Chapter 4

Crime as a national political issue first surfaced in the 1964 Presidential election campaign. Four years later, in the 1968 elections, “law and order” had become the most emotionally charged, and perhaps the most crucial, of all domestic issues.

To understand the emergence of crime as a political issue, it was necessary to turn first to statistics which recorded a horrifying rise in crime rates during the 1960s. Reliable data were lacking, but the Uniform Crime Reports published annually by the Federal Bureau of Investigation indicated the pattern: more than 3.8 million serious crimes were reported during 1967, a 16 percent rise over 1966 and an 89 percent rise over 1960. Violent crime was up 73 percent over 1960, crime against property up 91 percent.

Nor was that the whole story. Much of the increase in crime was found in the cities, where more and more of the U.S. population was concentrated. Much of it was street crime—the most visible and usually the most violent of the many varieties of crime in the United States. A disproportionate share was committed by young people, and by 1968 almost one-half of all Americans were 25 years of age or younger. The nation's failure to resolve its problems of race, poverty and urbanization contributed to the complexities of the picture. So did urban riots, student rebellions and widespread illegal use of narcotics. Finally, there was assassination: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy—each the victim of an assassin's bullets.

Although the soaring crime rates bred anxiety, fear and the urge to take remedial action, there was no general agreement on causes and cures. In part this was attributable to ignorance: there had been no major federal study of crime as a national problem since one made by the Wickersham Commission in 1931, and until the 1960s only a handful of scholars and scientists really examined the problem in detail. Even the existing statistics on crime committed were hopelessly inadequate. Thus, the general response to crime tended to be more emotional than reasoned.