The likelihood of getting caught matters more than the severity of the punishment for deterring crime, international comparisons reportedly suggest. Enforcement in the U.S. is spotty, but at least they finally convicted the two killers of rap legend Jam Master Jay from Run-DMC last month, over 20 years after the murder.
I recall people saying when he died that Jam Master Jay wasn’t the sort of guy to get involved in the drug trade, but it appears he supplemented his waning rap income by facilitating cocaine deals, and at least one of his acquaintances was angry about being cut out of a lucrative deal.
I also recall people, mostly liberals, saying back then that it would be wrong to think hip-hop music showed a dangerously widespread acceptance, or even encouragement, of crime, since the music merely reflects the gritty details of life outside the recording studio. That’s often true—and Eric Clapton doesn’t want to shoot the sheriff, and not every punk rocker wants to be a radioactive cannibal or what have you.
But it’s increasingly obvious there’s a pretty close connection between at least some rappers and the criminal life about which they rap, given phenomena such as “drill” rap, songs often so detailed about the gangs they laud and the crimes they’ve pulled off that they describe specific shootouts, motives, who got killed on which corner, who was riding in the getaway car, what the rapper’s relatives have to say about it, and sundry other bits of info that must be a gold mine for investigators who listen carefully.
If you don’t believe a Flock of Seagulls fan like me, listen to these summaries from the hip-hop community itself about the drill subgenre and its growing body count (here’s an eight-minute overview and here’s a twenty-minute one). The raps aren’t always post-facto, either. Apparently, some drill figures have rapped about planning to shoot each other and then done so—and then sung about it again, presumably with little fear of legal consequences.
That lack of fear is pretty reasonable. Even a pushy white woman I knew couldn't get Bronx police to respond to a murder in her area—or even update associates of the victim on the progress of the investigation, which was eventually dropped simply because a cop on the case had retired without anyone new being given responsibility for his case files. Bureaucracy of that sort is typical of the “thin blue line” that my tough-talking, right-wing acquaintances at The New York Post and Manhattan Institute think is essential to civilization.
And you wonder why the literal gangstas grow bold and witnesses turn silent (and why most conservatives, unlike some of the police-trusting urban ones, are so keen to protect the right to have guns for their own defense).
An NYU study apparently found murderous psychopaths most likely to enjoy old-school rap and the least-psychopathic people likely to enjoy melodic bands such as the Knack (who I've seen live, needless to say, and may the lead singer RIP). Then again, such studies have also found logical systematizers tend to like cold and grandiose music, so my musical tastes, like my philosophy and personality, suggest a combo of empathy and complex systematizing. I can live with that.
None of these musings are meant to suggest that the real problem is strongly yoked to ethnicity, by the way. If black people were a monolith in their views or behavior, we wouldn't have Candace Owens or Dr. Ben Carson. (Carson sounds saner speaking at CPAC in this clip than Jack Posobiec did ranting against democracy at the same event.) People of all sorts respond to incentives, and when one of those incentives is the realization that rules can be violated at will, bad behavior is reinforced and multiplies.
Ex-convict Sheldon Johnson, for instance, was arrested last week—one month after talking on Joe Rogan’s podcast about how he'd turned his life around after years in prison and become a Queens justice reform activist and podcaster working with at-risk youth. This new arrest was for having a human head (belonging to an old rival) in a refrigerator, Johnson having apparently been caught on camera wearing multiple disguises while disposing of pieces of the dismembered corpse.
Some will eagerly leap to the conclusion that the main lesson here is that Rogan is a bad judge of character, but liberals and leftists aplenty had praised Johnson as well, suckers for a good redemption story and frankly less fond of punishment than the right-wingers. In such a culture, methodical sociopaths such as Johnson learn just what to say to please the authorities—which notes to hit, as it were.
At loftier cultural heights, the contemporary left particularly loves covering up crimes committed by Bidens and making it sound as if Republicans dunnit, as Jim Jordan ably explains here. President Biden in his State of the Union address last week managed to make it sound as if the soaring blue-city crime seen a few years ago was merely a side effect of the pandemic or of a Republican presidency. He has plans to make things better, he says. Translation: more taxes, more spending, more war, and more J6 fear-mongering—though a growing number of Americans know they have more to fear from big government and common criminals, which is to say, from the patterns encouraged by decades of (modern, left-) liberalism.
If punishment, whether harsh or mild, is unlikely or seemingly arbitrary, you end up with unruly members of the populace—like a dog named Major that repeatedly bites people, followed by a dog named Commander who repeatedly bites people, both owned by none other than President Biden. Pretend that’s normal, Biden fans. I’m not saying he’s too soft on them. Perhaps he kicks them. He doesn’t seem to be teaching them steady self-discipline, in any case.
Faced with false promises of an ever-improving, big-government future like those in Biden’s speech, you can understand people being more inspired by the raspy old-school liberal sound of RFK’s response video or even by Trump’s dark vision as efficiently summarized by a horrified leftist here. They aren’t perfect, and they certainly aren’t libertarian, but they sound more rooted in a real-world awareness of our problems than does Biden’s newly faux-populist, faux-patriotic “Freedom Agenda.”
Protect the innocent and punish violence. A culture need do little more than those two things to thrive and send the right signals, but those things appear to be too much to ask of either our taste-makers or government.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on Twitter at @ToddSeavey