Michael Barone:
“…I know how violent rioting, and that’s what we’ve been seeing, despite media attempts at hiding it, can destroy a city and ruin the lives of its residents. In the summer of 1967, I was an intern in the office of the mayor of Detroit when the city suffered a six-day riot in which 43 people died. I was at the mayor’s side in the so-called command center as radio calls came soon after nightfall. Police were abandoning 1 square mile after another.
The riot finally ended after some 12,000 federal and federalized national guard troops restored order. But most of Detroit has still never fully recovered. You can still see the abandoned commercial structures and the residential streets with burned-out houses and hauntingly empty lots.
Downtown and adjacent areas have enjoyed a revival, which I hope will continue. But the lesson is clear. Violent riots destroy people’s willingness to invest their lives and money in a city. Those most harmed are those who start off the most disadvantaged. Violence and crime are a confiscatory tax on what people would otherwise earn and accumulate over a lifetime.
The combined effects of the COVID-19 lockdowns and the last several days’ rioting threaten to destroy the efflorescence of gentrifying central cities, which has followed Rudy Giuliani’s demonstration in New York City, a quarter-century ago now, of how to reduce and nearly eliminate violent crime. The demonstration these last few days that it can be suddenly increased threatens to undo that progress for the next quarter-century.
The short-term political effects are harder to gauge. A Morning Consult poll showed a 58% to 30% majority, unusual in these polarized times, supporting “calling in the U.S. military to supplement city police forces.” Will President Trump and Republicans benefit from their calls for “law and order,” as President Richard Nixon and Republicans did in the years after the riots in Detroit and many other cities half a century ago? Maybe, and especially if folks like Healey and the Fairfax County message poster are seen as representing the Democratic Party…”