Crime Is Not On The Rise. Why Do Voters Think It Is?
Democrats are ceding the narrative to Republican misinformation, when they need to talk about why their own policies are successful
Photo credit: Daniel Avram/Shutterstock.com
Fox News has an entire page of its website devoted to “Chicago’s Crime Wave.” The liberal voters of San Francisco not only recalled progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin in the summer of 2022, only six weeks ago, they passed a series of “tough on crime” ballot measures, including drug testing for anyone receiving public assistance. “Austin doesn't feel as safe recently. Because it isn't,” says a bi-partisan PAC dedicated to the Texas capitol’s “quality of life.” A series of policy decisions, the group claims, “have led to a surge in both violent crime and property crime against Austinites”—particularly women.
As we approach the 2024 election crime is all over the media. Sure, it’s the media’s job to report crime. But if you are a devoted listener of 1010-WINS radio (which covers New York, New Jersey, and Long Island) you will notice that other than weather and traffic, crime and policing are key aspects of the broadcast. Out of the top six news headlines on the WINS site today, five were violent crimes and the sixth was the ongoing student protest at Columbia. And if there aren’t enough crimes in the New York metropolitan area (oh, for the days of “Headless Body in Topless Bar”), reporters detail unusual and often grisly crimes that have happened hundreds or thousands of miles away. In the past week, the station has reported a gun battle in Louisiana that left three police wounded and one suspect dead; a fugitive former Oregon police officer accused of murder and kidnapping taking his own life; a robbery and carjacking in suburban West Haven, CT.
Given that crime is a staple element of tabloid news, coverage of local tragedies, rather than seeming to occur at a distance, brings the specter of mayhem into communities that experience little or no crime. As Gideon Taffe of Media Matters reported in January, 2023, Fox News produced “a misleading narrative” about the United States being in the grip of a crime wave in 2022, devoted 11% of its reporting to the topic in advance of the midterm election. But that crime wave was “largely created by its own relentless coverage,” Taffe writes. “By focusing on racist stereotypes, smearing progressive prosecutors, and pushing conspiracy theories, Fox News made crime one of the biggest perceived ailments in the country and pushed far-right policy prescriptions ahead of the election.”
The only sane policy responses, Fox hosts proclaimed, were those embraced by the Party of Trump. And these “draconian solutions” meant a return to policies forcibly ended in the courts as civil rights violations:
Fox personalities began arguing for a return to “Broken Windows” policing, which involves aggressive enforcement and harsher sentences for lower level crimes. In reality, there is no evidence that this strategy works as a deterrent to reduce crime, and other heavy-handed policing tactics based on the broken windows theory have been found to significantly discriminate against Black Americans and other minority groups.
But as Taffe also pointed out, crime in the United States has dramatically decreased—73%, to be precise—over the last thirty years. 2023 saw the biggest national drop in murder rates ever recorded (6%)), and murders in cities dropped 12%. Yes, there are periodic crime spikes (there was one during the pandemic), but overall, the trend is towards less crime.
The Atlantic’s crime reporter, Jeff Asher, pointed out that less crime doesn’t mean no crime. Yet, “declining murder does not mean there were not thousands upon thousands of these tragedies this year,” he wrote on his Substack:
Nor does it mean that there was an acceptable level of gun violence, even in places seeing rapid declines. It simply means that the overall trend was extraordinarily positive and should be recognized as such.
Detroit is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1966 and Baltimore and St Louis are on pace for the fewest murders in each city in nearly a decade. Other cities that saw huge increases in murder between 2020 and 2022 like Milwaukee, New Orleans, and Houston are seeing sizable declines in 2023. There are still cities like Memphis and Washington DC that are seeing increasing murders in 2023, but those cities are especially notable because they are the outliers this year, not the norm.
Yet, Americans don’t seem to believe that their world is safer than ever. In February, 2024, the Pew Research Center took the American electorate’s temperature. This nonpartisan, nonprofit research group identified 20 issues that will be priorities when voters decide between President Joe Biden and Unindicted Co-conspirator Number One in November. (Israel-Palestine didn’t even make the list, although perhaps it might now, amidst the campus demonstrations that are in the news around the country.) A whopping 73% saw the economy as the top priority for any president, outstripping the next item (defending against terrorism) by a good ten points.
“Reducing crime” was in the seven spot, at 58%, which may seem like ok news on the surface. But in fact, concern about personal safety, up 11 points in a little more than three years, is trending in the opposite direction of actual crimes. While the big shift has been among Republicans and “Republican leaners”—from 38% to 68% since Joe Biden was inaugurated in 2021—47% of Democrats also think crime should be a priority.
Here’s the puzzle: analysis of crime statistics—also by Pew—argue that there are fewer crimes committed in the United States today than there have been in any year since the early 1990s. Then, you may recall, politicians “solved” the crime problem, not through full employment, education, or welfare, but with harsh sentences, incarcerating a whole generation of mostly Black men for decades. Incarceration peaked at about 2 million people incarcerated and pending trial in 2010 and has since fallen by about 400,000 souls.
So, the fact that public opinion is so out of synch with crime statistics puts Democrats in a tricky position for November: they must defend policies that are working, but that large numbers of Americans, including Democrats, believe are failing. But trying to counter the narrative on the right is difficult, because these policies are counterintuitive to what Americans have believed for generations. For example, if the prison population is dropping, and the United States is becoming safer, that might mean that crime rates and incarceration rates are independent variables in determining overall rates of crime. Or it might mean that incarceration causes crime. Some policy makers did believe that prison transformed petty criminals into hardened, violent felons—hence the creation of a separate prison system for juvenile offenders beginning at the turn of the 20th century in Illinois and Colorado.
Here’s what I would do if I were the Democrats. Instead of allowing Republicans to take over the narrative, I would look for the programs that work, and that have contributed to reducing crime. I would create a series of advertisements featuring police officers talking about why community policing methods work; mothers talking about how “second chance” diversion programs turned their kids around; programs that support students in graduating from high school and going on to college; men and women who finished technical training, or high school and college degrees, while incarcerated started afresh; and formerly incarcerated men working as violence interrupters.
These are just a few of programs that produce thousands of success stories—and reductions in crime. That story is happening now, and American voters need to know it.
Culture Beat:
A movie and a book that I chose accidentally came together last week to inspire a set of open-ended questions about race, authenticity, and the literary market.
The movie American Fiction (Orion Pictures, 2023), based on Percival Everett’s novel Erasure (UPNE, 2001) revolves around an erudite Black novelist whose literary work is marginalized by sensationalist, market-based books packaged to meet the low expectations of white audiences. His rebellion? Writing a parody novel in street argot under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, a giveaway that none of the white people involved understand.) Racist hijinks ensue. But the movie also raises serious questions about what it means for a publishing industry that has historically excluded Black authors to reverse course, and what that costs the writers themselves.
R.F. (Rebecca) Kuang’s Yellowface (William Morrow, 2023) performs a similar, but even defter, turn. A successful young Asian American novelist dies suddenly: her friend, a white woman whose first novel sank like a stone, steals the first draft of a manuscript about conscripted Chinese laborers in World War I. The thief revises the book, sells it as her own work, and wins the success and attention she has always craved—and oh yes, marketing edits her name slightly to one that could be mistaken for—Chinese? She then has to handle the grinding scrutiny of actual Asian American writers raising questions, not just about the about the provenance of the book, but about her motives for writing the book in the first place. Questions about authenticity and truth become usefully tangled—is all fiction theft? What does it mean to be “authentic?” Is every fiction writer stealing the experiences of others? And then, two-thirds of the way through Yellowface, I realized: the joke is on the reader, since all of these questions are posed in the context of a narrative in which an Asian American author is inhabiting the persona of a white woman inhabiting the persona of an Asian American woman.
Do you have a question you would like answered? Then:
Short takes:
New rules for student protest at the University of Florida say yes to speech and no to the various forms of expression associated with the pro-Palestinian encampments that dominate the news this month. According to Nathaniel Rodriguez of WFLA, “While students are allowed to free speech and holding signs, the university has banned specific actions like using sound amplifiers like blowhorns, littering, building structures, or leaving unmanned signs.” One rule prohibits “disruption,” but doesn’t define what means. Students who violate the rules can be suspended and banned from campus for up tot three years. (April 28, 2024)
Remember when they put schools and colleges online during the pandemic and (real life shocker!) it turned out that poor people didn’t have access to broadband service that often costs well over $100 a month? Kids were attending class on their smartphones? Rural community college students were driving dozens of miles to sit in their cars outside a coffee shop to get into Canvas? As Judd Legum writes at Popular Information, the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), part of the Biden administration’s bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, changed that by subsidizing internet service for those who qualify (ironically mostly rural, red state Republicans) at the low-low price of $15 a month. The ACP runs out tomorrow, and even though it largely benefits voters in their own party, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R, LA-O4) won’t allow a vote on what the GOP sees as just another government handout. “The RSC claims the program is unnecessary because `80 percent, of beneficiaries had internet access before the program went into effect,” Legum writes. In other words, not a problem that needs solving! But that’s not true. “For that statistic, the RSC cites a report from a right-wing think tank, the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC),” Legum continues, and that report is based on a survey—that EPIC falsely represents. “The survey actually found that `over two-thirds of survey respondents (68%) reported they had inconsistent internet service or no internet service at all prior to ACP.’” (April 29, 2024)
How do Black Americans lose houses and land that have been in the family for generations? Because lack of access to the legal system after Emancipation means that many property owners did not have wills, with the result that descendants do not have titles. “More than a third of Black-owned land in the South is heirs’ property,” writes Lizzie Presser at Pro Publica. Known as “heirs property,” these homesteads become vulnerable in a national disaster because they are not eligible for federal aid or bank financing. Two Democratic bills in Congress hope to rectify a problem that both reproduces 19th century inequities and has an impact on reducing African American generational wealth. One legal expert notes that even if the Republican majority throws up roadblocks to this legislation, “HUD could make some of these proposed changes on its own by encouraging states to allow heirs’ property owners greater flexibility in qualifying for disaster aid, before federal legislation works its way through Congress.” (April 23, 2024)
So right on. Fomenting fear is how they will try to pick up some women too, who might otherwise care about the handmaids tale.