More crime or more reporters?

[xoxoxoBruce]

I cut this article from the Philly Daily News Nov. 5th, 1990.

As an expert on murder, mayhem and crime in 19th-century Philadelphia, historian/author Roger Lane looks at today's violent society a little differently from the rest of us.

The average person is shocked to read about the death of an infant at the hands of his mother and thinks: What's this world coming to? Lane reads the same story and gives thanks we are not seeing hundreds of infanticides every year, as was the case in the late 1800s.

We see quiet Gloucester City on the Jersey side of the Walt Whitman Bridge; Lane sees "Sin City on the Delaware."
We see fun loving Mummers parading up Broad Street, Lane sees wild street gangs of 100 years ago, now tamed and harmless.
We see professional firefighters doing their jobs efficiently, Lane sees the volunteer companies of the 1850s waiting in ambush to shoot at rival firemen racing to a false alarm.
And when we hear of a dozen prostitutes working Frankford Avenue, Roger Lane recalls the Philadelphia of the 1890s when 10,000 prostitutes walked the streets or found employment in the city's 1,000 brothels.

Lane, 56, a professor of American history at Haverford College, has made crime his specialty and has developed a central thesis in two books examining violent crime in Philadelphia.
He argues that violence in all American cities was high in the decades before the Civil War but dropped dramatically as the Industrial Revolution forced social changes that created an orderly, predictable, regimented work force.
As factories and manufacturing have declined after World War II, violence has risen again. This is Lane's "U curve" for violence, which he claims holds true even in Europe.

His minute examination of the newspapers, court and police records of mid- and late-19th-century Philadelphia paints a fascinating picture of crime that was at times similar but often quite different from our day.
"In the 1840s, 1850s, consumption of alcohol was at an all-time high. Drinking correlates highly with violent behavior," Lane says. "And the most murderous group was my own people, the Irish. They were peasants with no skills, and the factories were not yet here to absorb them.
"... Street fights were so common it was almost a form of recreation. Bricks were known as 'Irish confetti,'" Lane says.

Among the many gangs were the Schuylkill Rangers, who were practically river pirates.
But the volunteer fire companies, organized along ethnic lines, were also, street fighting gangs. They fought at fires, ambushed rival companies and often looted fire scenes.
The main job of the city police department, founded in 1854, was to fight the gangs.

In fact, Lane says, the battles often looked exactly like gang fights, only one gang wore uniforms. About 1870, the city forced the volunteer fire companies to disband and established a professional department, mostly to stop the violence.
Nineteenth century murders were nearly always the result of street fights or personal grudges. Murders committed during robberies or muggings were rare, Lane says.

But infanticide was one category of murder that rose catastrophically as street violence diminished in the second half of the century.
During one four-year period in the late 186Os, 483 dead infants were found on the city's streets, lots and cesspools. And Lane says this number was only the tip of the iceberg because most murdered infants were explained away as natural deaths.

Few babies were delivered in hospitals, so if a mother smothered her newborn and reported it as a stillborn, no one could contradict her story.
The carnage resulted from the fact that unmarried factory girls and streetwalkers who became pregnant couldn't afford illegal abortions costing $50 to $100. If the woman had no family support and no money, there was no. way to support a child. There was no welfare system.

In the few cases where a mother was charged with infanticide, Philadelphia juries were usually sympathetic.
Lane cites the 1881 case a Lizzie Aarons, who threw her newborn from an attic window. The jury acquitted her without leaving the box to deliberate, and spectators took up a collection for her.
Homeless, penniless, shoeless Lizzie told a heart-wrenching story of being turned away by numerous charities and hospitals the day she gave birth. One hospital wanted a marriage certificate and $5. A poor widow found Lizzie wandering in the snow and allowed her to give birth in her attic.

Lane says many women turned to illegal "baby farms" where, for $1 or $2, a woman could drop off the newborn child. "Ninety percent of [these] babies died," Lane says. "They didn't have baby formula at that time. Wet nurses were expensive. The babies got raw cow milk or sugar water and very few survived."

Prostitution was widespread, usually protected by police payoff. Lane says some theaters had "A third row," an area where the ladies of the night sat and negotiated business.

As Philadelphia became more orderly and Sunday blue laws were enforced, city dwellers went across the river to Gloucester City for liquor, gambling, Sunday baseball, horse racing and prizefighting, which was illegal in most places.
"Sin City on the Delaware," is the way the Inquirer described Gloucester of the 1880s.

The historian sees the Mummers Parade as a clever ploy to tame a bunch of wild guys who were breaking windows, shooting guns and generally raising hell on New Year's.

Lane's first book focusing on the city was "Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident and Murder in 19th-Century Philadelphia."
In 1986, he published "Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860 to 1900."
In this book, Lane says the normal "U curve" did not occur in black crime. Black crime rates continued to rise as white crime declined.
Lane argues that blacks were systematically excluded from the factory and office jobs and the Industrial Revolution and not exposed to the same forces that tamed the Irish and other whites.

One last fact about 19th-century crime: "The police weren't very good," Lane says. "They didn't have fingerprinting or other scientific techniques. If they didn't find the shooter standing over the body, the murder wasn't solved."

Sounds like there's less crime possibly because there are more reporters among other things. I wonder if other countries where increased industrialization is going on (China), are experiencing the same effect?
Would factories tame Africa?....or the Middle East?
Sort of enforces the notion that most trouble is caused by people with nothing to do and nothing to lose.