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Crime first became a major national issue in the 1964 presidential contest between incumbent Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican challenger Barry Goldwater. The rising crime rates prompted Goldwater to speak frequently about the problem. Johnson won the election handily, but he recognized the seriousness of the issue and named a blue‐ribbon commission on law enforcement and the administration of justice to study it. The study panel was resisted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover, but it proceeded nevertheless. The commission's 1967 report laid out a compelling critique of the criminal justice system but watered down many of its long list of recommendations. Still, it established the groundwork for shifting anticrime policy from what had been predominantly a local issue to a federal focus.

By 2001, the federal government was spending more than $5.3 billion each year to help states and cities combat crime, on top of the many billions allocated locally. In many instances, the money was going to programs that had not been shown to have much effect on crime. Many ideas have been proved worthwhile, however, and deserve more support. They include cohesive community anticrime campaigns, targeted drug treatment, prevention aimed at young people who show crime tendencies, plugging leaks in the criminal justice system, better news media reporting of crime issues, wiser use of the private sector, and dampening the political rhetoric on crime. As crime has become such a political football, relatively little attention has been paid to serious research on the issue compared with the amount devoted to medicine, for example. The danger in the early 21^st century was that as crime rates went down, government would downgrade even further its efforts to determine what worked and did not work in the past four decades. That could be a big mistake if crime rates started again to increase, a distinct possibility in view of downturns in the economy and more young people in the population.

This chapter identifies the broad resurgence of Hollywood crime films during the 1990s as the ‘New Crime Wave’, as well as Soderbergh's unique ‘anticrime’ iteration within it. A close reading of Out of Sight (1998) illustrates the alternative values system that Soderbergh proffers with his criminal characters. The film employs the presence of both the narratives of a charming criminal and the detective chasing after him, coupled with uniquely Soderberghian aesthetic signature stylistics, the characters' ethical impulse, and Soderbergh's slickly edited narrative — the latter of which is used as a method of restricting and revealing the range and depth of character information so as to complicate the viewer's understanding of the central relationship. It is more than just ‘likable criminals’ that distinguishes Soderbergh's films from others in the 1990s crime wave, however; it is that his criminal protagonists are set against larger, more nefarious institutions.

This chapter investigates the New Haven youth movement in the late 1980s. Fostered by a coalition of black college students and working-class youth, the New Haven youth movement coordinated an antiviolence/anticrime initiative designed to combat the burgeoning gun violence between rival street gangs, participated in a protest campaign for equitable public school funding, and mobilized black youth in support of grassroots electoral organizing campaigns. The movement underscored three characteristics of post-civil rights activism. First, it showed how young people can be catalysts for social change in urban municipalities plagued by decaying political machines and social stratification. Second, it demonstrated how young people can be valuable resources to persons who seek to challenge racial hierarchies and economic injustices in municipalities. Third, it identified the difficulties youth activists experience in sustaining resistance campaigns that challenge power structures, especially when allied with public officials and black leaders inclined toward institutional leveraging.