By David H. Padden
Dantrell Davis was killed by a sniper’s bullet on October 13, 1992. He was walking from his home at Cabrini-Green, one of Chicago’s high-rise public housing projects, to school. He was seven years old.
As well they ought to be, Chicagoans are outraged by this senseless killing. But Dantrell was not his community’s first victim of urban violence — two other students attending his elementary school, in fact, were shot and killed since March. Nor will he be the last. As this introduction is being written on November 20, the radio is reporting a young student killed and another wounded outside a different Chicago public school.
It is fruitless to ask why there is such sudden outrage over Dantrell’s death when such killings take place with such alarming frequency. We should simply be thankful that the citizenry is now sufficiently aroused to ask difficult questions and seek solutions to a very complex problem.
The reaction of politicians has been predictable. Mayor Daley announced an 11-point program that is so long on law and order that it reminds us of the brutal reaction of the Chinese leadership to events at Tiananmen Square. Buildings are being sealed, police sweeps launched, guards permanently stationed in lobbies, and residents required to enter and exit through metal detectors and subjected to random searches. Civil liberties have clearly taken a back seat to a heavy-handed authoritarian response.
Public officials are prone to get a quick fix by treating symptoms instead of causes. But such an approach bears little fruit in the long term. John Dineen, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, succinctly characterized the situation as follows: “You can’t have the police go in there and create a police state and think that is going to be the answer because eventually the police are going to have to leave.” Conrad Worrill, a community activist, observed trenchantly, “It is only a temporary solution. What the mayor needs to do is come up with a comprehensive program that deals with the social ills of the people who live in public housing that produces these kinds of behaviors.”
Mr. Worrill, on this point, is precisely correct. And creating an outline of a “comprehensive program that deals with the social ills of the people who live in public housing” is what the essays in this collection propose to do.
Television has made us all addicts of the sound bite. We want to know in fifty words or less answers to complex social problems. Undaunted, I will give you the “answer” to Dantrell Davis’ murder in a sound bite of just four words: change bad public policies. But of course this is not a satisfactory answer. We need a more robust explanation of which policies need to be changed, and how.
The following essays, assembled quickly while the event is still stirring our outrage, are far longer than a sound bite. Even then, they fall short of a comprehensive review. To detail the inter-relatedness of the many ways public policies cause hopelessness and despair in our inner cities would require a still lengthier and more detailed analysis.
The Heartland Institute has assembled experts in five areas of public policy that explain most of the woes of our inner cities. Though each essay stands alone, it is plain to see that solving the problem of urban violence requires action on all five fronts. It is not enough, for instance, to say that Dantrell Davis was a victim of the nation’s War on Drugs. Surely he was, but would gangs be such a powerful presence in the inner city if families there were stronger? If welfare policy undermines families in the inner city, suspending the War on Drugs may still not solve the problem of gangs. If jobs were available and if barriers to jobs, such as minimum wage laws and occupational licensure, were removed, would inner-city youth be less inclined toward gang involvement and violence?
It is not enough to answer any one of the above questions in the affirmative and then assume that life in the inner city would be markedly improved by one or a few policy changes. It is all of a piece. We need that “comprehensive plan” mentioned earlier, a plan that addresses the many causes that lay beneath urban violence.
There is a theme common to all of the essays that follow. Whether it be housing, schools, drugs, welfare, or jobs, the authors find that current public policies are animated by the notion that “government knows best.” This assumption, as Randy Barnett explains in his afterword, is plainly wrong. Basing public policy on so wrong-headed a premise has created problems far worse than those policy makers have sought to solve.
Policy makers of both the Democratic and Republican stripes have imagined they could overcome the problems of knowledge and interest that prevent government from being an effective solver of social problems. Again, it is fruitless to go back to determine how it all got started and who is to blame. The situation is now a bipartisan catastrophe in need of immediate change.
Tired thinking, knee-jerk reactions, and political posturing are inadequate and irresponsible responses to the tragic death of Dantrell Davis. To those who call for just more of the same, we must ask: If throwing more money at these problems is supposed to be a cure, where are the results of past spending? Compassion with other people’s money may salve one’s conscience, but we are long past the time when “feel-good” solutions could suffice.
The authors of these essays offer bold and imaginative programs for permanent improvement without regard to short-term gain. Many suggestions contained herein are specific, but more importantly they illustrate an approach that needs to be taken if progress is to be made in harmonizing the interests of all Americans. The details of implementation will be affected by the politics of the moment. The more important contribution of these authors is to point out the correct direction for others to follow.
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. Can we now, with the results of some thirty years of experience before us, say this model is working? Can we believe the way to end urban violence is to stay the course and pour still more money into the failed programs of the past?
It is time 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 segregation that so define life in the public housing projects. It is time, in short, for us to get out of the way. With freedom comes responsibility and a responsible citizen is the only hope for lasting peace. The authors of these essays point the way. I hope the reader will give them his or her most careful attention.
David H. Padden is president of Padden & Co., a municipal bond dealership in Chicago, and a director of Miller Building Systems. He was a founding director of The Heartland Institute in 1984 and now serves as its chairman. He is also a director of the Cato Institute and Citizens for a Sound Economy, two educational and public policy research organizations based in Washington, D.C.
