Do the right thing - suppress crime.

Do the Right Thing -- Suppress Crime

WHEN A YOUNG woman investment banker was raped, beaten and left for dead in New York's Central Park by a "wilding" gang of black youths last April, liberal opinion in the city didn't know what to think. But it knew very well what not to think. The crime, we were repeatedly assured, was not racial. It was simply a brutal crime and, as such, reported by the New York Times itself under the dispassionate headline: "Youths Rape and Beat Central Park Jogger." Contrast the same newspaper's headline last month when a young black man, Yuself Hawkins, was shot and killed by a gang of white youths: "Black's Youth Is Killed in Brooklyn by Whites in Attack Called Racial."

On this distinction, the Times has shown a determined consistency. An editorial at the time of the rape had distinguished between it and the Howard Beach attack, condemning the rapists for displaying "the same sickening lack of compassion as did the gang of white teenagers who beat blacks and chased one to his death in the Howard Beach case," but also claiming that they "did not display the crude racial animus of the Howard Beach group." So the girl was spared that at least, victim as she was of a lack of compassion.

No one had suggested in April that the people of Schomburg Plaza, from where the youths came, bore any responsibility for the beating and rape of the jogger. And they would have been accused of racism if they had. Thus a Daily News editorial at the time proclaimed "the simple truth that dreadful acts are done by individual thugs to individual victims--not by or to a race."

But there was an immediate consensus of newspaper reporters that Hawkins's murder was the result of the racial hostility that Italian-American inhabitants of Bensonhurst (where it occurred) felt for blacks. The time the Daily News editorial forsook simple truths for root causes: "despite the protests of some Bensonhurst residents, the attack was based on race . . . wrong to dismiss it as a bunch of neighborhood rowdies going too far . . . The motivation was deeper, more insidious," etc., etc. (The two News editorials, incidentally, were entitled respectively "Stay Calm, New York" and "Dare to Attack Racist Violence.")

The picture given, in short, was that the rape was an isolated event which, however, vile, was of no wider significance, whereas the murder of Yuself Hawkins was an extreme but predictable consequence of a pervasive white racism. Were that so, black people in New York would be at everyday risk of their lives. That, indeed, is what black columnists and celebrities now began to assert. Filmmaker Spike Lee wrote in the Daily News: "In America to be black is good enough reason to be killed." In the Times, Devin S. Standard, a young black entrepreneur, anguished: "I wonder if I am to be next. . . . I cannot walk throughout the city where I was born without fearing for my safety--just because I am an African-American."

Of course, most New Yorker cannot walk throughout the city without fearing for their safety--and many of them think that it is just because they are not African-Americans. Nor do the crim statistics confute them.

Nationally, they show that blacks are responsible for 50 per cent of all rapes and robberies and 60 per cent of murders. In New York City, the percentages are even higher. The point is rightly made that most victims are also black--but they are generally victims of crimes committed by other blacks. In murders committed by blacks in New York last year, for instance, four out of every five victims were themselves black. Mr Lee and Mr. Standard have most to fear from other African-Americans.

That leaves interracial crimes. But here the statistics offer even less support to their fears. A study by Professor William Wilbanks--and I am grateful to Pat Buchanan, whose column drew my attention to it--found that of the 629,000 interracial crimes in 1985 where victims survived to identify attackers, nine out of ten were by blacks against whites.

The social reality is that whites are walking the streets in fear of being attacked by blacks, and that respectable blacks, being more vulnerable, are in still greater fear of attack by other blacks. Blacks are threatened by whites largely insofar as white fear of black crime produces a crude neighborhood vigilantism. Fear of crime does not, of course, justify crime. But the statistics do not suggest that this is a major problem. "Bias crimes" involving violence amounted to only 168 cases (of which 63 had black victims and 57 white) in 1988, compared to over 1,900 murders and over 3,000 rapes.

YET FOR THREE weeks the talk shows and newspaper columns were conducted in accordance with the myths of white violence and black victimhood. And these myths have now inserted themselves firmly into the public mind. We now face two problems: genuine fears and cultivated paranoia.

Fortunately, the answer to both is the same: the restoration of public safety by more energetic policing and by more certain and severe punishment of crime. Not only would such measures protect potential victims, black and white, but they would also soothe the fears and racial tensions which unrestrained crime has fostered. Unfortunately, however, a crackdown on crime as such is distasteful to liberal establishment opinion because it promises an increase in the arrest and conviction rates mainly of blacks. And, as the uproar over Willie Horton showed, liberals share with racists an inability to distinguish between black criminals and other blacks. Hence their concentration on the side-issue of "bias crime," where, they note with relief, more of the perpetrators turn out to be white.

Willie Horton is indeed an unsettling symbol in American politics. He symbolizes liberal unwillingness to fight crime if it means fighting black crime.