Education, Culture, Ideology

By Jason L. Riley – The Giuliani administration won wide praise for making the city safe again, but William Bratton, the New York City police commissioner in the mid-1990s, told filmmakers that the dramatic reduction in crime stemmed from the ability of police to focus on maintaining order and not simply on capturing criminals after the fact. “In the 1970s and ’80s, police moved away from dealing with disorder on the streets and instead focused on responding to crime,” he said. “We didn’t deal with quality-of-life crime at all.”

Most people didn’t want cops off the street and sitting in their patrol cars waiting for 911 calls about serious crimes, Mr. Bratton said. Rather, they wanted the police to address things they saw every day: prostitution, graffiti, abandoned cars that weren’t towed away, gangs occupying street corners. The focus on lower-level offenses ultimately led to fewer serious crimes. Read More

By Jason L. Riley – George Gilder wrote about the importance of the nuclear family in “Sexual Suicide” (1973) and “Men and Marriage” (1986). Charles Murray, who had touched on it in his landmark study, “Losing Ground” (1984), made similar arguments in “Coming Apart” (2012). In 1994 David Blankenhorn published “Fatherless America,” and 1996 brought David Popenoe’s “Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence That Fatherhood and Marriage Are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society.”

Other books that cover the same ground as Ms. Kearney include Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s “The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially”; James Q. Wilson’s “The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families”; Kay Hymowitz’s “Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age”; and Ralph Richard Banks’s “Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone.” Read More