The cry of “No Justice, No Peace!” was, by best estimates, not heard on American streets until the 1980s. Its first mention in The New York Times was in 1987 following the acquittal of a police officer for the shooting of a Black man. The phrase appeared often in the Times in the 1990s, then less frequently for a while, and then roared back since the mid-2010s.[1]
What kind of statement is “No Justice, No Peace”? (And its complement, “Know Justice, Know Peace.”) It cannot be an historical claim that absent justice, peace is absent, too. Tell that to the vanquished (and often decimated) subject peoples of empires across human history. Arguably, the longest stretches of domestic peace have followed not justice triumphant but the brutal consolidations of empires.
In fact, history suggests that the reverse is more commonly true, that peace brings some justice (and mercy) by fostering economic, political, and physical security. Slavery, unjust and merciless, was an accepted commonplace across the globe for millennia. Challenges to it emerged as the middle class grew in the era of Pax Britannica. Similar humanitarian movements such as temperance and child protection emerged, too (see, for example, here). People–masses and elites–who are occupied with their own survival rarely step up for others; that usually follows gains in security.
We see this dynamic playing out on a smaller scale today as Americans react to an apparent upsurge in crime and disorder somehow connected to the pandemic.
About-Faces
Since 2020, liberal constituencies and politicians have stepped away from pursuing greater justice as defined by the Black Lives Matter and prison reform movements. They have instead sought more law and order, responding to a growing sense of insecurity in the last year or so. Joe Biden yelling “Fund the police!” during the 2022 State of the Union was just one sign. (In his case, this was not a change; he had rejected calls to “defund” in the 2020 campaign).
New York City voters recently elected Eric Adams as mayor, a Black man who was once a police officer and who ran on a safety-first message. Adams won the Democratic primary over more progressive Black and Latina opponents by overwhelmingly carrying Black voters. Soon after being sworn in, he resurrected an elite anti-gun squad that had been dissolved for harassing Black men. Meanwhile, New York’s Democratic governor is arguing for toughening bail requirements that had only recently been loosened.
San Francisco’s Mayor Breed, also Black, unleashed an aggressive effort to curtail drug-dealing near downtown, a tactic that will inevitably jail more Black men. (Not coincidentally, Breed had been told that major conventions were avoiding the City for safety concerns.) San Francisco’s newly-elected, progressive, reduce-jailing district attorney is likely to be recalled from office in June. Across the Bay, the progressive city council of Oakland, facing an upsurge in homicides, flipped from trying to reduce police funding in 2020 to increasing it in 2021. Up the coast, Washington Governor Inslee just signed a bill rolling back criminal justice reforms of 2020.
The peace-and-justice reversals also involve homeless policies. Liberal cities have moved to clean up encampments. After homicidal attacks by the mentally ill in New York City subways, the MTA planned to drive the homeless out. Liberal poster boy Governor Gavin Newsom of California–who, when mayor of San Francisco, married gay couples before it was legal–announced an aggressive program to pull the mentally ill off the streets, whether they liked it or not. “‘There’s no compassion with people with their clothes off defecating and urinating in the middle of the streets, screaming and talking to themselves,’ Newsom said. ‘I’m increasingly outraged by what’s going on in the streets…. ‘I’m disgusted with it.’”
How real is the seeming wave of crime and disorder that forced these moves? In the long run–that is, over decades–crime is way down. But crime rates have clearly jumped up since the pandemic in most urban places. Moreover, as others have suggested, the Covid-era victimization numbers may underestimate the true risk, because so many fewer people have exposed themselves to risk in public places or on public transit. In any case, Americans have become more fearful about crime in their neighborhoods.
The leftish politicians making the turnarounds on law and order are responding to their mainly leftish constituents. More of those voters, while still endorsing justice concerns, are putting peace first, as people usually do. Mainstream Democratic politicians are not going to be out-flanked on law and order this time.
Law and Order in the 1960s and ‘70s
Worry about serious crime rose sharply in the U.S. in the 1960s and ‘70s. I recall liberal pundits and scholars (including me) pooh-poohing public concerns, blaming distorted data and media sensationalism for alarming the populace. It became clear later, however, that the crime rise was real. Americans’ concerns also included anxiety about civil disorder, the big-city riots/uprisings (pick your term) following police misbehavior and following the King assassination and, later, the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.
Then, led by Richard Nixon in 1968, the Republican party captured the mantle, Defender of Law and Order. Combined with soft racism, the crime issue helped the GOP hold the White House for 20 of the next 24 years. Their election victories also helped them control the discourse across a wide range of other topics (for example, laissez-faire market ideology).
One gets a sense of how the public weighs peace against justice from a 1969 national survey of American men (aged 16 to 64) and reported by Blumenthal et al. in Justifying Violence. The respondents were not unsympathetic when it came to explaining the sources of street violence in the U.S.: 89% agreed that discrimination was a cause of violence; over 70% agreed that poverty and that lack of good jobs were causes. But when it came to assessing outbursts of disorder, that sympathy largely evaporated: 61% said that the police should shoot in responding to “ghetto riots” (almost as many as endorsed shooting at a “hoodlum gang” that had invaded a town); and 48% endorsed police shooting to handle a “student disturbance.”
The men’s very understanding of what “violence” was depended a lot on their concerns about disorder. Most thought that looting, burglary, draft-card burning, and police beating students were episodes of violence; most also thought that police frisking people, sit-ins, and police shooting looters were not episodes of violence. (Most Black respondents, however, thought did think shooting looters was violence. And 70% of them thought that “denial of civil rights” was violence.)
Lesson
“Justice, justice shall you pursue,” the Bible tells us (Deut. 16:20). But it is hard to pursue justice when people are worried about peace. Similarly, the maxim that “it is better that ten [or 100] guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer”[2] gets trampled during crime panics. No peace, less justice.
Maybe “No Justice, No Peace” is not meant as a factual claim but as a warning that without justice there will be no peace. One source quotes a protest organizer saying in 1987, “we declare that if there is no justice there cannot be peace.” This statement can be interpreted as a threat and as a justification for mob violence. That is how it is interpreted by, for example, the conservative writers at National Review (here and here), but also by many in the general public.
It may well be that progress toward more justice (and mercy) will require some progress toward peace.
NOTES
[1] This historical pattern is evident in both Google ngrams and in The New York Times stories. As to the latter, there were about 2 Times stories a year in the 1980s that used the phrase “no justice, no peace”; 10 a year in the 1990s; 3 a year in the 2000s; 6 a year in the 2010s; and finally 23(!) a year in 2020-2021.
[2] The original calculation–ten–is from Blackstone; the 100 is from Benjamin Franklin (here).
MADE IN AMERICA 