Against the Law: The Nixon Court and Criminal Justice

tortuous concluding chapter that they themselves prefer more redistributive policies in Oakland (less No. 1 and more No. 3). But they then go on to point out how probably such policies would fail for many reasons, the most immediate being that the affluent could simply move out of Oakland. A logical weakness of the whole argument, however, becomes more apparent at this point. Why impose these three ideal types on Oakland and then take a strong personal stand? Why not attempt to see how Oakland citizens (and leaders) view these issues? The argument (in Chapter 1) was that citizen preferences could be ignored because citizens had few opinions on the specific service issues studied. This may be true. But it does not follow that the same applies to views on these three very broad types of policies. The authors seem inordinately critical of other research approaches, such as comparative analyses of cities. These, they suggest, "do not identify particular levers which might be used to alter policy outcomes." For example, after one finds that cities with numerous Irish Catholic citizens have large city government budgets, they ask, "if a community wants to increase its budget, should one suggest that it import Catholics from Ireland?" (p. 11) By contrast, these authors are sufficiently convinced of their own ethical views to essentially ask citizens of Oakland to adopt their general principle of dramatically increasing redistribution, and accordingly to reorganize the entire city government. Is this policy analysis or political philosophy? Surely one alternative would be to document the ethical views of different ethnic and income groups within Oakland (blacks if not Irish) and then to point out how the city government might be reorganized to become more responsive to these different groups within Oakland. They might thus suggest better means to an accepted end; instead they suggest new ends. Still, it is likely that Urban Outcomes will be read more outside than inside Oakland; political scientists with an interest in service delivery cannot afford to ignore it.