Professor John Pfaff joins CBS News‘ Lana Zak to discuss the cause behind the recent years’ rise in crime in major American cities.
“I don’t think we’re going to find a single consistent story for what happened in 2020.”
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“It was urban, it was suburban, it was rural –– it was much more widespread. I think this very much gets to the politics of how we respond to crime; to realize that any increase in homicide, almost all the time, it’s never cities versus suburban areas versus rural areas. Even within cities, it takes place within very concentrated small, generally fraught, neighborhoods. I think one problem very much that plagues the politics of punishment is that both homicide itself and the way we choose to respond to it tends to be concentrated in very small and relatively politically disenfranchised communities, which causes much of the politics of crime and punishment to not really be about effective criminal policy, because most people debating it aren’t really impacted by it on a daily basis.”