Economics and Crime:Connecting the Dots

I love it when powerful people finally begin to connect the dots.

I read last week that 17 mayors from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware gathered at Philadelphia's Constitution Center to get a handle on how they might more effectively address the issue of violent crime in their respective cities.

Guess what they "discovered" about Philadelphia...

An Inquirer reporter covering the event pointed out that "...criminologists and police say Philadelphia's problems include the fact that a large part of its African-American population lives in isolated pockets of poverty. Philadelphia's unemployment rate, at 12 percent, is 4 percentage points higher than New York's. Its high school dropout rate, for certain categories of minority students, can exceed 50 percent. The result is a growing population of largely poor, dangerously idle youth with no stake in peaceful prosperity. Add the easy availability of semi-automatic weapons and lethality is a foregone conclusion..."

That's what the Inquirer reported.

The only issue I took with the reporter's story is that, according to "The Social and Economic Isolation of Urban African Americans"(2005), "...in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles-Long Beach, New Orleans and St. Louis, only about one-half of African-American males were employed." The same study indicated that African Americans in six cities, including Philadelphia, were twice as likely to be part of the poverty population relative to their percentage of the total poulation in their areas. It went on to cite an African-American poverty rate in Metro Philadelphia at 42 percent.

What disturbs me even more than the media's continuing under-representation of the black economic condition, in Philadelphia and other large cities, is the hypocracy of the mayors of those cities.These elected officials are purportedly responsible, among other things, for ensuring that blacks and other minorities have at least equal access to public sector employment and contracts in their cities but, in too many cases, they find that part of their job description politically unappealing, so they simply don't do it. As a result, they wind up contributing directly to the creation of the conditions that lead to economic desparation, property crimes and acts of violence in their own cities.

For example, here in Philadelphia, how can a city administration that has virtually never "lifted a finger" to ensure minority economic inclusion feign surprise that the city has a nationally significant poverty level and that thousands of young people no longer believe that the city offers them anything that makes going to school worth their while?

What happens when you have a functional 50 percent unemployment rate in a major city? Pretty much the same thing that happened nationwide when the U.S. experienced the so-called "Great Depression." (By the way, the peak unemployment rate then was just over 26 percent but even that was enough to cause good, God-fearing, people from across the country to rob banks, commit other property crimes at previously unprecedented levels and fill up the nation's prisons).

I don't know what happened in the other 16 cities that sent their mayors to the Constitution Center last week, but I'm absolutely convinced that we, in Philadelphia, are now simply reaping the bitter harvest of ignoring the legitimate economic needs of the majority of our city's population for far too many years.

Impose 50 percent unemployment levels and some of the nation's worst poverty rates on the currently upscale residents of Rittenhouse Square and Chestnut Hill and, I guarantee, similar anti-social behavior patterns will break out, even in those places.

I've been invited by City Controller Alan Butkovitz to provide testimony at his public hearings on the severe, ongoing, dysfunction at Philadelphia's Minority Business Enterprise Council(MBEC), on April 12.

I can't wait...and I hope, once the Controller's hearings are completed, that some powerful people in the city finally begin to connect the dots between Philadelphia's continuing, race-based, economic discrimination patterns and the propensity to commit crime.

Hey, it's never too late.


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