Brits Look Through "Broken Windows"

Remember “Broken Windows” policing? That’s the approach to policing introduced into New York City by Police Commissioner Joseph Bratton and Mayor Rudi Giuliani a decade ago.

Do you remember the results? Excellent! Murder down by 76 percent from 2,262 to 540 per year. Rapes down by 44 percent. And so on.

And let us not forget to credit the conservative scribblers and foundations that proposed all this: James Q. Wilson. Myron Magnet. Manhattan Institute. City Journal.

So now, as the crime rate in Britain spirals into the stratosphere, now, finally, New Labour under Tony Blair have invited the “Broken Windows” crew to Britain to talk about their experience. Gee. After, all crime has merely increased by 2,300 percent in Britain in the last century. It might be time to do something about it.

The Spectator’s Alistair Heath got to talk to Joseph Bratton. Bratton is now the police chief in Los Angeles.

‘You can do something about crime. You can control it,’ Bratton said. ’The American experience has clearly proven that. In the 1990s we finally got it right. It’s like a doctor dealing with a patient. If you find the right medicines, you can take even the most severely ill patients and make them well. And you’re probably one of the most severely ill patients of the Western world. You need political will. You need smart policing, intelligence-led policing, you need resources. This is not rocket science. Fighting crime is not the most difficult thing in the world.’

Actually, better than fighting crime would be to end the social pathologies in the inner cities introduced by liberal social welfare programs, but that’s too much to ask for.

So what should be done? The first requirement is large numbers of police officers... Officers have to pursue seemingly minor crimes that, if left unattended, soon undermine order, especially ‘quality of life’ offences such as graffiti, litter or vandalism — hence ‘broken windows’ policing. The police must... tap local knowledge and identify the small core of offenders responsible for much of the crime... [L]ocal commanders must be penalised if crime doesn’t fall in their area.

Like they say. This is not rocket science. But it does involve accountability. That could be a problem, for the politicians of the British Labour Party, like politicians generally, are not exactly into accountability.

Republicans and Race

Our national schizophrenia about race is never so blatant than when a columnist wonders what Republicans should do to attract African American voters to the “R” column.

For Clarence Page the answer is simple. Republicans should offer race-conscious policy to blacks.

For instance, he commends former Congressman Jack Kemp for an article in Human Events in which he recommends trolling for black votes by

extending all of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, parts of which are set to expire next year, and "by extending the voting franchise to the residents of District of Columbia

But then Page explains why blacks started voting for Democrats in the first place.

Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater's opposition to that Civil Rights Act turned black voters heavily in favor of Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and simultaneously lost Southern white voters to Johnson's party, as Johnson predicted it would. To black voters, the act of sacrificing political capital is true heroism, especially on behalf of equal rights.

Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act because he thought it was racist. The reward for his principled stand was to be tarred as a racist.

As it turned out, of course, Goldwater was right. Despite the noble intentions of 1964 the Civil Rights Act was used to reinject race and quotas into American politics and poison race relations ever since.

If blacks believe in “equal rights” then by all rights they should oppose the extension of the Voting Rights Act, which had a race-conscious rationale of supervising the election laws of southern states to make sure that they didn’t discriminate against blacks. Maybe a temporary race-conscious act was necessary forty years ago to crack the whip over southern states, but in 2006?

The problem with Republicans is that they persist in looking at Americans as Americans, not as race victims. African Americans won’t start voting Republican until they stop seeing everything through the lens of race.

The uncomfortable fact is that the name for a person whose politics is mostly determined by race is: Racist.

World Community Joins US on Missile Defense

All right-minded people are strongly opposed to rogue states like North Korea and Iran getting nukes, and rightly so.

So all right-thinking people deplore the actions of North Korea in fueling up an intercontinental missile capable of reaching the United States.

But how bad are things, really?

The United States took the opportunity of announcing that it was making operational its ballistic missile interceptors based in Alaska and California, according to Alan W. Dowd.

And of course the bellicosity of North Korea and Iran is influencing other minds. Slowly but surely, the US is building its International Missile Defense (IMD) system, not just in the US, but across the world.

As the technological pieces fall into place, so too does the IMD alliance: The Polish and Czech governments are negotiating with Washington on the deployment of anti-missile bases on their soil, enabling the IMD system to peer deep into Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The Poles have even expressed a willingness to open their territory to missile interceptors.

NATO has just published a report declaring IMD feasible.

And the Japanese are getting up off their Japan knees and joining the IMD coalition too.

[T]he Japanese system already includes a network of new ground-based radars; SM-3 interceptors, which attack incoming missiles at their highest point; missile-tracking Aegis warships, which patrol near rogue countries; and Patriot PAC-3s, which serve as a last line of defense.

It’s odd. The MSM would have us believe that the whole world is united against the US aggression in the Middle East. But here we have everyone signing up to become a part of our missile defense system.

And why not? One fine day, one of these rogue states is actually going to fire off one of their missiles.

It wouldn’t hurt if the US and its allies could shoot it down.

Dartmouth Moves the Goal Posts

Well, you had to expect it. After three dissident candidates got themselves on the Dartmouth Board of Trustees, the Dartmouth Alumni Association is moving the goal-posts. They want to bring in a new constitution that will not allow petition candidates to declare after the official nominees have been announced. How cool is that?

You can read all about it in The New York Times. Diana Jean Schemo tells all. The problem, according to John Daukas, a lawyer in charge of the task force that came up with the new constitution, is that

the current system put the official candidates at a disadvantage because they did not know whether they would face outside challengers at all or who they might be.

Oh dear. That would be a problem. Not that an alumni association that kept its ear to the ground would ever be blindsided by trustee candidates coming up out of left field.

Various bloggers and the folks at NRO are onto all this skullduggery. And even the two Dartmouth student newspapers are agreed.

Editors of the on-campus Dartmouth Review and The Dartmouth Free Press, conservative and liberal publications that seldom agree, called the new constitution "a slap in the face to open democracy" that "makes a mockery of the spirit of dissent and free speech."

Still. It is far too early to bet against the incumbents.

The Germans Get To Cheer Again

Sixty years after the devastation of 1945, the Germans are cheering for Germany again. And it is appropriate that they are doing it in the context of the World Cup, that harmless sublimation of national conflict and contest.

The Germans committed, under the malevolent leadership of Adolf Hitler, one of the great crimes in history, the attempt to eliminate the Jews from Europe by putting 6 million of them to death. But they have stepped up to the plate and endured their full share of shame and humiliation for that monstrous crime.

Meanwhile the heirs of the Lenin dynasty still rule in Moscow. That was the regime, remember, that starved about 10 million Ukrainians to death in the early 1930s.

And the heirs of the Mao dynasty still rule in Beijing. That was the regime, remember, that starved about 30 million Chinese people to death in the Great Leap Forward.

So it is time for the Germans to revive their patriotic spirit and celebrate their Germanness. For even if we regard Hegel’s promotion of Germany to the center and the culmination of the world in his Philosophy of History as rather over the top, the Germans still have much to be proud of.

• Germans started the Reformation.
  
• A German reinvented philosophy.
  
• Germans invented modern psychology.
  
• Germans dominated music in its golden age.
  
• Germans reinvented physics, both macro and micro.
  
• Germans invented the modern army.
  

So let us welcome the Germans back into full membership in the family of nations, and encourage them to return to the great tradition of dichter und denker, poets and philosophers, in which they gave so much to the world.

Why Do They Still Hate Thatcher?

Back in the 1980s my British cousin used to sport a sign on her house: “Thatcher the Snatcher,” it said.

Now, as Lady Thatcher reaches the age of 81 the BBC is planning to run a play in which Thatcher is “shown as a bellicose drunk, demolishing whiskies and importuning other guests for refills.”

That’s odd, writes Simon Heffer.

I know Lady Thatcher and see her socially quite regularly. I have yet, in many such meetings, to see her drunk. She has never importuned me, or anyone else in view, for drink or any other intoxicating substance... In private and in public, she has always had exquisite manners, reflecting the strictness and decency of her upbringing.

The question is: Why do they hate her so, 16 years after she stepped down as prime minister of the UK, and especially why do they hate her at the BBC? Fortunately, Heffer now understands their rage. He can stop wondering.

However, last week a light was shone in on my ignorance. A long-time servant of the BBC explained to me, in a moment of stunning insight, why the Leftists in that organisation, and the Leftist contributors to it, are so bilious and angry even 16 years after Lady Thatcher left office: it is because they lost. They were wrong. They were humiliated.

And to top it off, after Thatcher left office the Labour Party swung decisively to the Right. So now all the Lefties can do is spit with rage and tell lies about her.

“Pity them,” says Simon Heffer.

Everyone Wants Infrastructure, But...

We all want road and bridges and hospitals, but after a century of the welfare state we don’t see why we should pay for them.

In the old days before the welfare state a lot of infrastructure, schools and hospitals, was built with benevolence. People gave money to build a school. And then there were the turn-pikes: regulated, profit-making enterprises. People hated the gates, and they hated the toll collectors, and they hated to pay the tolls.

Trouble is, when you don’t have the infrastructure, you can’t have prosperity. And in a continent like South America, governments don’t build infrastructure, and people rebel from paying for private infrastructure, as the London Economist reports.

Although the region's economies are growing faster, thanks to an export boom, they are hobbled by poor roads and railways, clogged ports and a precarious electricity supply. In the 1990s governments slashed public investment to balance their budgets. They invited private investors to make up the shortfall... But the flow of private money for electricity, water and transport has dried up in many countries, partly because citizens or politicians turned against privatisation.

That’s because people didn’t want to pay for the infrastructure. Except for Chile.

But that is because the evil Gen. Pinochet got privatized infrastructure built anyway. Fortunately Chileans are still building. “In Santiago treatment of sewage has increased from 3% in 1999 to 70% today, says Alfredo Noman, chairman of Aguas Andinas, the capital's Spanish-controlled water company.”

Not that Chileans are happy.

Success has not made privatisation popular. Chileans grumble that they see only new cars on the new roads, because drivers of jalopies cannot afford them. (The same is true of Mexico's privately built toll roads.) Running water is convenient, but backyard wells were free.

It’s amazing. People will put up with staggeringly inefficient, but subsidized, government services like schools and public transportation but complain bitterly about efficient producers like oil companies and water companies that make products for which they have to pay.

But nobody said that humans were grateful.