>> you just know. and so people are down or they aren't down. that is my simplistic answer. we don't need to be measuring or particularly concerned, i think, with the demographic composition of our communities. we need to embody the sort of democratic vision for the middle east to which we aspire. one that is beyond secretarism and biological initiatives. by the way, you mentioned john

hopkins. the koch brothers are dig donors. palestine, the reason it is so compelling is it ties into so many issues. beyond the antagonazation. it is important for palatine and their activism to be aware of connections and develop them. it is hard to imagine sort of the type of palestine activism that is not in conversation with the continued colonization of native people or in police

brutality particularly in black communities or in conversation with economic injustice. all of these things are important. any kind of model that functions based on this system and antagonism should be reworked into something that is mindful in the ways in which palestine both draws from a wide range of interested parties and can contribute to the better meaning of their communities. what can students do? that is a tough question. i explore it a little bit in the book but it is very hard to argue with somebody who is in the swell consciously or not of a particular national mythology. that is lots of people in the

thrall with this. people are enthralled with the united states, canada, the uk or jordan or anything else as an ideal. what i tried to do is find ways to remove the emotional attachment from the equation. it is a difficult thing to do because a narrative i keep encountering -- i spent the last year traveling all over the place. i got to meet a lot of people and have a lot of interesting and productive conversations and one thing i kept hearing from communities and community members afterwards and it wasn't spoken exactly this way but it was evident that, you know, what happens -- what if something happens to israel?

what becomes of the jewish people? this is a type of narrative that i don't have the answer to. i don't want to speak in relation to sort of cultural nave narratives and realities i am not personally familiar with. but it is very important to delink the idea of israel as a nation station that abides by certain geopolitical realities and they are inherently violent because it is a nation state and all nation constituents engage in violence from the idea of a cultural idea identity. i think a lot of the folks from jewish voice for peace and others are interested in de-linking the idea of

jewishness from israel and from the conduct of israel. i would say to add to it i think the same is true of the palestinians interested in a palestinian nation or state. we should delink our sense of what it means to be palestinian from the gop reality of the conduct or entity that speaks on our behalf. we have to have a rougher, antagonistic relationship with these sites of power. i try to explain to people some buyer and some don't and some hate me for it. but when i speak of israel i am not speaking of jewishness or jewish culture. i am speaking of a go-political

human rights entity and i am not trying to put your culture together with the actions of a human abuser. and i don't think you should either. you cannot expect me to curtail my criticism of that nation state. you will have to learn to live with the comfort that results from that. does that make sense? thank you, everybody. >> thank you so much for this very inspiring talk. you took us and explained to us your own struggle and experience but you also brought it to beyond the university of illinois, to the academy in general and touched on all sorts of topics that are important and deeply troubling in many ways. thank you for all your insights. >> thank you. [applause] >> booktv continues with barry

latzer. the criminologist tracked violent crime from the 1960's until today. he is interviewed by samuel beiler. >> high profile violence in milwaukee, chicago, washington, d.c., and the question on the issue of violent crime required a national attention it hasn't had since the 1990. barry latzer wrote a new book "tough as they come" what inspired you to reinvestigate the issue of violent crime? >> no one had really studied in a comprehensive way the history of violent crime and i felt that needed to be done especially because, as we both know, the violent crime late had skyrocketed in the late '60s and

really became a major concern for the entire nation for the next several decades. two and a half deck apeds, really. so i tell, given the significance of violent crime in the post-war period, a major work upon that needed to be done. >> now you do something unique in this book. most people when they take about violent crime they start '60s and '70s with the first spike. you start your story in the 1940's. what made you decide you wanted to take a longer perspective on violent crime? >> actually when i wrote the manuscript i went back even further than that but they only decided to publish the period from the 1940's on. the period within the memory of people are still alive. but i feel that to really understand violent crime and

most major phenomena one has to go back in time and see how things developed and that is true with crime as well because i have learned that crime has its ups and downs and there are good reasons for it and without a historical perspective one just can't really fully grasp that. as you know, many crimin criminalodgical studies study a ye year's worth of crime and i am not knocking them but they don't give a broader perspective. >> before we get into the story of crime in america let's set the stage for the viewers.

what is violent crime? >> it is described as four different crimes. murder but of course that could be treated as a manslaughter if there are certain what we call elements of the crime present or not present. so together we might refer to those as criminal homicide. so that is one crime. and then rape, of course, considered a violent crime. assault is the third one and usually we are interested in what most states call aggravated assault where you have serious bodily injury and that would be the third. and robbery is the final one although robbery is somewhat of an hybrid because there is a property motivation that is

theft motivation and it is combination really of theft and violence. some people might include other things for instance kidnapping or some might even include arson which could cause death or injury but i guess kidnapping isn't included because there are so few instances of it and don't include arson because it is mainly a property crime with people destroying properties to collect on insurance. >> let's get right into it. in the 1960s and 1970s we see a spike in crime. you call it a crime tsunami. what drives this increase? >> i think this is the biggest sustained increase in violent

crime in the country's history. i know that description at least going back to the late 19th century. i didn't dive into the earlier period as much so i am not as confidant saying probably the worst in america history but it probably is. why did it happen? i think there were three thing major factors and one can always point to some subsidiary events but it is always good to pick three. first, you have a major migration of a high crime culture. that is a group of people who engage in violent crime at very high rates. in this case it was african-americans who migrated to the cities of the north as

part of the great migration. now it has to be understood that most of this crime is intermural that is in this case black-on-black crime. it arises first in the south where of course african-americans have been enslaved and where they were obviously treated very badly because of the jim crow racist system that developed in our history. but african-americans in the south in part influenced by whites in the south developed a culture of violence in dealing with personal insult, personal disagreeme disagreements, arguments, and

fights. the use of violence was common in the south and common amongst whites and black as i say. this resort to violence to resolve interpersonal conflict especially migrated north with the african-american population. now, the great migration was not only great but it was really good. it was a great positive benefit to african-americans who moved away from the jim crow system and who made tremendous gains in terms of income and work opportunities, to shed the back-breaking labor of the sharecroppers in the south and who really inspired the great civil rights movement of the '60s. but there was also this high

rate, as i say, of interpersonal violence which was the, if you will, the negative side of the great migration and was transferred or transported north with the black population that moved north. this was a massive migration by the way. in the 1960's the estimate is 800,000 african-americans moved to the north and the west coast also. in the next decade, in the '70s, a million and a half. so this was quite a migration. and unfortunately, and there was a lot of reluctancy to deal with this issue, and understandably it is a sensitive topic. it does bring crime to the northern cities and it is a big

factor in the rise of violent crime. the other two big factors and they relate to this in some way were first demographics. the babyboom as it has come to be done cohert came to age, so to speak, in the late '60s and 1970s. those years are roughly 18-late 20s. for males especially this is when we expect peaks in violent and violent crime. as of course is well known we had this demographic bulge after the war when the soldiers came home. given the prus perry of the

country -- prosperity -- we had many people marrying and having children and these children reached their adult years in the late '60s and '70s. this was true for blacks and whites. that alone is not enough to explain the violent crime amongst this group but something happened where crime became what we might call a contagent where young people copy the behavior of other young peep. so amongst this baby boomer group we have the development of this crime contagen grows like wild fire and reaches a tipping point in which it explodes. and that brings us to the third

factor: when the crime boom reaches the tipping point and explodes the criminal justice system is caught black footed. the system can't cope. it is swamped. it is the swamping of the system that provides the third major element in the great crime tsuna tsunami. what happened was the police started arresting fewer people. we know the numbers. we could see when we look at what we call the clearance rates. the let's say arrest per complaint for each crime we are seeing the numbers actually go down in the late '60s while crime is rising. and then the convictions per

let's say case charged go down and the prison commitments per conviction actually begin to diminish and the time served per conviction goes down. so while crime is going up and we would expect the system to respond to that by arresting more people and imprisoning more people and giving them longer sentences the opposite is happening. the system, in other words, is caving. it is collapsing. it cannot handle the sudden and massive increase in crime. so the migration of african-americans who the poor ones i should add, the imp impoverished african-americans are engaging in high levels of crime in the northern cities, that baby boom and the collapse

of the criminal justice system all three contribute to what became the great crime tsunami. >> i want to focus on this question of norms and culture of violence that you mention. where does this come from? how should we understand this? >> well it is very important because we don't want to be understood has making a biological argument or racist argument saying some races are more prone to crime. no one believes that. i certainly don't agree with that. but what accounts to some groups engaging in more crimes than others? if it isn't genetics or biological explanation there must be another explanation and

that is where culture enters in. culture can be viewed as the values and norms of a distinctive groups and some would add the behaviors of that group and i would add over a fairly long period of time. it cannot be something short run. when a group begins to adhere to certain values and when it leads to certain types of behaviors over time we say that is the group's culture. i discovered something quite interesting over the course of my study. and i am probably not the first to discover it either. i found that a; poor people monopolize violent crime -- that is they do the overwhelming amount of violent crime -- however some poor groups do more

violent crime than other poor groups even though they are comprebly poorer. their adversity may by similar but their violent rates are not. this intrigued me. why should that be? why shouldn't we be able to measure and find a correlation between the depths of poverty or adversity and violent crime? but usually we can't. that led me to conclude there must be cultural differences between the groups. and apparently this is a worldwide phenomena. i came across an article by an english criminologist and talking about the asians and

african-americans and saying the asians are treated badly in europe and victimized in terms of discrimination and relatively impoverished and their situation in terms of adversity is roughly compreable to the afro-caribbean but added to afro-caribbean have a higher homicide rate. so it struck me this must be a universal condition because i found other examples in other places so that it seems some groups facing similar adversities simply do more violen violence than others and that is where i think culture must enter in. there must be something about the values of the group, the behaviors of the group over time, that lead them to engage in more violent crime than other

groups. i am only interested in violent crime but there could be other behaviors that are distinctive to the groups. i am sure there are. >> when you think about this in the context of the united states and you look in the south and see the great migration. where does this violence come from in the united states? can you track that? >> i came across a book by fischer called albian seed and albian was the old ancient name for what is now the united kingdom. this book traces the migration from england to the united states in largely the 18th century. and fischer points out some of the migrants from england, the

immigrants from england, especially from a distinctive part in england, the portion between scotland and england, were a very aggressive group of people. unlike others from other parts of england. it turned out the very aggre aggressive group from these border lands between england and scotland ended up coming roughly to the appalachian area roughly around pennsylvania and then migrating south to georgia whereas the other groups, the puritans, tended to migrate to new england. and he went on to describe the norms and values and behaviors of this group that came from the border lands and ended up in the

south. while low and behold it turns out they were a rather violent lot. and they were very sensitive to insult. they tended to take the law into their own hands to impose retrobution on those viewed as outlaws and disserving of punispunis punishment. they engaged in a lot of lynching which is self-imposed justice. this began and what was claimed to be the southern culture. the southern culture of violence. and this it seems grew in the south and developed in the south among white southerners.

so this is the origin of the southern culture of violence from my view. this involves interpersonal conflict where people have dispute either long running grudges or just sudden disputes arising out of perceived insults. and these disputes are often resolved violently. and this became a way of behaving in the south for it seems at least one, if not two, centuries or more. in fact, it was once written in the late 19th century, which i came across, which compared the murder rates in the south and the murder rates in new england and it has been true and persistently true that new england's murder rates are much lower than the murder rates in

the southern states. something accounts for this. so it is my argument that this is the origin of this southern culture of violence. it is sometimes referred to as an honor culture, sam. we found the little, i don't know, exaggerated or old fashion. what they mean is that people are easily offended. they are very senseive to -- sensitive to slights and ind indignity and willing to use violence to defend their quote honor. african-americans who were enslaved and the south and liberated and remained in the south -- 90% of the

african-american population lived in the south throughout the 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th century. the great migration begins roughly turn of the century but really accelerates in the 1920's and then in the 1940's with the war which provided job opportunities. it is my contention in the late 19th century african-americans essentially developed because of the influence of their white neighbors this honor culture. this culture of violence. and it is my claim because of the jim crow system, because of the racist practices if the country, because blacks were not permitted to advance to the middle class until late in the

middle 20th century this cultural violence is per pe continued in the lower african-american community. that is why when we have the migration of this group to the northern cities that is why we have this transportation of violence with that group. >> one of the other things you mentioned when talking about the culture of the south and i will read from a section you quote. in such regions where the state has little power to command compliance with the law and citizens have to create their own system's order this means the rule of doing this is the rule of retaliation. can you talk about the lack of state control in the south and why it contributed to this question? >> this is very important. in the south, especially in the rural areas, you had no policing. that is why i notice most of the

lynchings that took place took place in the rural areas never the cities because there were no police essentially. if you have an area where there is no police you have a much greater likelihood of people taking the law into their own hands. lynches. this is what happened in the south. the south remains largely rural. the big cities were never as big as they were in the northeast. the immigrants from europe who packed into those cities seldom went south. oh so the south remained isolated and largely rural and this really fed into this culture of taking the law into your own hands. engaging in vilance to --

violence to insults perceived or real and indignity. that is why this culture violence, i think, takes root more in the south. >> and recently the los angeles time put a book out called ghetto side where it was argued there is this culture of state indifference to violence in the african-american community. do you think we see something similar driving the culture in this time period? where the african-american community contributes this need to act where the state has abandoned you? >> i read that book and fine book. very interesting. i know she focuses, as most contemporary books do,

victimization without looking at the offenders and i think you need to look at both sides. i have heard it said and i suppose there is in one sense an underpolicing in black communities. but of course also there is the claim that there is an overpolicing in black communities. is this responsible for people quote taking the law into their own hands? i am not fullly persuaded. i think it is more -- fully -- likely simply that that is the traditional way of handling things then if you are insulted, if you are offended, you take care of business; you resort to violence. often times young men are members of gangs and so you have quarrels between gangs and this

is just an extension of that interpersonal violence. i don't think it is a matter of lack of policing to tell you the truth. i think it is just that that is the way things are done. that is all. they have always been done that way. so i wasn't in full agreement with her points. i wasn't in full agreement with her point. in fact i note where police made more arrest of, let's say, homicide perpetrators and the clearance rate used to be much higher -- the arrest rate, that is. black crime didn't go down. in fact it went up. so i am not persuaded that, you

know, more aggressive policing, the police with respect to serious crimes, would really change this culture of violence. so can i go off on another issue slightly different but related issue? what will change this culture? what does change this kind of culture? i think once people advance to the middle class this changes the culture. onceia move through the middle class, and this agrees to any group whether it is african-americans, white ethnic groups, doesn't matter. once people move to the middle class they develop disincentives to personal violence.

probably a reason. you would lose your family, your job, be a pariah in the community, and probably end up in prison as well. there are very good reasons not to engage in violence if you are in the middle class. now, by contrast, if you are a young, single male and you don't have a lot of lucrative opportunities ahead of you then you don't have a lot of disincentive to violence. that is why it is the young, low income male that is most likely to engage in this violence and most likely to exaccept and be a part of this culture of violence. -- accept -- i think the cure, if you will, for this culture of violence is the movement to the

middle class. and by the way, this is not just speculation on my part. when i studied the earlier period, the part that is not quite yet in print, the pre-1940's period i saw very high crime rates among mexicans who had come to the united states in the 1920s and southern italians who came between 1900-1910. now what happened with these groups? especially the italians. of course they melted in the great melting pot is actually a valid term. they melted in, they moved to the middle class, they moved up the socio economic ladder and shed their association with violent crime. this happened to the irish who had high rates of violent crime

in the 19th century. once they moved to the middle class their culture violence is abandoned because it would ill serve them, be -- not be constructive of their advance, and so they stopped engaging in violent crimes. i believe as we dismantle our racist practices in the country, and we have done so already and we continue to do so, and more african-americans become middle class, this discussion about african-americans and violent crime will not be made anymore. it will be a discussion of something out of history.

>> let's get into why crime rises. in the 1990's we saw a dip in the crime. what factors lead to this dramatic change? >> it was sudden and dramatic. as sudden and dramatic as the rise in crime. crime actually begins to fall in the early 1980's. and i think that happens because the baby boom generation which was the major players here in the crime rise began to age out. aging out as you know is a well known phenomena among criminologist. since young many, roughly 18 to

late 20s or perhaps early 30s at the most engage in most violent crime. as they age and move into middle 30s and beyond they begin to retire from violent crime. so the baby boomers aged out and my hypothesis is crime would have continued to fall but for a new phenomena that really through a monkey wrench in the whole crime development and that was the crack cocaine epidemic. crack cocaine becomes the new contagion. it takes place in roughly 1988 and continues to the early 1990's and when the crack

cocaine epidemic ends in 1993-1994 the crime rates continued to fall and they keep on falling. we have a new crime trough. a new low period for violent crime. >> you say that we have this mini bubble created. why doesn't this take us skyrocketting -- skyrocketing again? why didn't it disrupt crime? >> it did skyrocket the crime rates but why didn't it continue? this is fascinating. this is another contagion and phenomena where young people, who tend to copy other's

behavior. we know this. we know they are influenced by their peers. they begin with this contagion related to cocaine use. even though they may know cocaine use is so destructive, the addiction, the disease, the likelihood of being arrested, the shootings that take place among cocaine gangs, all of these negatives are perhaps intellectually known to the young people but it doesn't matter because everyone is doing it. it is cool. it is copied. and therefore it becomes a contagion and reaches a tipping point. this cocaine business is responsible for a major spike in

crime. why? because first of all the people who become addicted to the cocaine in its crack form co called where you have by a cooking process the creation of little pellets of cocaine, cocaine mixed with other things, these little pellets give off a vapor when heated and if the vapor is inhaled it gives the euphoria the cocaine user craves. this euphoria which is intense wears off in maybe ten minutes. and then there is a craving for another. now, if you are poor, and crack cocaine caught on in the poor neighborhoods because it was sold in small, inexpensive

amounts. it was sold for $2-$5 and $20 at the most. poor people can afford it. then they become hooked. so if you are poor and you need, you have this craving for more of the cocaine how are you going to get it? obviously the males started engaging in robberies, violent crime, thefts of course, larceny, the females being less violent did things like non-violent theft, prostitution, whatever they needed to do to raise the money for more cocaine. so the cocaine epidemic really stimulates robberies, assaults, muggings. the other thing it causes are

murders and aggravated assaults. why? because the distribution gang, the organized gangs that distribute the cotain begin to compete with one another for turf and territory. obviously they cannot go to law. they cannot complain this other gang is imposing on my territory. i want a court order. make him stop. that is not going to work. we saw this in the prohibition era where the alcohol gangs started killing each other in territorial competition. these murders and assault when the murder was ineffective and they didn't kill the guy but

seriously wounded him really spiked the murder rate. i should say, too, these were very young people and very well-armed. they had gangs which they had obtained illegally. this was a deadly combination and you can see why crime went through the roof and there was a major spike in crime in the late '80s and early '90s. that snuffs out the nascent trough. the nascent decline that had begun in the late '80s. what happened? by the early '90s, i guess because law enforcement had toughened up, because people were dying from the cocaine use, they were overdosing because it is a very potent drug. because they were getting other

diseases from the use of the drug. you could get mental diseases. you could get heart diseases. all sorts of pharmalogical based disordered could arise out of cocaine. because many were now being arrested the criminal justice system had toughened up since the '60s and many were arrested and sent off to prison. many were shot, wounded or killed because of the cocaine war. and suddenly cocaine became uncool. the realization suddenly struck these youth that this is path to destructi destruction. they always knew it but i believe we had a positive

contagion in reverse where youth began to copy the abandonment of cocaine. this isn't just speculation on my part. there was a study in manhattan where they urine tested the people and found out what their age were and determined through urine testing what drugs they were using if any. what they found was those who were older had been using heroin which was the drug of choice before cocaine came into the vogue. those who were younger had been using cocaine and past a certain year the cocaine use drops off dramatically. even by people who are arrested. so we know that the cocaine use was declining dramatically

1993-1994. and that is exactly when the crime spike begins to add. >> explaining the crime drop is probably one of criminolgogies past time. and two of the hypothesis are that legal abortion brought down the crime and the reduction of leaded gasoline brings down the crime rates. what do you think about these theories? >> i don't think they are correct. they are intriguing. there is quanatative -- quantitative research for both of these. the colleagues in the abortion

study made their studies very carefully. there have been also my mythological criticism i have seen especially of the abortion study. but i think there is a bigger problem. the argument is this: abortion, of course, wasn't legal until the mid-1970s and when it became legal in the mid-1970s a lot of unwanted babies were never born because women aborted. now there is a premise here and the premise is that had these unwanted babies been born and had they lived and had they reached the years of 18 to say the late 20s it is more likely they would have engaged in

criminal activity. since they were aborted and didn't live there were fewer people to engage in crime. that is the abortion theory in a nutshell. so if abortion becomes legal in the mid-70s say and you add roughly 18 years to that period that corresponds beautifully with the mid-1990s when crime falls. the only trouble with that is the same cohort of people with lots of abortion reducing this population also lived through the period of the cocaine crime ri ri rise. in fact the same younger cohort was responsible for the crime rise.

i don't understand how it could be that the same generation and cohort, shown of the people who are unwanted and aborted, can engage in lots of crime and be responsible are the crime rise and the crime decline. and the same goes to the gasoline story. this includes the clean air act that was passed in the 1970s which forced the removal of lead from gasoline which was a great health benefit to everybody. it turns out lead in the bloodstream is associated with aggressive behavior and maybe even with crime. the argument similar to the

abortion argument is if you have people with less lead in their blood stream they will engage in less crime. so add 18 years to the clean air act and you have a drop in crime. but the same people blessed with less lead were putting cocaine in their blood. so i think the lead and abortion theories are probably interesting but flawed. >> looking forward to today. we see the headlines from chicago, milwaukee and washington, d.c. what do you think about the arguments saying this crime trough is at an end? >> it may be.

we don't know. criminologist are cautious because we know that one needs to see a trend. we cannot go by one year spikes because they might be one year phenome phenomena. when i look at the latest homicide figures for the ten biggest cities in the country i look back to 2010 and figured let's at least look at the last five years when i looked at the last five years i didn't find that crime was higher. it was lower. or at least homicide was so we need a trend before we are going to conclude that the trough

trough is over. alternatively, i would want to see some of the signals. the red flags, the kind of phenomena we saw at least in the early period who crime rose.

after reading several books on the -- i wonder if it's really massive and only one half of 1% of these high american population, in any event i noticed that in all of these books about mass incarceration there's no discussion of crime. this incarceration just happened, we engaged in this massive lockable people but there is no crime involved. at the basis of some of these books they're only telling half the story. yes, there was a huge increase in our