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October 9

1960s crime in New York

There will be presidential elections in Argentina in a pair of weeks, and tonight the candidates took part in the presidential debates. At one point, Javier Milei was talking about crime in Argentina (which is quite high) and said this (translation by me)

"[...] this disaster is because of embracing the ideas of doctor Zaffaroni, who in the last 20 years caused a real disaster in this country, because basically he changes the roles of victim and victimizer, so that thiefs are treated like victims when they are actually the ones who ought to be jailed. These ideas were proposed by Zaffaroni and they were not new, they had been promoted in the 1960s in New York, and 20 years later it was also a disaster [...]"

(For the full speech, in Spanish, see here, Milei's turn starts at 15:30)

I'm from Argentina and I'm already familiar with Eugenio Zaffaroni and his aforementioned ideas, so I knew what he was talking about. The part that confused me a bit is the reference to New York, as he gave no names that I can google, and my knowledge of US history is limited to the things of worldwide impact. Do you get the reference? Was there a crime spree, a controversial policy towards crime or something like that back then, something with an article that I can check and compare with Zaffaroni? Cambalachero (talk) 13:19, 9 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Don't know what the name for that type of thinking is, but you can listen to the "Officer Krupke" song from the musical "West Side Story". AnonMoos (talk) 18:59, 9 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

New York had a crime problem in the 70s and 80s. This handy website breaks it down by crime type and year and there are rates per 100,000 people in the second section that spell it out pretty clearly. I don't know what that has to do with Zaffaroni, though. Matt Deres (talk) 13:57, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Cambalachero, we have an article on Raúl Zaffaroni who supports the idea that crime is a product of social deprivation. New York's homocide rate doubled between 1964 and 1974 but fell equally dramatically in the 1990s after Rudy Giuliani introduced a "zero tolerance" approach to law enforcement based on the broken windows theory - the antithesis of Zaffaroni's teachings (although some critics have pointed out that urban poverty also declined in that period). Alansplodge (talk) 19:04, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Chicago's homicide rate also doubled from the same era, but worse, from 1965 to 1970. But probably for the same reasons as New York: due to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King which went viral. I'm guessing this was the same for Memphis? 170.76.231.162 (talk) 14:45, 12 October 2023 (UTC).[reply]

The scholarly take is that the crime back then was due to lead poisoning and lack of abortion on demand. Abductive (reasoning) 18:11, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]