The police want all the power, prestige and respect that come with being a police officer, but none of the responsibility. That respon
I’ve known for quite a while that Richard Nixon’s so-called “Southern strategy” — to lure white Democrats to the GOP largely around issues of race — had a strong Northern component targeting white working class “ethnics.” But I only realized writing my book that I was raised in the capital of the GOP’s Northern strategy.
You can argue with my geography. Macomb County, Michigan, right outside Detroit, is considered the ancestral home of the Reagan Democrats, thanks to Stan Greenberg’s pioneering polling on how voters there transitioned from backing John F. Kennedy in 1960 to Ronald Reagan in 1980, mainly around crime and race.
But while Macomb County gave us Eminem and Alice Cooper, my ancestral home, southwestern Long Island, gave us Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, the loudest, lingering voices of the white backlash that emerged in my childhood (The PBA’s Patrick Lynch, also Irish Catholic, grew up nearby in Bayside, Queens). That backlash had a lot to do with fearing crime and chaos, and reflexively defending cops, two issues that again polarized Americans around race in 2014 – even in liberal New York, and even in a time when the city, overall, is incomparably calmer and safer than it was decades ago.
I saw that polarization personally this year, on Facebook, where I’m in touch with family and childhood friends. Some of them are Long Island Republicans I love very much. We have an unspoken pact: we stick to commenting on one another’s kids and pets and leave politics alone. But recent headlines about police killings eroded that agreement, with a few people cautiously, respectfully, disagreeing with my posts. And even apolitical people — even a few Democrats — posted news stories defending police and attacking protesters, whether in Ferguson, Mo., or here in New York.
It reminded me of growing up, and the peculiar politics of southwestern Long Island in the 60s and 70s. It was more like Outer Queens: mainly working class migrants from Brooklyn and the Bronx who’d fled the city in the early 60s. It was about having a yard and a two-car garage and a bedroom for every kid; it was also about what’s euphemistically called white flight.
It wasn’t just race: the flight was driven by crime and arson and riots, and a sense that the world was unraveling. I tried to write about some of this sympathetically in my book: the transformation of New York in the 1960s and 70s was scary. Crime and arson rates spiked: the murder rate jumped 150 percent between 1965 and 1973; property crime jumped by a third. Some of my uncles and cousins were cops and firemen, including my mother’s two brothers. She worried about them every day, and so did I.
But for a whole lot of people, it was all about race. Conservatives made sure of that, with William F. Buckley running for mayor in 1965 mocking the liberal idea that social factors drove the rising crime rate – as if poverty and racism could “make Negro crime any less criminal.”
Significantly, that comment came in a debate over whether cops needed civilian review. Almost every major urban riot of the 1960s – Harlem and Philadelphia in 1964, Watts in 1965, Newark and Detroit in 1967 – was touched off by police misconduct. When Mayor John Lindsay appointed a police review board, Pat Lynch’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association sponsored a ballot initiative to repeal it. To the shock of liberal Manhattan, a coalition of outer-borough Jews and “white ethnics” voted with the cops.