Why do Americans always think crime is going up?
What bothers me most about this inflammatory language is that it provides ideological cover for only the shittiest of knee-jerk solutions. In the Progressive era, Beauregard observes, commentators believed problems could at least be fixed. Terms like “crisis,” “doom loop,” and “urban death” carry a far more intractable connotation or at least... See more
John D. Zhang • Tales of the City
In March 2017, just as the national homicide rate started to rise, the Brazilian Forum of Public Security, an NGO that brings together academics, policymakers and police officers, found alarming evidence that the fear of falling victim to crime explained a surprisingly high degree of support for authoritarian right-wing politics.
Richard Lapper • Beef, Bible and bullets: Brazil in the age of Bolsonaro
All of these trends had been decades in the making, but as esteemed urban planner Robert Beauregard notes, it was the summer of unrest that marked a paradigm shift in the minds of the American public. In Voices of Decline , his seminal work, Beauregard traces American perceptions about urban progress and regress in the twentieth century through a... See more