Do Democrats need to get tough on crime?
No. But progressives need to figure out how to talk about it.
If you haven’t read this Eric Levitz interview with David Shor that’s been making the rounds, check it out. It’s totally fascinating, and an indictment of every corner of the Democratic Party. I’m not sure anyone can read it and come to the honest conclusion that their assumptions about and analyses of the 2020 election were 100% correct.
The interview is sprawling, and it covers a lot of ground. But the piece I want to touch on is the one that was, for me, the most painful to read: Shor’s analysis of how progressive messaging on crime and policing has been bad for Democrats at the ballot box.
Shor’s argument — that slogans like “defund the police” hurt Democrats among Black and Latino voters — is hotly debated, with lots of smart folks pointing out that Democrats saw massive turnout and made important legislative gains in 2020, many of which were caused by Republican voters casting their ballots for Democrats. That certainly calls into question the narrative that “defund the police” was particularly toxic. And as Brian Beutler points out in his very smart newsletter, the problem isn’t Democratic policies, which are extremely popular, or even Democratic rhetoric — in this election, the leading candidates all rejected the “defund the police” slogan and embraced moderation and, as Beutler points out, Biden won the election, which makes it all the more bizarre that we’re talking about this like a loss. What’s really interesting is the fact that Republican policies are so toxic that the party lies to the public about what those policies actually are, but still manages to win close to half the vote by exploiting culture war issues and tribal identity over policy, and by lying to the public about what Democrats’ policies are, too. Democrats already do what Shor says. But Republicans have rigged the game.
Shor points out that in 2020, Democratic gains came largely from highly-educated white voters; Democrats saw declines in support from Black and Latino voters. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the same voters cast a ballot for Clinton in one election and then swung to Trump in the next; others argue that it is more likely that different groups of voters within the same demographic were motivated to turn out (that is, more conservative Latinos showed up in 2020 than in 2016). Beutler and Shor agree that, if we want future elections to be fair, then Democrats need to use the power they have right now to ensure that every vote counts and the GOP can’t continue to put their thumb on the scale — that means ending the filibuster, making DC and Puerto Rico states, and banning partisan redistricting.
Where Shor and Beutler most clearly part ways are on the questions of what Democrats actually are and are not doing, and how much harm the left wing of the party is or is not causing. These questions are arguably the most salient when it comes to crime and policing — issues that are inexorably tied up with racism, issues that are matters of life and death, but where public opinion does not in fact fall neatly along assumed racial lines. But both of them would agree, I think, that there is a gap between the public’s perception of how Democrats approach crime and policing and how Democrats actually approach crime and policing.
I say that Shor’s criticisms of progressive messaging on policing and crime were particularly painful for me because these are some of the issues I care about the most. America’s incarceration rates are stunningly high — we imprison more people than any other country in the history of the world. Our prisons are brutal and deadly. We continue to execute people. Even after people get out of prison, they can face a series of penalties that prevent them from being fully integrated back into society. We use imprisonment as a means of racial social control; we rely on prisons to remove people who need help — those struggling with mental illness, addiction, and poverty — from our collective view. So the idea that Democrats need to be tougher on crime is a tough pill for me to swallow (it is a pill that, in fact, I will not swallow). And the idea that racial justice advocacy harms liberal aims does not line up with the real, tangible, and positive policy changes that have come in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and thanks to decades of work from justice advocates. Elections are not the end-all be-all of politicking, and polling is not the only reliable source of information.
But I also find Shor’s analysis credible. I just think it’s more complicated than “defund the police lost Democrats the election,” which is the current fall-back line from folks who really don’t want to have complicated discussions about criminal justice, and don’t want to see the kind of big overhauls that are necessary to fix a broken system.
All of that said: I do think Democrats were hurt by the perception that they aren’t just soft on crime but in denial about it. And I think it’s possible for Democrats — and to an even greater extent, those of us who chatter on about this stuff in public — to take a progressive approach on policing, crime, and incarceration that is much more effective than the current strategy, both in terms of persuading voters and in getting liberal voters to turn out. But it’s going to require hearing people out, recognizing that perceptions matter as much as statistics, and focusing on winning votes rather than impressing people on Twitter.
One of the worst tactics that progressives have adopted is denying that crime is a problem, telling people who complain about it that they’re wrong, skating over the experience of crime victims, and making fun of people whose crime-related complaints they perceive as petty and bourgeois.
That isn’t to say that progressives shouldn’t counter bad information with good. It is to say that this growing tactic of shaming people for crime-related complaints may get someone to clam up, but it’s also a lot more likely to alienate them from progressive solutions.
Crime in the United States is a serious problem. We are an exceptionally violent nation, and we tolerate, as our baseline, levels of crime that would be outrageous in many of our economic peer nations. Crime here is often much more deadly or injurious compared to crime in other wealthy democratic nations, thanks to American gun culture. So much of this conversation, from violence in policing to fear of crime to pervasive over-sentencing, comes down to guns, and how much better off we would be with sane and reasonable gun laws.
But what I often hear from folks on the left is a denialism that crime is as pervasive, serious, and destabilizing as so many people say it is. This is especially true in large, progressive cities where crime used to be much worse — places like New York and Washington, D.C. — and when the commentators are white-collar folks who live in neighborhoods with particularly low crime rates. Conversations on social media, and especially on apps like Nextdoor which draw in a lot of regular folks who are not up-to-date on the latest left-twitter debates, go around in the same cycle: Someone complains about crime; someone else responds that crime is actually way down from what it was in the 1980s and 90s; person A becomes indignant because they’ve lived here for however many years; person B tells them they just don’t get it or that their complaint is itself offensive; rinse and repeat. This gets uglier and even less productive when the issue at hand is someone calling the police in response to a crime, which is alternately framed as either the worst thing you can do, or the one and only way to respond. We see this kind of denialism and blame-shifting in progressive media, too, in the articles (and responses to those articles) that put the onus on crime prevention on the victims, that mock people who complain about things like theft, and that suggest or flat-out say that if you’re the victim of a crime it’s your own fault. Often, this is a ham-fisted attempt to complicate existing narratives around crime, which separate people into “victim” and “criminal,” when in reality, a lot of people who commit crimes are victims themselves, and many times over — of poverty, of violence, of abuse, of drug dependence. But often, we see an overcorrection: The story needs a villain, and in an attempt to not fall back on old tropes that strip out context and humanity, we create new ones.
Apps like Nextdoor, Ring, and others really don’t help here — they over-emphasize criminal activity and give the impression that any given area is awash with crime, chaos, and violence. And the pandemic has only exacerbated matters. Murder rates actually are way up in many cities. In New York and Washington, D.C., carjackings and car thefts are an increasingly regular occurrence; in more rural and suburban areas, people who have their homes broken into often point to the rise in opioid addiction as one causal factor. As we’re all stuck at home and avoiding crowded stores, we’re ordering many more items for delivery — which probably means that many more items are getting swiped from peoples’ doorsteps and package rooms. And thanks to Covid, day-to-day life is quieter, more insular, and more online — I would guess people are spending more time on various neighborhood apps and websites, and more of their attention is being drawn to stories of theft and vandalism and violence. All of that contributes to a sense that the social contract is being broken; that something is out of control.
I don’t think most people need or even want to hear “we will find the guy who swiped your Amazon package and we will throw him in jail.” But I do think people want to feel heard and recognized, and they want to feel like something is being done to correct a real problem — not told that this isn’t a real problem at all, or they’re whiners because this is just the reality of city life, or who cares, or it’s their fault for leaving their car running or getting something delivered to their home in the first place (and if you think that the only people getting things delivered are rich whites, well… I think you’re probably wrong).
When people don’t feel heard and don’t feel like their experiences and problems are even recognized by those in power, of course they’re going to be more receptive to the folks who do seem to hear them — even those folks are offering solutions that don’t actually work, and in many cases exacerbate these issues. People do not vote primarily on policy. They vote on their feelings, and their sense of who represents them, speaks to them, and who they believe will make their lives better. Most people do not have a solid sense of what each party’s policy agenda is; they instead have a sense of who each party represents based only partly on what politicians say, but largely on what the media they consume, what the people in their communities say about politics and politicians, and who the liberals and conservatives they know are. A lot of that is amorphous and emotional, which the GOP seems to grasp, and which Democrats still struggle to understand.
It’s easy to make fun of someone who complains that their monthly salsa club shipment got swiped. But often, people are getting important or irreplaceable items stolen — necessary medications, handmade gifts, items of significant monetary or sentimental value. When it comes to carjackings and even stuff like bike theft, a lot of the folks suffering are undocumented food delivery workers who might not feel safe reporting the crime, which in turn means they’re just eating a devastating financial loss. Videos of assaults on elderly Asian-Americans have gone viral, and Asians are reporting an uptick of hateful attacks, from physical assaults to racist verbal harassment; the response they’re hearing from some corners is, well, this isn’t really racially motivated, and the solutions are largely either nods to “solidarity” or steps potential victims can take to protect themselves — something feminists, for example, have largely rejected in the discourse around sexual violence, and that I have to imagine sounds pretty hollow to people worried about the safety of the little old ladies in their community.
Of course progressives should counter bad information with real facts. Crime rates have been steadily declining for decades. New York is the safest big city in America. Fear-mongering about crime is a tried-and-true reactionary tactic with a long and racist history. The police have not actually been defunded.
But if the conversation ends there — with “what you think you see happening around you isn’t actually happening” — we’re going to lose people. And we’re really going to lose people if we’re dismissive and condescending toward anyone who raises these concerns. While progressives are mocking folks who think it’s reasonable to expect their neighbors not to steal from them — calling them gentrifiers or Karens or NIMBYs or whatever — or arguing that the whole concept of private property is bourgeois bullshit, Republicans are promising both validation and a solution: They’re saying, you’re right, this is a problem, society is falling apart, no one is taking personal responsibility, crime is a serious threat, and we solve it with more policing and more incarceration.
Progressives could begin at the same starting point — I hear what you’re saying, this is a problem — and then change course. It is, in fact, a problem that there are thousands of people who steal packages or break into houses because they are desperate for money, whether that money is necessary to feed an addiction or their kids. It is, in fact, a problem that there are people with serious untreated mental illnesses who are committing multiple violent assaults and going through a revolving door of jail and hospital and homelessness. It is in fact a problem that murders are up, and that murders in poor urban neighborhoods often go unsolved. It is in fact a problem that in the middle of a pandemic, when the elderly and ill are at particular risk, there is rampant theft of necessary items people have delivered to their homes. It is in fact a huge problem that there are more guns than people in the United States, and that this glut of firearms means that any given crime has a higher chance of ending in death than it would if it occurred just about anywhere else in the world.
It is traumatic to be the victim of many crimes, even if the crime isn’t violent. Getting an Amazon package stolen isn’t a traumatic event. But someone breaking into your home can be — it’s tremendously violating, even if you aren’t there. Getting held up at gunpoint by someone who takes your car is a trauma, and it shouldn’t happen.
Progressives can recognize all of that and also put forward solutions that have actually been shown to work — and throwing people in jail is not a solution that has been shown to work when what people actually need is money, or drug treatment (or even a safe way to use), or mental health care, or a home, or to be in school, or to have dignified and fairly-paid work. We can do all of the above: Affirm peoples’ problems, anxieties, and experiences while refusing to reinforce the easy criminal / victim dichotomy and while directing the conversation to what would actually address the issues at hand.
I do think most people actually understand, pretty intuitively, what drives crime and what could decrease it. I think this is especially true of people in the center or the center-left who don’t buy into ideas about inherently good people and inherently bad people, and are more receptive to understanding there are good circumstances and bad circumstances, positive incentives and negative ones. And these are the solutions that Democrats and progressives already support, and often discuss. I don’t even think the disconnect comes primarily from Democratic politicians. I think it comes from how we all talk to each other in the more amorphous space of “the discourse” in person and online, and how those of us in the liberal media tell stories about crime and policing. We’re still looking for good guys and bad guys. And since we (laudably and correctly) don’t want to make desperate people the bad guys, we (unfortunately) just flip the script, so the bad guy becomes anyone who raises a complaint or believes they are entitled to a neighborhood free from violence and theft. That maintains the dichotomy, and gives a lot of folks the sense that we’re simply on the wrong side of it.
Maybe difficult conversations about crime and policing would be more fruitful for those of us on the left if we were less dismissive and invalidating of peoples’ frustrations, less focused on convincing them that their experiences are wrong (or reflect some kind of wrongly-held worldview), and less reliant on buzzwords and quick concepts in the place of serious engagement. Serious engagement includes pushing back against racist ideas of criminality, rejecting reactionary framing, talking about all people as human beings deserving of safety and dignity, and meeting misconceptions with reality. But we can do that without overriding peoples’ experiences and what they see in front of them; we can do that without telling them that what they think is a serious problem that scares them and affects them isn’t really happening. We can seek to open up the conversation instead of seeking to shut it down.
None of that demands that activists moderate their goals or their language. None if it says that we need a return to Clinton-era moderation or the kind of tough-on-crime approach that destroyed communities and millions of lives and cost taxpayers billions of dollars. None of it is going to attract reactionary conservatives who believe lots of people are just bad and need to be behind bars. It does ask us to let this be complicated, and to really hear people who want to be on our side.
All politics are identity politics. And if people feel like their day-to-day fears and the issues that frustrate and impact them in their day-to-day lives are being mocked or dismissed, well, they’re not going to identify with the broader political views you’re selling. People need to know you hear them and understand their problems before they’ll trust you to help solve those problems. Too many of us — myself definitely included — haven’t really been listening, especially on the issues about which we care the very most.
xx Jill
Image via Wiki Commons
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