Over at the Freakonomics blog, Stephen Dubner kicked off a discussion about the demerits of public transport in certain areas of St. Louis. Apparently, inner city teenagers have been using the metrolink extension there in large numbers to travel to an upscale mall, spiking the shoplifting and assault incidents at that mall.
I’m a big proponent of public transport and think it should be expanded in all metro areas as much as is feasible, so I’m not going to dwell on that part of the argument. All traffic policy experts agree more public transport is a good thing, and if it’s properly administered, it ends up saving the community and the taxpayers money. I’ve yet to see a good argument against public transport, period.
In this particular case, if St. Louis built even more metrolink lines, I’m pretty sure that particular mall would be less of a focal point for delinquencies. The solution here would be better planning, more focused investment, and better enforcement of loitering laws — not griping. (In fact, I bet that simply patrolling the trains better to check that all passengers were ticket holders would reduce the problem further — and create jobs.)
What gets my hackles raised is the comment section of that discussion. A lot of the commenters seem to think that this is about “the rich” against “the poor,” and that “the rich” (meaning the shop owners at the mall) somehow deserve to have their products stolen by inner city punks.
I’m all for aiding the poor, even systemically, if that aid has pragmatic results. But I absolutely cannot stand it when people who are themselves middle class sneer at those of their peers who get robbed or stolen from and then complain about it — as if being prosperous earns anyone the duty to be victimized.
There is no excuse for the victimization many lower class citizens suffer for bad reasons, but surely that doesn’t mean they’re entitled to commit crimes against those loosely associated with their own grievances. The fact that more poor people get pulled over by cops doesn’t mean they can then go and beat up suburbanites at malls. Most of those cops don’t live in those suburbs. They live just down the road from the ghetto. And even if they did live right next to the mall, stealing from those cops’ neighbors, robbing and beating up their kids, and heckling their daughters doesn’t solve the problems the poor face, nor do their grievances justify that sort of behavior.
I’m not saying this as one of those suburbanites, either. Hyde Park in Chicago, where my university is, is safer than the rest of the ghetto that surrounds it. But here’s something interesting that happens to aforementioned sneerers, of which the university has its fair and smug share: Once it’s them who gets robbed or sexually assaulted, which happens rather more frequently than in the burbs and is almost never perpetrated by anyone who isn’t part of the poor inner city population, the former sneerers change their mind rather quickly. All of a sudden, the rule of law doesn’t seem so bad. I guess it’s just as long as it’s the other guy who gets beat up and robbed that it’s the just revenge of the underprivileged. Hypocrites.
And one last thing. A lot of those sneerers seem to be saying what they’re saying out of some misplaced sense that they’re combatting racism by advocating crime and putting down the victims as deserved victims. The opposite is true. The implication is that poor African Americans or poor Hispanics can’t help themselves, that crime is part of who they are, intrinsically, and that it’s their way to Get Respect. To say someone is inherently immoral because of their ethnic background is about as racist as it comes. So shut up, move where poor minorities live, and then get back to me about how that bit of self-righteousness worked out for you in a year or so. I have the feeling those safe burbs won’t look so bad.
