Legal Commentary

Most of us are ready to leave Nixonland behind, and the current fiscal crisis of states like California may help provide the needed pressure to help walk politicians down from ever tougher criminal laws (as Hadar reports), but the road from fear to hope is shadowed by a ghost from the '60s that won't go away, the wave of violent crime in America's cities.  Just as the dramatic decline in urban gun crime all over America during the 1990s helped produce a housing a boom in America's large cities (ok and some incautious lending as well), the recent uptick of homicides involving guns in some large cities (including San Francisco and Oakland) is causing a growing panic among middle class families that have reinvested in cities.  Since the 1960s this has been a race problem as well as a youth and violence problem.  Half of all homicide victims in San Francisco last year were African American (mostly young men, as were their likely killers), while fewer then 10 percent of the city's current residents are.  For forty years we have built white suburbs and predominantly black prisons and fear of gun homicide is, I would argue, an anchoring condition for both.