On March 3, 14-year-old Starkesia Reed was killed by a stray bullet as she gazed out her window in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood. Eight days later and just a few blocks away, Siretha White, 10, was struck and killed in her aunt’s living room as she was about to blow out the candles on her birthday cake.
Senseless Killings
These tragedies produced extensive news coverage and a national debate over how to make our cities safer places to live. They are eerily familiar.
Fourteen years ago–on October 13, 1992–a seven-year-old boy named Dantrell Davis was killed by a sniper’s bullet while walking to school from a Chicago public housing project, Cabrini-Green. His tragic death also generated front-page stories and national debate.
A few weeks after Dantrell’s murder, The Heartland Institute released The Killing Can Be Stopped, a penetrating report by seven authors pinning blame for the culture of violence in inner cities on public policies affecting education, drug abuse, low-income housing, welfare, and job creation. Because the recommendations reached by The Killing Can Be Stopped are still urgently needed, Heartland re-released the report in March.
Comparing today’s public policies with those in place more than a decade ago reveals the progress being made in some areas and the continued abject failure in others. The need for new policies based on freedom instead of patronizing regimentation has never been greater.
Public Housing
In 1992, tens of thousands of Chicago’s poor lived in government-owned housing. Dantrell Davis’s family lived in one of the worst projects, Cabrini-Green. The first chapter of The Killing Can Be Stopped, written by Michael Finch, reported, “recent history has shown that investing public funds in concentrated high-rise public housing projects–rather than making use of existing, decentralized, low-rise private housing–has been a terrible mistake.”
Finch echoed the advice of the late Ed Marciniak by calling “for people to leave Cabrini-Green, and for the buildings to be torn down and/or sold to private developers for redevelopment as they deem fit.” The recommendation was bold in 1992, but it reflected an emerging consensus of experts … and in 1995, demolition began at Cabrini-Green.
Today nearly the entire complex is gone, replaced by on-site and off-site mixed housing developments incorporating public, subsidized, and market-rate units. Housing vouchers enable thousands of families to live in private housing, escaping the incredible violence and pathologies of public housing.
The demolition of Cabrini-Green and the shift in public policy it represents are major victories in the war against senseless violence, but the deaths of Starkesia Reed and Siretha White in private housing are proof housing reform alone is not enough.
Welfare Reform
Dantrell Davis’s mother was unwed and living on welfare. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was a life-long entitlement for unwed mothers. While not apparently generous–benefits averaged $8,500 to $15,000 a year, depending on the state–it was enough to effectively discourage work and marriage.
As I reported in the chapter on welfare in The Killing Can Be Stopped, “only 3 percent of female-headed families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution have a year-round, full-time worker” and “nearly half of all female-headed households in America have incomes below the poverty line.”
I wrote, “we should follow Dr. [Charles] Murray’s lead” and consider (quoting Murray) “scrapping the entire federal welfare and income-support structure for working-aged persons, including AFDC, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Unemployment Insurance, Workers Compensation, subsidized housing, disability insurance, and the rest.”
In 1996, federal legislation abolished AFDC and the entitlement to welfare. In its place was erected Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which gives block grants to states to cover benefits, administrative expenses, and services targeted to needy families. TANF imposes a five-year life-time limit on cash assistance (states can opt for shorter) and requires states to impose work requirements on adult recipients.
Since 1996, the number of people receiving public aid has plummeted from 12.2 million to 4.7 million, a drop of about 61 percent. In Illinois and Cook County (where Chicago is located), the fall was even more dramatic–86 percent and 85 percent, respectively–thanks largely to reforms conceived by Gary MacDougal and the Governor’s Task Force on Human Services Reform.
Welfare reform has been spectacularly successful, if by this one means reducing the number of people getting aid. Most who left the welfare rolls are working or in households with a member who works. Two of the major causes of poverty–unemployment and female-headed households–are shrinking rapidly, with tremendous benefits to the poor and formerly poor as well to the rest of society.
War on Drugs
While housing and welfare policy have changed dramatically since 1992, the War on Drugs has not. Starkesia Reed and Siretha White lived within blocks of each other in a neighborhood described by one newspaper as “plagued by drugs and gun violence.”
Dantrell Davis’s killer was a gang member apparently under orders to fire on members of a rival gang. The suspected killer of Siretha White is a 19-year-old gang member who sought revenge for a January 1 shooting. He was aiming his handgun at members of a rival gang standing outside the home.
“The War on Drugs put the rifle in the hands of the man who killed Dantrell Davis,” wrote Dan Polsby in his chapter for The Killing Can Be Stopped. “To talk about ways to ‘stop the killing’ without also talking about ending the War on Drugs is unproductive and dishonest.”
The War on Drugs finances gangs by driving the drug business underground. “It draws young people into the drug zone with promises of fast money and instant success,” wrote Polsby, “it traps them in that zone by depriving them of critical years of education and skills acquisitions and leaving many of them drug-dependent, and it eventually kills many of them there.”
Polsby recommended de-escalating the War on Drugs and redeploying criminal justice resources to ensure that persons who are real menaces to others are apprehended and jailed. Unfortunately, that has not occurred over the past 14 years.
Difficult Lessons
Bad public policy clearly helped create the circumstances that led to the killing of Dantrell Davis in 1992. It fostered the culture of poverty and literally built the housing project on the roof of which his killer stood. The War on Drugs provided the killer’s means and motive.
The killings of Starkesia Reed and Siretha White were also partly the product of bad public policies, though at least we can report progress in two areas. The War on Drugs, however, remains, as do other policies I don’t have room to address here.
David Padden, founder of The Heartland Institute and now its chairman emeritus, has put his finger on the flawed assumption at the root of all these dysfunctional policies. In the introduction to The Killing Can Be Stopped, Padden wrote, “For longer than a generation we have treated the citizens of our inner cities with patronizing indignity. We have presumed to know what is in their best interests, and we have made it impossible for them to choose how best to improve their lots.”
That approach plainly hasn’t worked. “It is time,” Padden writes, “to set the poor and disadvantaged free. Free to choose whatever education for their children they deem best, not what is forced upon them. Free to start businesses or take jobs on their own terms, not at prices and conditions determined by others. Free of the gangs that terrorize their lives, gangs supported by the obscene profits which drug prohibition brings about. Free to own their own homes or to pay rent in private buildings where people of various income levels live, free of a baleful dependency and segregation that so defines life in the public housing projects.”
We’ve expanded freedom in the areas of housing and welfare, and it has worked. We continue to deny freedom much of a role in education, battling illegal drugs, or creating a vibrant economy in low-income neighborhoods. And we pay a steep price.
“It’s time, in short, for us to get out of the way,” concluded Padden.
Too late, we must admit, to save Dantrell, Starkesia, and Siretha. But not too late to save tens of thousands of other children whose very lives depend on our choices.
