What Is Wrong With Our Country?

Four people were shot and killed on a Chicago Blue Line elevated train early Labor Day morning. Police say the victims, who were not seated together, appeared to be asleep at the time and “may have been homeless.” A suspect is in custody, and police say it was “an isolated incident and a random attack,” as if that is supposed to make people feel safer.

Some reports of the murders claimed the crime took place on a commuter train; others said it was a subway. In fact it was an elevated train. Photo by AlphaBeta135.

When I learned about these murders, I had already been thinking about transit crime because of a story that appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press about the decline of the intersection of Snelling and University, two of the most important commercial corridors in Minnesota’s capital city.

“The Green Line light rail, which launched in 2014, was supposed to reactivate economic development in an area that had seen more than its share of commercial departures,” says the article. “Instead, much of the commercial energy at the intersection is long gone.”

“The light rail was the start of it going downhill,” says a local bookstore owner who has had to keep doors locked and buzz in customers on a case-by-case basis due to vandalism and violence. Another business owner, who originally favored the light rail, now says “it’s become one of the city’s biggest safety concerns.”

I’ve noted before that light rail generates more crime (measured in crimes per passenger-mile) than any other form of transit and that the Twin Cities’ light rail generates more crime than any other light-rail system in the country. The former fact is explained by the use of an honor system for fare collection. This makes it easy for people to evade fares and, having done so, apparently makes it more likely they will commit more crimes.

Why is Minnesota’s light-rail system so attractive to criminals? It’s not just a little more crime-ridden: between 2014 and 2021, it generated nearly 600 crimes per billion passenger-miles, which was almost twice the number in the next-highest city and more than six times the national average for light-rail systems.

The Democrats say that crime rates are falling, but transit crime rates are increasing. Twin Cities light-rail suffered about 30 crimes a year from 2014 through 2018, for an average of about 300 per billion passenger-miles. Then in 2019 the number shot up to 118, or almost 1,200 per billion passenger-miles. This wasollowed by a decline to 66 in 2020, but since far fewer people rode transit that year, the rate per passenger-mile in that year was greater than in 2019. The rate remained around 1,400 in 2021. In any case, something happened in 2019 that made Minnesota’s light rail the most dangerous in the country by far.

I don’t know exactly what that was, but I suspect several factors that compounded the issue of fare evasion. Why do we have so any homeless people? Why do we tolerate severe drug addiction? Why do cities not actively prosecute shoplifting and other property crimes? Our tolerance for all of these things has synergistic negative effects.

I first heard the term “bag lady” in 1974. Before then, the idea of homelessness was inconceivable to me. Portland and other cities had plenty of really cheap apartments (I lived in some of them) and it wouldn’t take much of a social security, disability, or other paycheck to be able to live in one.

Now, about 650,000 Americans are homeless, according to the surveys by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Some are homeless because we’ve made housing too expensive. Some are homeless because they are mentally ill.

In addition, however, some have simply chosen homelessness as a lifestyle. Nearly 20 percent of working-age Americans don’t have jobs and aren’t interested in working. Many of them are homeless. They aren’t counted as a part of unemployment rates (supposedly under 5 percent) because they aren’t looking for work. For many of them, getting high on drugs all the time is easier than working.

I’ve long supported decriminalization of drugs, but my concern was people were being given stiff prison terms for occasional recreational use of things like marijuana. Hard-core additions were different, often leading to crime to support the habits. The drugs may not be something to be criminalized, perhaps, but the results should not be tolerated. Oregon’s attempt to end criminal penalties for most drug use ended in failure, so a different approach is clearly necessary.

Fundamentally, permissiveness needs to go hand-in-hand with responsibility. What has happened to our society that has made it okay to be unemployed, okay to be homeless, okay to be a drug addict, okay to shoplift, okay to evade fares on light rail? All of these permissions add up to a serious breakdown of society.

I hate to sound like an old fogey. I grew up in the 1960s and supported what was then called the permissive society. Free love! (Not that I ever enjoyed much.) Smoke dope! (Not that I ever smoked any or even drank alcohol.) Freedom for me meant freedom to be a workaholic, but at the time I didn’t resent people who wanted to be hedonists. Now I think hedonism is fine so long as you can pay for it yourself and don’t depend on others.

The other side of permissiveness is the way the middle-class has shaped cities to fit their self-image. Urban sprawl is bad, so ban it, which makes housing expensive. Successful people don’t ride buses, so make taxpayers spend billions of dollars building light-rail lines for the elites. Cars are evil, so stop building roads, which leaves working-class people whose jobs don’t allow flextime stuck in traffic. These selfish policies have divided the country, with working-class people flocking to Donald Trump because they know something is wrong even if I disagree with them on the root cause (hint: it’s neither immigration nor transgenderism).

What have I missed? What else has led to the decline of cities in general and downtown areas in particular? Or do you think these problems are simply exaggerated, and if so, how do you explain the attraction to Trump?