As usual, I opened up my Northwestern e-mail and saw a message from an oddly discomforting sender. It wasn’t a name, familiarly broken up into first and last. Instead, it was the cold, automated uniformity of “emergencyinfo” – someone had gotten mugged, again. Except this time, the description of the incident was longer and all the more disturbing.
First, the location: Simpson and Orrington. Two blocks from where I live and right in the center of a neighborhood largely inhabited by students. And then the gun. Never fired but all the more chilling because of it.
But how should we think of crimes like this? The quick hit-and-run muggings serve little purpose beyond getting whatever cash is in the victims’ wallet – for students, not all that much – and using the credit and debit cards at 7/11 until the bank realizes that the student has never spent 60 dollars there before.
The costs of these crimes are larger than is immediately apparent. Not only the obvious costs of resources we expend to fight crime – police, street lamps, blue telephones, 9/11 responders, locks, phones and the rest – but the harder to observe costs on everyone. These range from the anxiety that afflicts the victims of crime when they walk home at night to how people rearrange their schedules and even living arrangements for fear of being victimized.
These may not seem like large inconveniences, but anyone who has been the victim of a mugging knows exactly what I’m talking about. The constant looking over your shoulder, the flinching at sudden noises, the figuring out of new routes home so you’re never in the dark too long, the icy, neutral gaze you cast at people walking down the street you don’t know.
All of these behaviors are understandable in light of a violent attack, even if it leaves little to no physical damage. When I was assaulted and mugged this past summer, the bruise was gone in two days, but my discomfort walking around my neighborhood at night didn’t leave until I did.
It makes sense to react this way. Bethany Ojalehto’s reaction in the Daily article about the mugging, in which she said that Evanston was hardly dangerous compared to Kenyan refugee camps where she had lived, is, in a way, totally rational. Her argument, however, misses both the more subtle effects of crime and makes it seem as if crime is not really a serious problem.
It is very easy – and perhaps psychologically necessary – to adopt a steely, resilient attitude in response to these seemingly random crimes that have little to no hope of being effectively prosecuted (my assailants, two young men, were never in much danger of being brought to trial). By all means, leave the panic to those actually victimized.
However, that does not mean crime is a necessary outcome of our social conditions or anything of the sort. Despite our continuing economic malaise, violent crime continues to fall. Entire swathes of the country that were thought to have been irretrievably crime ridden 20 years ago are now vibrant and safe. As the criminal population shrinks, police can focus their resources on fewer people, leading to a virtuous cycle of crime reduction. And if the people who want to buy 30 dollars worth of taquitos with your tattered bills know that there could be a police officer on that block – or just that others might see them assault you – they might think better of it.
Crime isn’t a punishment for society’s sins or the inevitable result of living with other people. It’s a problem that can be made better or worse by collective action. Just don’t leave the response up to me, flinching every time I hear footsteps behind me at night.
Matt Zeitlin is a Weinberg senior.
He can be reached at [email protected]
