Johnson’s, and then Nixon’s, descriptions of the Black insurgency as lawless disorder pivoted the national focus away from systemic racism and toward crime. As the political scientist Naomi Murakawa has pointed out, “the United States did not face a crime problem that was racialized; it faced a race problem that was criminalized.”
Crime was used as a political tool to deflect attention away from the causes of the riots; at the same time, it was also a reality in the lives of the Black working class. In the early seventies, the long postwar economic boom gave way to an economic downturn, causing more suffering and desperation. From 1972 to 1975, Black unemployment rose from ten per cent to nearly fifteen per cent. During that same brief period, federal statistics suggest that there were nearly four million more violent crimes committed, which led to a palpable desire in Black communities for more to be done—including, as the legal scholar James Forman, Jr., has explained, more policing. Funds that were siphoned from the dwindling Great Society could have mitigated the worst aspects of the recession that lasted from 1973 to 1975, including rising rates of crime. Numerous polls taken in the aftermath of riots indicated that a majority believed that better jobs, housing, and opportunities were a remedy to inequality—and that crime was one of its key expressions. However, as the affluence of the sixties turned into recession and stagnation in the seventies, the politics of racial resentment gained new traction and defined solutions to ongoing social crisis.
The turn to the politics of punishment was not a political gimmick that would change from one Administration to the next. It marked a transition in all of U.S. politics. This turn could be measured in the growing reluctance of Democrats to embrace social welfare and the “root causes” explanation for crime. It could also be gauged by changing spending patterns across the entire criminal-justice system.
From 1977 to 2017, state and local spending on police increased from forty-two billion dollars to a hundred and fifteen billion dollars, adjusted for inflation. This skyrocketing increase continued even after crime rates began to fall in the early nineties. Today, the Center for Popular Democracy found, Chicago, Oakland, Houston, Minneapolis, Orlando, and Detroit each spend at least thirty per cent of their general, or discretionary, fund on their police departments. Police-spending figures do not include the hundreds of millions of dollars paid by municipalities across the country to settle lawsuits connected to police violence. ABC News reported that, in the last year alone, lawsuits against police cost the public more than three hundred million dollars. For many city leaders, it has sadly become the cost of doing business.