"Defining Deviancy Down"

The idea [behind “Defining Deviancy Down”] came to me in 1992, as Liz and I were leaving the New York City Democratic National Convention and driving to upstate. And we were up on the Henry Hudson Parkway, crossing the South Bronx. And my good wife was driving, and I had plenty of time to read the New York Times full [and] there on page B-14 was a story, not a big one, about seven people having been found shot dead in a Bronx apartment building. That was a notable event because the mother, before she was shot, managed to shove her infant child under a bed. And when finally people noticed, the police got in, they found the child and she was alive. And that was sort of interesting. The fact that seven people had been shot in the back of the head was not interesting at all.

And I thought of that wonderful example of gangland violence, the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago, when Al Capone’s men rubbed out seven of Bugs Moran’s men. Well, it became the subject of national legend. We could no longer deal with the amount of murder going on in Manhattan and the Bronx, so we had to sort of say, well, only special murders get attention. And you can take this pattern of avoidance and defining deviancy down all across the society.

Read the rest of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan interview here.