Seventy-five years ago, when Gorham had 3,000 residents, there was one part-time constable. Today, with five times as many people, it has 22 full-time police.
To a large extent, Big Brother laws that make crimes out of seat belts, smoking, booze, the enjoyment of hemp and recreation between consenting adults are responsible for this exponential growth in police.
What would have been a Halloween prank of 50 years ago is now vandalism. An old-fashioned shivaree might today be kidnapping. Rogue priests are now sued rather than quietly transferred to another parish. Marijuana, accepted for millenniums and proven to be beneficial for some medical purposes, has become a major preoccupation for police. When a woman was raped 50 years ago, she kept the fear and pain to herself. Now she talks to the press.
The media must share much of the blame. Violence is second only to sex as a media profit producer. When the shootout at the OK Corral sent the Clanton boys to Boot Hill, only the citizens of Tombstone knew about it. Today, Wyatt Earp would be interviewed on Letterman within 72 hours and the Clanton corpses would be shown on “Hard Copy” for millions to treasure.
Then there is government itself. Abetted by bureaucrats hankering for bigger bureaus, politicians play on our fear of crime. Before Mr. Nixon’s War on Drugs, federal officials used to report only 60,000 heroin addicts; but a new method of government reporting has raised that estimate to over a half-million.
Crime is nothing new in America. Crime (and violence) is a visible thread woven throughout the tapestry of American history. Other than a high level of street crime in large cities – plus a scandalous prison population associated with the insane War on Drugs – we may not be sinking as deeply into a new morass of crime and violence as we are encouraged to believe. The Liberty Boys of Boston of 1776 were hoodlums bent on destruction. The James Boys were the behavioral ancestors of Bonnie and Clyde. Slavery involved the most vicious kind violence, yet the U.S. was the last civilized government to abolish the practice – at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.
Many of the benefits we enjoy today originated with predatory entrepreneurs who used violence as a business practice. Carnegie library users should recall the Homestead riots at his steel mills when strikers (and spectator women) were killed and wounded when the president of the United States sent soldiers to reinforce the Carnegie goons.
Ask the Mexicans who have made a national monument of Chapultapec where Gen. Scott and his artillery slaughtered their child cadets in order to steal Mexican territory when President Polk wanted to extend American territory to the Pacific.
The ghastly and sweeping violence Americans visited on native Indians needs no reminder.
In the 1850s, Los Angeles suffered 44 murders in a population of 8,000 (a rate more than 40 times as high as the rate in the l990s). The draft riots in New York during the Civil War, when the Irish objected to fighting on behalf of slaves, killed four times as many New Yorkers (in relative terms) as were killed in the comparatively recent Watts riots of Los Angeles. In the l920s, Chicago had a rate of murder 36 times as high as London, and a robbery rate 66 times as high.
Crime seems to be more or less constant. Only the definition and treatment have changed.
Rodney Quinn, who lives in Gorham, is a former Maine secretary of state. He can be reached at rquinn@maine.rr.com.
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