, meaning that 'identity politics' before that was real and institutionalized racism, which means there are still plenty of people alive today who remember that they themselves were discriminated, not just by individuals, but by the law and all of society. So I do wonder if 'deranged' really is an appropriate term here, or that we instead should reserve that term for actually deranged people such as the pedohile/rapist currently holding the office of President of the United States of America...
If you'd listen to the arguments surrounding the 'defund the police' campaign, for example, you'd see that their problem was not investing in safety, but the fact that the investments in policing did not lead to more safety. That is not deranged, that is in fact a good observation and a reason to do something about it (even though defunding the police clearly is not a good solution). Their calls for more 'community officers', and things like that, you can see reflected in Noah's statements with regards to police officers in Europe who are just there 'on the streets'.
As a brilliant writer with a strong following do you need to use this picture? Please tell me what it adds to your important commentary.
As a survivor of a violent robbery I strongly identify with Iryana and I don’t think she deserves to be remembered for the terror of her last moments. Tell the story. It is important. Remind us how big cities have historically welcomed refugees & immigrants who have survived horror & overcome tremendous obstacles to add positive value to our country. Advocate for the changes we must make. You can do these things without using a picture that reduces her to a quivering victim. She was a brave, resourceful human who found her way out of war. Show us a picture that portrays who she truly was & sparks our imagination to mourn who she could have become.
That's a good point. I'll crop the image to just include the murderer.
Thank you. You are a gem!
Thank you for so clearly articulating my own bad vibe about the picture!
Back in 2008 a similar, particularly horrific, unprovoked murder was committed on a Greyhound Bus in my home province by a schizophrenic man. To this day that attack is the primary thing I think of whenever I see a Greyhound Bus, however irrationally, and it significantly hurt their business.
In that case the man had no prior criminal history so there was nothing that could have been done to stop him, unlike in this one. And at least he was sent to a mental institution afterward. It would be nice if there were more mental hospitals still around and we were more willing to send people to them, both for our good and theirs. Some things are unavoidable, but so many problems could be fixed if we were just able to confine people we know are unable to function in civil society.
Great post Noah. People don't like it, but putting up with disorder doesn't make people or our cities better, and it isn't more humane if it makes most of us unsafe or creates a higher level of anxiety and crime amongst our populace. We shouldn't have to abide and put up with people who don't realize we live in a society and there is a social contract. Also we need to hire more police across the board, train them well and frankly bring back more levels of involuntary commitment. It sucks, but clearly what we are doing now isn't working.
How about adding a paragraph or two on the current policing situation in DC and soon Memphis? Is Trump a secret urbanist?
Well, I don't think his patrols will do much, but I'll wait to see if I'm wrong.
They've certainly crushed a lot of pedestrian-oriented businesses.
"I'll wait to see if I'm wrong" is a bad and unprincipled reaction to Trump's military incursions on U.S. cities. Practically: it's not likely to promote respect for the rule of law by the residents of those cities.
Liked because I thought this was provocative but ultimately a very interesting and worthwhile question. Does “surging” the national guard into cities as a form of policing contribute to the same positive incidental effects?
Miko Yasu worked in a Japanese Police Box before she quit to become the manga author of Police in a Pod. The work was later turned into an anime and a live-action slice-of-life drama/comedy. A very refreshing presentation of police work in general and community policing in particular. Most cops don't work in homicide, nor do they hunt terrorists.
The anime is available on crunchyroll, the manga at Amazon, and the English subtitled live action series can be found on the high seas.
https://mydramalist.com/699343-hakozume-koban-joshi-no-gyakushu/reviews
Systemically diverting the chronically mentally ill into newly built up mental institutions would be helpful. The community mental health model failed; if anything blue cities in blue states that spend oodles of money on safety net health systems are particular failures in this regard.
Please define ‘oodles of money’ in % of the police budget for those same cities.
Looks like the NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation budget is $12.2 billion and the NYPD budget is $5.8 billion. $3.04 billion of the HHC budget is from direct city subsidy. So 110% bigger than the NYPD?
Idk where you are getting those numbers. Here's an actual quote from the city council report on the corp under 'funding sources':
"City funds comprises 80 percent ($1.4 billion) of H+H’s total funding in the current fiscal year"
HHC revenue is around $12 billion, the medical care isn’t free.
So you do agree that the NYPD is given about 4x more money than hospitals by the city.
What does the size of the city subsidy have to do with anything? If Health and Hospitals suddenly could function without a city subsidy, do you think that means the services would disappear? If the city gave them another couple billion dollars a year to match the NYPD, HUC would be in significant surplus. HHC is over twice the operations size of the NYPD.
Usually I tend to complain that economists isolate their economic reasoning too much from socio-institutional dynamics, in this case I think you focused a lot on the socio-institutional dynamic of this issue, but I'd also like to emphasize the economic component: You need to invest in society, in order to make it work. And for that you need to tax, and spend money (on the right things though...) So yes, rule of law, policing, public transit infrastructure, but also healthcare for all, housing, etc.
I don't think it's a coincidence that Japan has one of the highest tax rates in the world, and Tokyo is one of the safest city. Even in the US there's somewhat of a relationship between state income tax rates and per capita crime in cities. Of course there are exceptions: Singapore has pretty low tax rates, but is very safe, likely because they have emphasized rule of law, and orderly conduct very strongly, at all levels (from littering to political corruption to drugs, etc.). France on the other hand has both high crime rates and high taxes. Although Paris seems relatively safe, as you suggest, that seems to be strongly about keeping the inner city safe for tourists and the wealthy, not so much it's suburbs (nor the rest of France). One good thing that France has, which I think helps preventing this kind of random violent attacks, is free healthcare. If you're poor and sick or in pain, in the US you might revert to drugs you buy on the streets (with all its risks), in France you go to the doctor and get helped.
The US, considering that your current president is a pedophile-rapist-psychopath-crypto swindler, overall crook and general arsehole, hellbent on destroying American society and all notions of rule of law, social security and care, and is reducing public investments, is probably going to get worse before it gets better.
I honestly find it so bizarre that you keep saying "progressives" want this and that when you are talking about things that zero progressives or liberals I know want and that are all basically ultra strong practically anarchist level libertarian positions. Where I live it's the right-leaning libertarians who are against cameras, reasonable gun restrictions, involuntary commitment, and everything else you listed here. Who hates cameras on roads and public areas the most? Young men and libertarians. Who doesn't want involuntary commitment or restrictions on crazy people getting guns? Same people? Who is totally unwilling to pay an extra $5 a year in taxes to pay for all of this stuff that would cost a ton of money? Libertarians and the right leaning.
Like what are you even talking about, I trust you are speaking in good faith but this is total bizarro land. Where are the right wingers demanding to pay more in taxes to build involuntary commitment facilities and pay for more police, exactly?? Nowhere to be seen. The police are so underfunded they have to spend all their time issuing traffic citations just to raise revenue, they don't even pretend to bother to investigate crimes or do anything else that doesn't increase their hourly fine rate.
I realize these are actual stupid and incredibly dumb arguments that supposed progressive millennials in cities made the past ten years, but is it anyone but them? And did they perhaps somehow just not notice that they were not in fact advocating for anything one could argue with a straight face to be socially liberal or progressive?? Like they just all adopted anarchist level libertarian talking points and didn't even notice? What is up with that and why is anyone describing it that way. By your simple cross-country comparison, it's obviously not what anyone could call liberal or progressive, it's anti-government anarchy loving extreme libertarianism.
“Who doesn't want involuntary commitment or restrictions on crazy people getting guns? Same people? Who is totally unwilling to pay an extra $5 a year in taxes to pay for all of this stuff that would cost a ton of money? Libertarians and the right leaning.
Like what are you even talking about, I trust you are speaking in good faith but this is total bizarro land. Where are the right wingers demanding to pay more in taxes to build involuntary commitment facilities and pay for more police, exactly?? Nowhere to be seen. The police are so underfunded they have to spend all their time issuing traffic citations just to raise revenue, they don't even pretend to bother to investigate crimes or do anything else that doesn't increase their hourly fine rate. “
Utter bogwater. The right wing libertarians prevent New York City and San Francisco from funding police and institutionalizing the sick? These municipalities spend billions on community health and have ongoing mental health crises.
Try again.
There are other cities besides those two. In fact, Noah seems to be talking mostly about any city BUT NYC, which he holds up as being the only one that gets some of this right. But he's talking about places like Charlottesville where this murder on their rail occurred. Where I live there is literally no way conservatives would pay for any of this stuff, it was like a two decade fight to get a light rail at all and we already have some of the worst paid cops in the country. I assume Noah is talking about all the other cities across the country where no one wants density and partly that's because of their fears of disorder...he's not talking about NYC, that's his model.
Were you asleep during 2020?
I was awake during 2020 and saw every call for police reform squashed. It was incredibly depressing, and police effectiveness is lower than ever.
I saw people arguing for police and prison abolition full stop. It is clear which side is responsible for the stabbing in Charlotte.
The stabbing in Charlotte was caused by the abolition of the Charlotte police department? Literally WTF are you talking about? Are you even a human?
Noah is specifically talking about cities OTHER than NYC, he's talking about all the other places that don't and won't do density and partly that's bc of public order fears. He obviously holds up NYC as a model and SF as an anti-model, in that regard. There were not serious demands to abolish police in every city, but regardless I'm not talking about a single year when everyone lost their mind bc they were cooped up and locked down. I'm talking about years and decades. Everything he's discussing here costs a lot of money. At least where I live, they won't even approve getting the cops cars that aren't dangerously old and can't drive in local weather, people won't vote for anything that raises their taxes, they sure as hell aren't going to vote to construct a bunch of buildings to house mentally ill people. I wish they would, and so does basically everyone else (honestly when is the last time anyone actually argued against involuntary commitment, lol like 1982??). No one wants to pay for it though, this stuff doesn't magically grow from the ground. Anyway, the point stands that in no way can someone with a straight face say that this time of public projects for public welfare and order is opposed by the left, it's very obviously mostly opposed by libertarians who do not like paying for public goods. They'll just use their private security guards and retreat behind fences and in the wilderness I guess.
Many good points here, but it is silly to blithely dismiss race at the top of the post when everyone knows young black men account for a shockingly high proportion of urban violence. The statistics are everywhere. You really have to drink a lot of progressive Kool Aid to believe the major reason why Japan and the U.S. have vastly different rates of crime and disorder is because Japan has more beat cops.
So is the recent increase in crime and disorder across Europe due to police budget cuts? Any other factors at play? I can think of one.
The hard question is, what do we do about black urban crime--how hardcore utilitarian do we get? We can pretend race is not a factor, per Noah, to promote racial comity. Then, sure, a massive investment in policing makes sense. But we might get better results at far less expense by simply arresting and convicting the relatively small number of urban males who do most of the shooting. Maybe post-Zarutska we are ready to trade some civil liberties and due process for Bukele-style law and order--Trump's stance against crime earns him his best approval numbers. And the inevitable accusations of racism might not stick when striving inner city blacks are the biggest beneficiaries.
But enforcement must get results. National guard deployments are for show.
As for mental illness, just ignore it. Stop asking why someone broke the law and medicalizing everything--simply arrest and prosecute. There is no need to do a deep dive into a perp's motivations, personal history or addictions. Elevate vagrancy, disorderly conduct, trespass, property crimes and public drug-taking into felonies with real sanctions, and, yes, hire enough police to enforce them. By treating mentally ill criminals as criminals, we stigmatize (instead of excusing) anti-social behavior, reinforce incentives, ensure equality before the law and avoid throwing non-criminal oddballs into virtual prisons.
We can’t destroy due process without amending the Constitution. A Bukele-style dragnet that scoops up the innocent with the guilty will not make people feel more secure if they have the wrong look.
Liberals' debilitating empathy will put Republicans in power everywhere. They have to go against their own instincts - a really hard thing for them to do, if they want to avoid that. They will need to rely on reasoned thinking, and override their liberal impulses, to implement reasonable policies to detain criminals and mentally ill.
As a physician who has worked in urban emergency departments for years, and has taken care of innumerable people with severe mental illness, substance abuse disorders, and homelessness, I strongly believe that we need more paternalism and coercion when dealing with these issues. Someone who is always either high or in withdrawal while hearing distressing auditory hallucinations and sleeps under a piece of cardboard between two dumpsters might be "free" in an abstract libertarian sense, but that freedom is leading to suffering rather than flourishing. Some people are, unfortunately, incapable of functioning independently in modern society. They need long-term institutionalization, with some ability to petition for release every year or every five years or something, is needed. The current system has failed terribly.
I lived in DC for a number of years without a car. While I loved many aspects of the urban environment, it was exhausting dealing with the smells, dirt, social disturbance and other issues. I live in a dense inner suburb now (sadly without public transit), which is extremely safe, and the improvement on my mood and general lower stress levels is profound.
I’ve been a liberal my whole adult life but there are times when I truly wonder whether I’m starting to lose touch with them. While I think Trump butchers everything he tried, I actually support the national guard demonstrations. Our cities are a mess. Virtually every large city has the same problem. I love the idea of police on the corner, funding them more and adding more bodies / training, but the ACAB side of the left is so loud and fierce. I think it may be literally impossible for the left to ever promote that kind of policy. Same with more force in the homeless and mental issue. I can’t think of an issue that has directly impacted me more than public safety, and it is an absolute shame that the party I identify with as the urbanism party holds us hostage on this point
I feel like we are moving the goal posts a bit when we go from talking about crime to talking about “smells” and “dirt.” You absolutely are better off not living in a city.
Great piece, Noah, and very important and thought provoking. Btw, I was quite startled by the fact that a lot of the problems which you listed as causes of public violence and disorder read almost like a list of prescriptions for an anarcho-capitalist society from Murray Rothbard’s books. Perhaps I am unfamiliar with the arguments of American liberals, but it seems that most of the bad policies you listed here are actually hard-core libertarian positions. Including of course the high tolerance for inequality, which is yet another difference between European/Japanese and American cities and which contributes to levels of crime and disorder.
Well, I guess to solve the crime problems in SF, DC, Memphis and other high crime cities, we just have to get rid of the hardcore libertarian city governments there that are obviously responsible for this situation. Oh, wait…
Well, from a European or Japanese perspective, all American cities are actually quite libertarian. In the sense that they don’t have very good public services, including strong and widespread public policing, wide coverage by CCTV cameras, widespread substance use treatments, psychiatric institutionalisation of homeless people with obvious severe mental health problems, gun regulations, etc.
What Americans see as progressive governance still operates within a narrower bandwidth of state involvement compared to Europe/Japan. While no U.S. city literally elects libertarians, the structural absence of strong public services makes American cities de facto more libertarian than their European/Japanese counterparts. In European or Japanese cities, the state does a lot more (and better) than in almost all American cities. As Noah is hinting at in his article.
I think that these things should not be about left vs right: cities just need good governance, widespread policing, well-funded public services including health services, and in Europe this is accepted by both the left and right.
From a Japanese perspective, your points on how city governments there are less libertarian don’t fit. Tokyo has less than half as many CCTV cameras per capita than NYC and 10 times less than London.
Drinking in public is allowed in Japan and there are lots of publicly drunk and passed out people on the streets after dark, however they are unusually strict about cannabis and meth compare even to Europe. Sex and gambling businesses (deliheru, host/hostess clubs, pachinko) are common and advertised conspicuously.
NYC and London have twice as many police per capita than Tokyo, though they may spend more time walking the streets. Japan does have less protections for accused criminal suspects than the US.
Free healthcare is not common in Japan, and there are low numbers of psychiatric healthcare providers, and low numbers of people committed to mental health institutions because of a societal stigma surrounding mental illness.
Japan is far from libertarian, but in some areas it is more free than US or European cities.
The libertarian position, in short, is that there shouldn't be government investments, nor too many rules because it's better if society arises 'naturally' (whatever that might mean, lots of problems with this position). Japan has one of the highest income taxes in the world, as well as the highest government debt, and is thus in no way 'libertarian'. It might be more free for individuals, as you say. That would be because freedom is only possible once the basics of society are in place. A well developed society, with clear norms that are respected, but also with a social safety net, can be more free exactly because people don't have to worry about figuring out the most basic things like survival, or how to get around in a city. It is exactly because Japan has been willing to invest in society, that individuals can be free. Japan might not have free healthcare, but it does have mandatory and universal health insurance (most people pay about 30% themselves, I read somewhere, at much lower total costs than in the US) and there often is additional financial support for people who can't afford it.
The problem with the US is that a lot of people are not willing to invest in society. Or at least is this the position of a strong political current. They are not willing to pay a little bit of taxes that would support a universal healthcare system, or a strong rule of law (including for the elite), or a well functioning city, and so it's just less likely to happen.
No, you're totally correct. It's insane anyone is attributing this kind of stuff to anyone other than anarchist libertarian type stuff. Where I live it is absolutely the libertarians who are opposed to all of this. But then it seems some people can't look past a few months in 2020 when adults let a bunch teenagers act like maniacs...I am looking at the past 30 years of policy and they have ALWAYS opposed this stuff on the grounds that it was the "nanny state". I suppose a big difference is where I live we have hardly any black population at all, and seemingly when there are black people causing crime, white dudes go hard authoritu state, but when they're the ones doing all the crime, they want no rules. Sorry to be crude, but that's the impression I'm getting from these comments, obsession with race and with a single year of insane politics that no one ever enacted, despite the fact mental facilities were shut down 45 years ago.
I think you both misread Noah's article as well as the evidence, but cities in countries that are more equal, and less like an anarcho-capitalist society, are in fact safer. If anything all of this is contra Rothbard, which isn't that difficult considering that Rothbard (& Mises), generally speaking, made up lengthy tracts void of logic and fact.
I might have expressed myself imprecisely, but I meant it exactly in the way you’re saying it - that to me Noah’s article reads like a very good evidence of why Rothbard was wrong: all of the libertarian prescriptions (no mental health institutions, no gun laws, no public health policies for substance use, no urban planning, no public funded police, no redistribution and thus tolerating high inequality etc.) just lead to worse and unsafer cities. I was just surprised that Noah attributed these (bad) prescriptions to progressives rather than the rothbardian libertarians.
In Europe (where I live), things like mental health care, including involuntary, gun regulation, frequent and visible policing, dense cities, substance use treatment, public transport, ticketing inspections, and redistribution to decrease inequality etc are all policies widely supported by our liberals and progressives (as well as conservatives). But I always thought that in America, it was the libertarians who opposed these things.
On inequality: I live in central Europe and always believed that one of the key reasons why our cities are one of the safest in the world is precisely because we also have one of the lowest inequalities in the world.
Ah no, I guess I totally misread your comment, my bad. I agree with what you say.
And let’s face it, less multicultural.