how our fear of crime is killing us by Billy Wimsatt	He lived in Northbrook, a wealthy suburb outside of Chicago. Late one night, his dog started barking furiously. There was an intruder trying to get in the front door! He got his gun and shot the intruder to death. But when he turned on the light, he discovered that the person he had shot was not an intruder at all, but his daughter Lesley, coming home from college unexpectedly late one Friday night. This is not some urban legend; it is an actual tragedy that happened to my mother's cousin several years back. It is a graphic illustration of a complex phenomenon in America today: Our fear of crime (read: young black and Hispanic men, strangers, streets, cities, ghettos) is killing us. It's the engine behind the decline of our civic and community life. The story goes something like this: White and middle-class fear; white and middle-class flight; flight of jobs and capital; shrinking tax base; degradation of public services; accelerated suburban sprawl; destruction of the countryside; race and wealth polarization; regional polarization; higher cost of government; declining public institutions; less contact between rich and poor; top-down poverty programs designed to fail; more hostility toward the poor; more industries that exploit fear; more unions that benefit from fear; more laws that exploit fear; more fear in the media; less opportunities for poor people; more desperation; more crime; more public fear; tighter security; less community life; less public life; less political participation; worse politicians; less support for the common good.
The cancer of fear has taken over. We have government by fear. We have a fear economy. We have a landscape of fear.	The cancer of fear has taken over. We have government by fear. We have a fear economy. We have a landscape of fear. We have a mass media that sells it. Any effort to reverse the spiral of fear must begin with individuals taking initiative to examine their own fears, asking whether their emotions are being manipulated, and taking bold steps to test the validity of their fears. Only then can a grassroots movement be built to transform our culture, government, and economy. All three of the authors I interviewed this month for Tripod agree that one of the most important steps to breaking the cycle is to get middle-class people to move back to the ghetto. I don't think that's impossible. Millions of ordinary, middle-class Americans still live in ghettos. Thousands of middle-class whites live in ghettos. I personally know at least 20 of them. No, they are not clowns. They don't even consider themselves brave. At least half are female. Some of them have been beaten up or robbed, but not any more so than middle-class whites who don't live in the ghetto. Not one of them has been shot, stabbed, or raped in the ghetto. (Actually, a few of them were raped — in non-ghetto areas.) I am not arguing that ghettos are good places. They are bad places which have been created because white and middle-class people have moved away from them and pulled up the ladders of access to the networks of opportunity and economic self-advancement that they themselves took for granted.
Ghettos serve as a shield against the arrogance of the affluent world.	But there are good things about ghettos. They preserve the sense of neighborhood and community that were once typical of urban life — knowing your neighbors and shop owners; a sense of history and extended family; the fabric of casual encounters; street, stoop, and public transit life; the charm and compactness of buildings; the opportunity for small businesses to flourish; the pedestrian (as opposed to automobile) scale of the streets. These are the things that used to make city neighborhoods feel like small towns — even as our urban planners, government, and business elites have replaced them with high-rises, strip malls, and parking lots. Ghettos also serve as a shield against the arrogance of the affluent world. Yes, there is still the landlord, the teacher, the cop, the pawn shop owner, the social worker — all the missionaries and pimps of poverty— but there's still a sense of belonging, a sense of familiarity and place and community, a cultural comfort-zone. That's why gangs fight to protect neighborhoods they don't even own. That's the reason so many black kids who go to white schools feel torn apart inside. That's why gentrification is a bad word. Affluent people, especially affluent whites, usually don't know how to live in the city. The ones who do live in cities too often don't get to know their neighbors. They don't talk to strangers on the street. They drive everywhere. They don't shop in local stores. They don't get involved in grassroots community groups, or if they do, they try to take them over. They put up a fence instead of sitting on the stoop. They call the police on neighborhood kids. They get offended and scared. They don't share. Worst of all, they bring in more affluent people who drive up the rents.
Any progress toward more livable communities must begin with our fear of crime.	In Chicago, the "inner-city" isn't the location of the ghetto anymore. Almost everything within 20 or 30 blocks of downtown has been gentrified or is about to be. The new location of the ghetto is the outer-city and the inner-suburbs. Many other cities are trying to follow a similar pattern of gentrification. If they do, it will only succeed in moving our ghettos into the suburbs (the way they are in most Third World countries), and destroying the soul of the city. Any progress toward more livable communities must begin with addressing our fear of crime. Crime has been dropping during the 1990s because 15-25 year olds are a smaller percent of the population than they used to be. But in five years, we're going to have a lot more 15-25 year olds and crime is predicted to rise. The good news is, if you're white and middle-class (if you're reading this on the Internet, you most likely are), most of your fears are not supported by facts. As Minnesota state legislator Myron Orfield points out about residents of the suburbs of Minneapolis, "[most of them] held expectations of victimization that were in some cases more than six times their true likelihood of victimization." In most instances, when we jump out of the Fear Box, we will be pleasantly surprised to find that things aren't nearly as bad as we imagine. Americans are afraid of crime because we aren't cultivating community life and cross-cultural social skills, because we watch too many scary TV shows, and because we are ignorant of the true facts. Here are a few statistics that begin to tell the story: For all our fear of crime, the FBI reports that almost half of all Americans have never even been punched. Chicago, where I live, has about 2.5 murders per day for a population of 2.7 million people. Most of that remains within the violent subculture of a relatively small group of people. Even if you live in the ghetto, as long as you stay out of the bullshit, the chance of being randomly murdered on any given day is less than one in a million. Most Americans take a greater risk every day just by driving their cars.
The new growth industries are gated communities and prisons.	When I think about how out of hand our fears have become, I wish I could go back in time 50 years before we became a suburban nation, to a time when the fear economy was still in its infancy. Back then, cities were in a better position to defend themselves. I also try to look into the future and imagine which of the disasters of tomorrow are in their infancy today. The new growth industries are gated communities and prisons: These are the models for urban life in the 21st century. We will become a nation behind bars. For the time being, people not behind bars are still a majority in this country, but we're losing ground fast. If we don't build a movement soon to save and revitalize our public life, then the cities and the suburbs of today are going to be history. For those of you who already live in gated communities, I hope there's some way to convince you to rejoin society — while there's still one left to join. It seems our nation is spiralling into darkness. When the light comes back on, we may be startled to learn the identities of the victims. I dedicate this essay to my second cousin Lesley Horberg, who I never got a chance to know, and to her family.
Related interviews David Rusk, Grass roots leader rescuing cities from the suburbs. Myron Orfield, state legislator and the author of Metropolitics. James Howard Kunstler, prophet of doom for suburban sprawl.	Billy Wimsatt is the author of Bomb the Suburbs, a collection of essays about America's unfounded fears of the inner city. He was recently named one of America's most important "Visionaries" by Utne Reader magazine. To order a copy of his book, send seven dollars to The Subway and Elevated Press Co., PO Box 377653, Chicago, IL 60637.