By any metric, one of the best things you can do for your city is to support its arts, particularly arts programming for young people.
Baltimore, Maryland is seeing its lowest homicide rates in 50 years. It is no accident that their mayor, Brandon Scott, instituted solid youth programming and education, over $500 million dollars worth.
Louisville, on the other hand, continues to cut youth and arts programming, pushing millions into policing, and the crime rates continue to climb.
Let’s predict the outcome of more cuts for programming and a boost for Louisville police, whose budget is almost $250 million dollars.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that engaging the minds of people prevents crime far more effectively than engaging them with force.
It is a mistake that is an American problem, and not just a Louisville one, but Mayor Craig Greenberg certainly seems to carry deep affection for men in uniform, despite the data that shows how ineffective this approach is.
You probably can guess that policing is getting a boost in the next budget. And the arts? It’s getting the axe. The tiny bit of budget the arts had is mostly disappearing.
How long before Greenberg brags that Louisville has a thriving arts scene to sell our city in his futile attempts to attract new interest in a town dying under his leadership?
The arts make cities better. Period.
Follow the dots.
Communities that struggle with crime most often also struggle with poverty, food deserts, and resource deserts. Those communities that experience lower street crime rates (white collar crime is a different tale) are those that can afford to engage in the arts.
Police do not move crime rates. Access and resources do.
Why do we continue to double down on force? There is only one reason. Only one.
There is no way to prejudice those in the wealthier communities to support your campaign without showing the contrasts between “us vs. them.”
If Greenberg can’t get his wealthy donors, and those whose lives are disconnected from the root causes in these areas, to hate a common bogeyman, how will he maintain the status quo?
You know the same status quo that most Americans claim they despise.
My god, how will he beg for reelection?
Here’s the thing: it is not possible to police your way out of high crime. What you can do is to address the reasons that crime rates increase.
It’s a broken record, and the chorus goes like this, “We have plenty of money, but we’re spending it in the wrong places.”
Take care of the people, and the people will do the same. Anyone who has traveled abroad can see, over and over, instances of people who have healthcare, their basic needs met, including access to fresh food, education, and the creative arts — the crime rates in those countries fall. They FALL. Yes, there are places in the world where you can walk around at night without fear for your safety. A wild thought.
The reason gangs proliferate in areas of poverty is that those gangs often provide what the city does not — food, clothes, and other necessities to their communities.
It feels so pedantic to continue to say what most nations in the world have figured out.
America continues to fail in this regard, and it is showing across our nation in our lack of innovation, poor healthcare, poor health metrics, terribly outdated public transportation, and crumbling infrastructure. As citizens, we are being used.
We’ve believed the lies like ‘good guys with guns,” despite the statistics that prove otherwise.
We’ve policed ourselves into a fascist state, despite the statistics about policing vs. programming for crime reduction.
We’ve blamed others instead of confronting the obvious — we are too sick, too dumb, and too trusting to see that we have failed ourselves and each other.
We should be demanding an audit of our local and federal governments, checking every one of our pennies, and where they are being spent.
We should be electing people who lay out real plans for solutions, not concepts of a plan, or tossing our dollars towards the same tired beat — more cops and less resources.
We have been made to believe that poor people are our enemies, as the sales of luxury cars, executive salaries, and new billionaires increase.
The American Dream that one day you could get your Porsche, or make a million dollars, is a lie unless you have family to give you the starter pack, like Greenberg, like Donald Trump.
Most of us don’t have that starter kit to wealth and work day by day, trying to do the best we can.
One power we do have is the vote, and looking at the city’s budget for youth programming vs. policing, Greenberg should scrap a bid for reelection unless he runs with an R behind his name. Maybe they will believe him.
Would you?
