By CHRIS POWELL
For the sake of argument, stipulate that President Trump, a Republican, never has good intentions, only demagogic ones, and has a political interest in exaggerating the problem of crime in the cities, most of which long have been mismanaged by Democrats.
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But that political interest is no stronger than that of the Democrats in falsely minimizing urban crime. Indeed, crime data is almost as manipulated as economic data is by whoever is in power. The question now is whether the urban crime problem is bad enough to deserve the attention Trump has called to it by taking control of the District of Columbia police and deploying the National Guard to patrol the district.
In any case, crime in D.C. seems to be down sharply now that there are soldiers all over the place. Though the president may not have authority to put soldiers in other cities, many of them, like Chicago and Baltimore, could use similar treatment or else thousands more police officers on their streets and aggressive prosecution of the lesser crimes like shoplifting that are now condoned.
State government in Connecticut could hardly care less about crime. As long as the worst of it — the shootings, stabbings, and murders — is confined to the state’s cities, particularly Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport, the poverty factories — it’s all considered normal and largely avoidable by the middle and upper classes, who can stick to the suburbs.
Presiding over a poverty factory, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker has an especially difficult job, since he feels obliged to express sympathy for victims and perpetrators alike while trying to persuade suburbanites that his city is still safe for them despite incidents like the two fatal shootings that occurred Aug. 25 next to the Yale University campus. Those murders unnerved students as the new college year began, reminding them that New Haven consists of two parallel and very different universes.
Responding to the murders, Mayor Elicker noted again that most criminal violence in New Haven involves people who know each other. That is, you’re perfectly safe in New Haven as long as you don’t know anyone there, or at least no one outside the Yale cocoon.
If you’re born into the underclass, born into a fatherless household, as so many children in the poverty factories are, state government would have you put your faith in ever more anti-poverty programs — free or heavily subsidized stuff, and in social promotion in school, during which you may feel better about yourself until you graduate from high school and find yourself qualified only for menial work or the dangerous trade in illegal drugs. (Connecticut’s purported legalization of marijuana has not eliminated that trade as was hoped.)
Of course that’s if you ever get to school and graduate in the first place. Chronic absenteeism is high in the poverty factories and was probably about to get higher in Bridgeport when the school board decided in April to save $4.6 million by eliminating bus service for 2,400 students, increasing by a half mile the distance students are obliged to walk to school.
The state Education Department, which has put Bridgeport schools under extra scrutiny because of their grotesque failure, intervened, locating extra money and apparently negotiating a better deal with the bus contractor than the school board made, allowing bus service to remain as it had been. But that won’t diminish chronic absenteeism.
That problem, like most of the problems of the underclass in Connecticut, is mainly a matter of child neglect, a lack of parenting in households that can’t afford to take good care of their children or don’t try to. The less parenting, education, and job skills in society, the more policing will be needed.
So awful as Trump may be, he is emphatically right about the cities, even if he doesn’t fully understand or care about why they got so bad, and his Democratic adversaries are not only wrong about the cities but the main perpetrators of their frightening decline.
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 