Christine Rosen on the New Crime Wave and Its Consequences

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2021

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The United States is undergoing a spike in violent crime. Murder rates have increased drastically in big cities across the country, from Atlanta and New York to Milwaukee and Seattle. For the roughly 7 million Jews in the United States, four out of five of whom live in cities, incidents of violent crime can’t be ignored. The cities where most American Jews live are the very places that are growing more dangerous.

American Jews aren’t the only ones affected by rising urban crime, of course. Hate crime directed against Jews is very high, but as Christine Rosen wrote in the March 2021 edition of Commentary, “the vast majority of these homicides were black Americans, including many children, 55 of whom were killed in Chicago last year alone.” Here’s a case where two of America’s most urban populations, black people and Jews, are together imperiled by the return of urban disorder.

On this week’s podcast, Rosen joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss her essay, and how different ways of looking at law enforcement reveal different philosophical understandings of the human condition.

Musical selections are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	We're living through a spike in urban crime in the United States.
0:10.8	The Manhattan Institute's Heather MacDonald wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently
0:14.5	that, quote, the local murder increases in 2020 were startling.
0:18.9	95% in Milwaukee, 78% at Louisville, Kentucky, 74% in Seattle,
0:23.6	72% in Minneapolis, 62% in New Orleans, and 58% in Atlanta."
0:30.6	Now, of course, you don't want to read too much into statistics like that.
0:34.6	If the previous number of murders was two and the new number of murders
0:38.2	is four, that would seem like a very large percentage increase, but that would be misleading.
0:43.0	So, a caution, not to over-interpret. But neither should we under-interpret. In commentary,
0:49.3	Christine Rosen wrote about Portland, Oregon, quote, where Mayor Ted Wheeler responded to
0:53.8	Black Lives Matter
0:54.8	activists' demands this summer by eliminating the police department's gun violence reduction team.
1:00.6	Activists claimed it was unfairly targeting black citizens.
1:04.4	Gun violence doubled, end quote.
1:06.2	Rosen goes on to quote, a Portland police detective who told a local news team that, quote,
1:11.7	the city of Portland had three or four murders up to, I think, the end of May, mid June
1:17.4	2020.
1:18.4	And then we'd had like 48 cents, and the pace is really bad.
1:22.4	That puts Portland on a pace to have 100 homicides a year or more, which would be by far a record that goes
1:28.5	back 30 plus years."
1:30.5	End quote.
1:31.5	Crime.
	...

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