WI: after '74 Congressional elections, U.S. Democrats take reins on crime issue.

For starters, they talk about sheer demographics and the number of young men between the ages of 16 and 25. Yes, young men commit more crimes than young women, wish it was otherwise, but that's the fact of the matter.

And demographics is not an excuse to do nothing, but rather even more reason to get smart on the issue and do the effective stuff.

And yes, there will be some 'tough' on crime, but primarily simply being effective on crime. For example, if heroin clinics where addicts can register, get heroin without stealing, and shoot up in relatively safe circumstances is part of an overall package and is a substantial net positive in its own right, then so be it.

And crime is an issue where good politics is perhaps best built on good policy, maybe considerably more so than other issues.

Okay, so following their considerable majorities from the 1974 elections, how do the Democrats do it?
 
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Your problem here is going to be that crime is not really the issue. Fear of crime has a dishearteningly loose correlation to the actual crime rate. So a focus on rehabilitation isn't going to do anything to address that.

I would suggest the democrats would have better luck going after media sensationalism and "misrepresentation" (maybe even nipping Fox News in the bud as history's greatest side effect), but how you could square that with the first amendment circle I can't say.
 
Okay, so fear and public concern about crime has a rather elastic relation with the actual crime rate. Point well taken.

in '68, Nixon ran on a 'law and order' platform which was blurry-blendy between actual crimes and civil disobedience.

Maybe in '74, prominent Democrats start thinking and talking aloud, we're not going to give Republicans that issue again.
 
Could they try getting Big Business on their side? After all drugs, prostitution, gambling, etc. can be legal business opportunities.

When broken windows policing comes in go after Republicans for focusing on petty issues. "People are being killed and he cares if I have an open beer bottle?"

More mental health hospitals.
 
American fears about crime are a safe way for the white majority to express their racist fears of the black minority, as mentioned above it has surprisingly little to do with the actual crime rate. Notice how the broken windows program basically targeted poor and black people to make whites feel safer as they started moving back to downtown in the 1990s and 2000s. Notice also the failure of such programs or indeed any sophisticated computer backed policing in cities that are too black for a white middle class to move back to (Baltimore, for example) because at some point you give up and cook the books.

It is therefore an inherently hard problem to solve for the Democratic Party once segregation is off the table. (Mayor Daley in Chicago was a master, if you compare the highways he built to where people lived at the time they very neatly cordon off the whites from the blacks) and given their voting base reliance on black people.

So I dunno. President Wallace would likely do it although he'd more obvious about it than Reagan or Nixon IOTL and probably end up scrambling the party system as we know it. And, either way, crime probably goes up in any kind of law and order crackdown from the evidence we have on the war on drugs (lol).


The other solution to actually tackle the problem is to approach it from an environmental standard: there's some pretty good evidence that lead-based products caused crime, so outlaw that in the 1950s-60s instead of the 1980s and problem solved, America's cities in 1980 will look (crime wise) like they do in 2000 OTL.

Likewise not conducting the war on drugs (perhaps lesser Viet Nam + no lead = way lower crime so harder to start said war) would drastically reduce crime.
 
Aging baby boomers help lower crime rates
CNN, October 4, 1997. <-- almost 20 years ago

http://www.cnn.com/US/9710/04/crime/

' . . . "Part of this is demographic: Many baby boomers are now in their 40s and have mellowed out. They are not committing the high-risk violent and property offenses they did 10 years ago," said professor Jack Levin, director of the Program for the Study of Violence at Northeastern University in Boston.

'Experts also point to better policing strategies, more police on the streets, a record U.S. prison population, tougher gun-control laws and improved economic conditions. . . '
I really think demographics are huge.
 
I really think demographics are huge.

And yet when the mini-boom occurred the crime rate kept going down. Demographics are destiny, in many things, but in the USA it does seem that lead based products literally (real literally) caused crime.

The 1970s Democratic Party could at best pass some kind of police expansion bill (or, in a different universe some kind of RFK led community policing bill) which would not reduce perception of crime. But they passed up Nixon's healthcare bill and Ford would likely have veto'd whatever they would pass, and they hated Carter... so passing anything is an ongoing problem with Southern Democrats existing in alliance with Republicans.

You can change things in real terms, but the perception change is harder.
 
I do recall there being a very influential paper written during this time that basically said rehabilitation didn't work. It had a lot to do with changing attitudes. The paper was subsequently debunked and disavowed by the author himself but the damage was already done. Have the author get his facts straight the first go around and that could help.

(I'm sorry I can't remember the title or the author)
 
I don't get this. After their 1974 victory, the Democrats somehow "take the reins" on the crime issue, and what would be the best result for them? In 1976 it might help them to win the presidency and maintain their large congressional majorities more or less intact. Which is what happened in OTL.

Yes, the Democrats did lose in 1980. That was because of the economy, Iran, Afghanistan, etc., not because of the crime issue. The crime issue hurt the Democrats in 1966, 1968 and to a lesser extent 1988. It was a minor factor in Reagan's success on the national level (however much it helped him in California in the 1960's).

Anyway, I don't agree that "crime is an issue where good politics is perhaps best built on good policy, maybe considerably more so than other issues." Free heroin clinics, to use your example, are going to be very unpopular regardless of their effect on the crime rate. Which the voters will probably not notice anyway, because crime will still be going up--and "it would have gone up even faster without the clinics" is not a very persuasive argument in 30-second TV spots.

Really, the only good politics (in the vote-getting sense) on crime in the 1970's is to be as "tough" on it as possible. Democrats tried, but they could hardly out-tough the Republicans on that issue.
 
And yes, there will be some 'tough' on crime, but primarily simply being effective on crime. For example, if heroin clinics where addicts can register, get heroin without stealing, and shoot up in relatively safe circumstances is part of an overall package and is a substantial net positive in its own right, then so be it.

I don't think the public would accept heroin dispensaries as a social benefit, even if it did lower the crime rate among junkies.

As others have pointed out, public sentiment about crime is not motivated by rational analysis. So, as long as their is ANY drug-related crime being reported in the news(even if the drug in question is not heroin), it can easily be linked in the public's mind with the heroin clinics.

Remember the "egg" ad from the 80s? The narrator didn't feel obligated to tell us exactly what drug the frying pan was supposed to represent. Heroin was the same as coke was the same as pot was the same as LSD was the same as mushrooms etc. Alcohol and tobacco were omitted from the daisy-chain, of course.
 
Alright, a lot on the table!

the heroin clinics would probably be a serious policy proposal from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore or Mass Gen in Boston, and yes, I have a hard time seeing how a doctor might reconcile the ethics of it, even though each individual addict would (arguably!) be better off and treatment more at the forefront of mind and more readily available.

European do smart things on drugs, maybe not precisely this, but other smart things. And I don't accept the argument, Americans are more conservative. Even if true, too much a circular argument. Americans are also very pragmatic as are other people.

Liberals sometimes take complex ideas and water them down and talk down to people. And that's almost always a mistake.
 
The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies, Thomas Hine, 2007, page 193:

https://books.google.com/books?id=Z...ted from college and avoided the war"&f=false

" . . . Nevertheless, as they entered the workforce, these earliest boomers, especially those who had graduated from college and avoided the war, were fortunate. They were like the first people in line at a buffet table. Good jobs were fairly plentiful, and barriers to getting them weren't overwhelming. . . "
So, during the 1970s as young men became sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, what kind of job situation did they face?
 
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