Unprotected: The Origins of US Violence and Public Safety Failures

• In Event: Justice and Injustice: Political Science Perspectives on Crime and Punishment Mini-Conference: The Political Origins of State Violence

Abstract

"Since the great migration, almost half a million AfricanAmericans
have been murdered, mostly
from intraracial violence but also from police violence. The mutual mistrust between police and
the AfricanAmerican
community, the high rates of violent victimization, and mass incarceration
represent a truly catastrophic policy failure, one that is poorly understood.
In this paper, I test an explanation, which I’m calling the sticky hobbesian theory. In the absence
of a neutral thirdparty
to provide public safety—usually the state—people are stuck in a
Hobbesian trap. They are uncertain about the intentions of others and that uncertainty leads them
to adopt behaviors that deter victimization. To keep themselves safe, they must establish a
reputation as dangerous. This leads them to escalate conflicts, avenge sleights, no matter how
minor, avenge attacks, and strike preemptively. Put differently, they must undertake their own
defense and justice. This is violent. Nonstate societies have violent death rates as high as 60%. In
contrast, state societies, which generally provide effective public safety, appear have a 500 fold
lower rate of violent death (Pinker 2011). The stickiness part of the theory is that people take
time to learn to adapt to changes in safety levels. When people have had to undertake their own
defense and justice, they carry those practices with them, to some extent, even when contexts
change, such as when they migrate. Likewise, when people habitually let the state handle defense
and justice for them, they also carry those practices with them. A growing literature supports the
sticky hobbesian theory and does so across social groups and contexts (Fischer 1991; Grosjean
2014; Restrepo 2015; Couttenier, Grosjean, and Sangnier 2017; Pinker 2011; Leovy 2015). This
theory helps us understand police violence and mutual mistrust because the police and the
broader community misinterpret the violence. Instead of seeing it as a substitute for actions the
state has failed to take, they see it as criminal. It helps us understand why it persists.
Criminalization by the police leads people to distrust the police, which leads them to do their
own defense and justice, which leads to criminalization, and so on.
Testing this explanation with recent data is difficult because mutual distrust between the police
and the African American community is so widespread. So, I begin by examining its start.
Under slavery, AfricanAmericans
were at the mercy of their masters but also under their
protection—they were valuable property. Given the low public safety provision in the South
during slavery, AfricanAmericans
were, arguably, better protected from others (nonmasters)
than were whites, so we would expect blacks to have little habit of doing their own defense and
justice. Since they were not in the Hobbesian trap during this period, we would expect blacks to
undertake little of their own defense and justice, and so kill each other less often than whites
killed each other. Moreover, we would expect these patterns to persist after slavery. Using data
from government records and newspapers, I find support for these predictions. Consistent with
their reputation at the time as peaceful, blacks appear to kill each other at lower rates than whites
to each other, a pattern that holds up during slavery and in the decades after slavery.
Reconstruction governments provided public safety, with relatively large police forces, black
police officers, and sheriffs, so institutions may have helped reinforce these existing behaviors.
The redemption governments, however, withdrew this public safety provision along with most
public goods for AfricanAmericans.
Its shrunken police forces were hostile and wantonly
violent towards AfricanAmericans.
Southern governments withdrew public safety because it is
expensive, because AfricanAmericans
had no representation in government, and most
importantly because white planters opposed it—to ensure a cheap labor supply, they provided
security and other statelike
services on the plantation in exchange for labor and racial deference
(Alston and Ferrie 1999). Without public safety, AfricanAmericans
had to learn to protect
themselves and do their own justice. We would therefore expect to see and do find increasing
rates of black intraracial violent victimization starting in the 1880s and rising until they peaked at
crisis levels in 1930s southern cities. During this period, AfricanAmericans
shift from being
arguably the least violent social group in America to the most violent one. Failing to understand
their predicament, police and the broader public criminalize them for doing their own defense
and justice, leading to further mistrust. African Americans could have organized their own
security, but Jim Crow governments saw any such organization as a threat. So, African
Americans were not only deprived of public safety, but prevented from organizing their own.”

Author

• Gabriel Lenz, UC Berkeley