2

apparent to those who study not only what we say here but also the work of our seven research task forces and five investigatory study teams. Their reports to us fill fifteen volumes. We also held a series of hearings and conferences, receiving the views of more than 150 public officials, scholars, educators, religious leaders, and private citizens from media executives to young students. We are publishing the transcript of six days of hearings on the mass media; transcripts of the other hearings will be available for study in the National Archives.

Extensive as our study was, it could not embrace every aspect of such a complex problem. Others must build on our work, just as we have built on work that preceded ours. But within the confines of the time and resources available to us, we believe we have gained some valuable insights. We believe we have identified the causes of much of the violence that plagues contemporary America. We are convinced that most of this violence can be prevented, for our work has illuminated for us the strengths of this great nation, as well as its shortcomings. Our institutions and ine spirit of our people are equal to this challenge, no less than to the challenges we have met in the past.3

Violence in the United States has risen to alarmingly high levels. Whether one considers assassination, group violence, or individual acts of violence, the decade of the 1960s was considerably more violent than the several decades preceding it and ranks among the most violent in our history. The United States is the clear leader among modern, stable democratic nations in its rates of homicide, assault, rape, and robbery, and it is at least among the highest in incidence of group violence and assassination.

This high level of violence is dangerous to our society. It is disfiguring our society-making fortresses of portions of

2. The contents of these reports are outlined in Appendix IV.

3. We have devoted an entire Chapter of this Report to "The Strengths of America."

our cities and dividing our people into armed camps. It is jeopardizing some of our most precious institutions, among them our schools and universities-poisoning the spirit of trust and cooperation that is essential to their proper functioning. It is corroding the central political processes of our democratic society-substituting force and fear for argument and accommodation.

We have endured and survived other cycles of violence in our history. Today, however, we are more vulnerable to violence than ever before. Two-thirds of our people live in urban areas, where violence especially thrives. Individual and group specializations have intensified our dependence on one another. Men are no longer capable of solitary living and individual self-defense; men must live together and depend upon one another to observe the laws and keep the peace.

The American people know the threat. They demand that violence be brought to a halt. Violence must be brought under control-to safeguard life and property, and to make possible the creation of the understanding and cooperation needed to remedy underlying causes. No society can remain free, much less deal effectively with its fundamental problems, if its people live in fear of their fellow citizens; it is ancient wisdom that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

In this Report we suggest a number of specific measures for the better control of violence. We urge, for example, that the nation should double its investment in the prevention of crime and the administration of justice, as rapidly as that investment can be wisely planned and utilized. We recommend that central offices of criminal justice be created at the metropolitan level to make all parts of the criminal justice process-police, courts, corrections-function more effectively, and that private citizens' organizations be formed to work as counterparts of these offices in every major city in the nation. We urge that public officials, including law enforcement officers, intensify their efforts to develop more effective tactics in handling both peaceful

| Violent crime in the city is overwhelmingly committed by males.

Violent crime in the city is concentrated especially among youths between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four.

Violent crime in the city is committed primarily by individuals at the lower end of the occupational scale.

■ Violent crime in the cities stems disproportionately from the ghetto slum where most Negroes live.

The victims of assaultive violence in the cities generally have the same characteristics as the offenders: victimization rates are generally highest for males, youths, poor persons, and blacks. Robbery victims, however, are very often older whites.

Source:

Task Force Report, Crimes of Violence (National Commission on the Causes and
Prevention of Violence, to be published.)

demonstrations and violent disturbances. As we show by comparing successful and unsuccessful strategies of control of major mass demonstrations of the past few years, official behavior may determine whether protest remains peaceful or erupts into serious violence.

Further, we recommend the adoption of a national firearms policy that will limit the general availability of handguns.

Necessary as measures of control are, they are only a part of the answer. They do not cure the basic causes of violence. Violence is like a fever in the body politic: it is but the symptom of some more basic pathology which must be cured before the fever will disappear.

Indeed, if measures of control were this society's only response to violence, they would in the long run exacerbate the problem. The pyramiding of control measures could turn us into a repressive society, where the peace is kept primarily through official coercion rather than through willing obedience to law. That kind of society, where law is more feared than respected, where individual expression and movement are curtailed, is violent too-and it nurtures within itself the seeds of its own violent destruction.

In this Report, we analyze basic causes which underlie the chief varieties of contemporary violence. We make a number of recommendations directed to removing these causes. They cannot be eliminated entirely; even in a perfectly just society in which all have a fair and nondiscriminatory stake, there will always be some violent individuals, in rural as well as in urban areas, and measures of control will always be required to restrain them. But we can improve the conditions and opportunities of life for all citizens and thus reduce sharply the number who will commit violent acts.

Thus, we urge that young people must be given a greater role in determining their own destiny and in shaping the future course of our society. Responsible participation in decision-making may, for many, be a substitute for the violence that is born in frustration. We propose lowering the voting age, reforming the draft, and providing a massive expansion in opportunities for youth to engage in public service activities whose goals young people wholeheartedly embrace.

While we categorically condemn all illegal violence, including group violence, as incompatible with the survival 4. In Chapter 3 we define group violence as the unlawful threat or use of force by any group that results or is intended to result in the injury or forcible restraints or intimidation of persons, or the destruction or forcible seizure of property.