Homeland insecurity
A War Against the Cities
By BOB HERBERT
Amid all the muscle-flexing in Boston this week ("my homeland security platform is bigger than yours"), it was impossible to hear more than the merest hint or offhand whisper about the demoralizing decline in the fortunes of America's cities over the past few years.
Paralyzed by a war in Iraq that we don't know how to end or win, we're in danger of forgetting completely about the struggling cities here at home.
Bill Clinton mentioned the 300,000 poor children being cut out of after-school programs and the increases in gang violence across the country. And he gave cheering delegates a devastating riff on the impending lapse of the ban on assault weapons and White House plans to scrap federal funds for tens of thousands of police officers:
"Our policy," he said, "was to put more police on the street and to take assault weapons off the street - and it gave you eight years of declining crime and eight years of declining violence. Their policy is the reverse. They're taking police off the streets while they put assault weapons back on the street."
But those brief comments were the exception. A clearer sense of the rot that's starting to reestablish itself in America's cities was offered in an article out of Cleveland by The Times's Fox Butterfield on Tuesday. "Many cities with budget shortfalls," he wrote, "are cutting their police forces and closing innovative law enforcement units that helped reduce crime in the 1990's, police chiefs and city officials say."
