Commentary
Now that the subject of crime in Washington is in the headlines, we need to reflect on the meaning for society. Most of the focus has been on murder, partially because it is verifiable and reliably reported. They say it is down in the District of Columbia, but it’s hard to know what this means when it is hardly a trend. Every year for 20 years, according to official data, between 100 and 200 people are murdered in the district.
It’s not entirely comforting to know that, thus far this year, 100 people have been murdered, whereas during the same period last year, 113 were murdered. I’m not sure that anyone would really think of that as indicating a safer city. No one walks the street with comfort knowing that only 150 people will be killed in this small town this year.
A related serious problem concerns theft, both in personal property and in commercial spaces. This problem is personal to me because my first experience of being robbed was in D.C. I was walking down the sidewalk with a carton of carry-out Chinese food when a young man came up behind me, took my wallet out of my pocket, and ran off.
I stood there in shock. Nothing like this ever happened in Texas, where I grew up. My one and only thought was rather naive: That’s mine, so you cannot take it. My sense was that he should return it immediately, almost like there had been some mistake.
I had not understood the meaning of a personal ethic in which normal rules do not apply. What’s mine is not mine; it is someone else’s if they can manage to get it from you.
My life in D.C. was not the same after that. I moved surreptitiously through the city, looking out for trouble everywhere and around every corner. But my exposure to the D.C. plague hardly ended there. I recall being verbally harassed by a guy who demanded all the money in my possession. I said no and walked off, fully expecting a bullet in my back. Nothing happened, and so I breathed a sigh of relief.
Meanwhile, nearly all of my friends had something happen during the summer we lived there. One was mugged. Another was beaten and had to be hospitalized. A woman had her purse snatched. There were worse stories, and they were common. It seemed like nearly daily. When I moved to D.C., my car was broken into via a smashed window. I learned never to keep things in my car. But then my car itself was stolen. People said it was my fault because all cars need to have a steel club on the steering wheel.
It became my habit to wake up several times in the night and look to see that my car was still there. I’m not sure what I thought I would do. If someone were in the process of taking it, what would I have done?
The police, everyone knows, are useless. I once called them because of a car break-in. A team of cops arrived and dusted all over the car for fingerprints, as if the criminals would be leaving those everywhere. Plus, honestly, if they found a fingerprint, how would they know that it belonged to a thief versus a passerby? Moreover, I seriously doubted that they really had a system of matching fingerprints. It was pretty obviously a performance.
That’s why people stop calling the police in D.C. Everyone knows it is useless and a waste of time. This is also why crime is so wildly underreported. Even store owners know that they are powerless in the face of a mob that shows up and grabs all things. The security cameras accomplish nothing. Even if you catch the bad guys, they are pushed in and out of the system without consequence.
This is my memory, and I doubt it is better today. There is simply no way I would live there. If I did live there, I would only walk in daylight on the main streets that are well lit. Even then, I would not be comfortable. After moving to Virginia, I avoided going into D.C. simply because I did not want to take the risk to my person or property. The entire city became toxic to me.
I’m certain that many people feel this way.
Consider the implications of a society that does not respect personal property. It means that nothing feels safe ever. It means a world in which the distinction between mine and thine—whether property or life—has been completely obliterated. Society cannot function that way. People will live in fear. Economics cannot work. Production is brought to a halt. You literally end up in barbarism.
The Declaration of Independence speaks of the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This is a very nice riff on John Locke, who wrote of the rights of “life, liberty, and property.” Why did Thomas Jefferson change the word property to the pursuit of happiness? This is likely because of the ambiguity over the word property in both England and the United States.
The ownership of large estates in England changed hands in the religious wars multiple times and ended up being grants from the Crown. There was an argument that seethed for centuries that these estates and the titles that went with them were not justly earned. And in the American context, there was, from the beginning, a problem of slavery: Men and women were considered property. Jefferson despised slavery and wanted no words from him to imply that he supported it.
Pursuing happiness is a broader ideal, but certainly depended on property rights—provided that they were justly earned and that the property was not stolen or otherwise contradicted the moral law. Locke generated a convoluted justification of property rights that involved homesteading and labor factors. But David Hume had the more compelling defense: Private property is a social convention to deal with the property of scarcity and bring peaceful settlement to the problem of multiple claimants to the same thing.
What are the limits of private property? In the American system, there was only one—you cannot use what you own to exploit others. You cannot engage in fraud. You cannot rob people. You cannot physically harm people. Otherwise, you can own as much as you can earn or inherit. This presumption made the United States the richest country in the world by far. In other words, in the U.S. experience, the right to own legitimate property was bound up with the ideas of freedom and prosperity.
Back to the problem of D.C. Here is a place that is not unlike many big cities. There are places you do not want to be for fear of attacks on life and property, places where law and basic moral codes are simply not respected.
It should hardly be a surprise that people are sick of it, which is why President Donald Trump’s move to take charge of policing in the city was welcomed far and wide. We’ll see if simple enforcement is enough to reverse many decades of anomie and population disregard for basic ethics.
You can understand the priority of bringing some sense of order to the nation’s capital. That said, no amount of enforcement can substitute for an endemic social contract that inveighs against theft in all forms. The rule against stealing and harming others is a matter of personal morals and social structures that reinforce those morals. Police alone cannot bring this about.
A society based on pillage will be that regardless of how many cops are on the beat. When I first discovered how lawless and essentially poor many communities are in the nation’s capital, I had immediate doubts that anyone in this city had earned the right to tell anyone what to do.
There is some analogy between the insecurity of life and property on the streets of D.C. and the goings on inside the Capitol building itself, long inhabited by a class of politicians who have a low regard for the property and lives of the people. Indeed, this whole town is organized around the principle of plunder. Hence, it should not surprise us that the same pervades street culture, too.
The phrase “Physician, heal thyself” comes to mind. If D.C. cannot be made safe, the system of government that inhabits the place has no credibility to tell anyone else how to manage their affairs.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
