The late Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York was a radical liberal with an independent streak.
Before being elected senator in 1976 (he also served as UN ambassador), Moynihan worked as a special assistant to Labor Secretaries Arthur J. Goldberg and W. Willard Wirtz in 1961-62, where he wrote a revolutionary report on federal architecture.
He will be remembered for his work as Assistant Secretary of Labor. Moynihan noticed that despite more black people being employed, the welfare rolls were exploding. The reason disturbed him: single parents, mostly mothers, heading up households with children.
Moynihan published his research in 1965 in what is considered the most influential government report on poverty: "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action," today known as "The Moynihan Report." At the time, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children welfare benefit required that no man be present in the house. Benefit eligibility was changed in the 1990s, but by then, the enormous damage to black families had been done.
Moynihan noted the complacency and acceptance of the status quo when it came to the crisis of the black family. In a 1993 essay, he referred to the attitude as "defining deviancy down."
He described the "social process of normalizing deviant behavior, the resulting breakdown of social values, and the rise of crime and other social problems," explains the American Enterprise Insititute.
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Indeed, the reaction to President Donald Trump's takeover of the Washington, D.C., police force by Democrats and the media is "defining deviancy down" in action.
“I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor and worse,” Trump said. He is rejecting the idea that a slight improvement in terrible crime statistics is "normal" in any sense of the term.
Residents of Washington aren't celebrating fewer murders per year. They don't feel any safer. Besides, the city just settled a lawsuit by a police sergeant who claimed the city was fudging violent crime statistics to make it appear there was improvement.
Heather Mac Donald turned her practiced eye on Trump's D.C. takeover. "Virtually every news article followed its report of the National Guard deployment by noting that crime has decreased in D.C. over the last two years, as if that fact rebutted the grounds for the federal action," Mac Donald wrote.
Here is what such locally controlled crime looks like: on July 5, three-year-old Honesty Cheadle was sitting in a car with family members after attending a Fourth of July cookout. A drive-by shooting broke out, striking the toddler with a bullet to the upper body. She died two days later.
On May 3, 2024, three-year-old Ty’ah Settles was shot at under identical circumstances —a bullet from a drive-by shooting while Ty’ah was in a car. She died that night.
Also on May 3, 2024, a chaotic shootout among students outside Dunbar High School left a 17-year-old student inside the school with a bullet wound to the head; the victim’s skull was visible through the wound, according to charging documents.
We have become inured to feeling unsafe in our own country. "It's not as bad as it was in the past" is defining deviancy down. It allows us to remain paralyzed by the enormity of the political problem of crime.
The formula for dramatically reducing crime is not a secret: more police, better-trained police, and putting perpetrators in jail. But this is politically impossible in most cities until violent crime becomes an unbearable fact of life. By then, half measures won't work.
Meanwhile, the left continues to argue that it's the underlying causes of violent crime are the biggest problem: poverty, racism, poor housing, lack of job skills training, etc. No doubt, improving all of those metrics would affect crime at the margins.
But first and foremost, we must refuse to accept the status quo as "normal."
Media coverage of Trump’s National Guard call-out has all but ignored these incidents; they have become an unremarkable part of America’s urban fabric that now includes flash mobs, vicious and gratuitous pedestrian assaults, and mass looting. Though violent crime in Washington did decline last year from its 2023 high, the city still experienced nearly ten violent crimes a day, nearly six robberies, nearly three assaults with a dangerous weapon, and more than 14 car thefts a day, in a population of just over 700,000. In the first ten months of 2023, nearly three juveniles a day were shot. The city’s homicide rate in 2024 was 27.3 deaths per 100,000 residents.
By comparison, London’s homicide rate in 2023 was 1.3 per 100,000 residents; Switzerland’s homicide rate in 2021 was 0.48 per 100,000 residents. Anywhere else in the industrialized world, the D.C. crime situation would constitute a national emergency. It should in the United States, too.
Elected leaders of America's big cities are failing the people they're supposed to protect. Their first responsibility should be law and order. That's not the case today.
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