Yes, We Have a Violent Crime Problem

Let Republicans own it.

¹The United States has a violent crime problem. And progressives have a talking-about-violent-crime problem.

Murders in many American cities were up in 2020, and it looks like they’re going to be up again in 2021. But claims that violent crime is rising are routinely met with hand-waving and even full-on denial on social media, in progressive publications, and even by lefty politicians. One argument is that crime isn’t actually rising; another is that concern about rising crime is either hysteria; another is that crime rates aren’t actually that bad; and still another is that’s simply parroting right-wing talking points to recognize the problem of violent crime and to acknowledge the difficulties rising violent crime rates might pose to crucial criminal justice reform efforts.

This is all going to bite progressives in the ass.

Last year was the single biggest increase in homicide rates in U.S. history. Murders, particularly with guns, are a growing threat in the lively urban centers that have been drawing young people for the last two-plus decades — New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, and on and on. And a disproportionate number of homicide deaths are of Black and brown people, often in a handful of neglected neighborhoods. The crime denialism doesn’t seem to be coming from the folks who are living it; it’s coming from progressive activists and talking heads, most of whom seem to live in comparative comfort and safety.

Progressives aren’t denying or waving away violent crime increases for fun; there’s a very real history (and present) of crime fears being used to push draconian policies on policing and prisons, of which the 1994 crime bill is the chief but far from only example. Stoking fear about crime typically comes with racist undertones (and sometimes overtones), and it’s communities of color that have historically paid the price for aggressive policing and the tough-on-crime policies that often harm more than they help.

This is a well-worn conservative strategy: Fear-monger about crime as a pretext for cracking down on Black, Latino, and poor people. The result is scores of people in prison, most of them racial minorities and many of them practically children, who come out traumatized and largely unemployable — all of which has hugely negative downstream effects for communities where many adult men and a significant number of women are locked away and then deemed disposable. This in turn feeds a cycle of crushing multigenerational poverty and systemic racist neglect, which leaves few options for (legal) gainful employment and little room for upward mobility.

So there are good reasons why folks on the left resist the “violent crime is rising” narrative. The problem, though, is that violent crime is rising — murders, in particular, are spiking — and that even when at historical lows, violent crime (and particularly homicide) is much, much more common in the United States than in most of our economic peer nations. We have a devastating violent crime problem. And if progressives cede the basic facts to conservatives, then we’re also ceding the causal explanations and the potential solutions.

It is true that crime generally isn’t rising, and that certain kinds of crimes (property crimes, for example) are down. But the very worst and scariest kind of crimes — violent crime, and murder in particular — are up. “Crime rates aren’t up, idiot (except for murder)” isn’t an argument that inspires much confidence. Neither is pointing to the fact that crime is much lower than it was in the 1990s, when crime rates were at all-time highs. The foundational concern is that the current uptick in violent crime portends a return to those bad old days, and “don’t worry, we aren’t there yet” is not particularly consoling. It’s also not unreasonable for people to want to live in safe cities and communities, and to expect their elected officials to be responsive when that sense of safety wanes.

But in some circles, expressing concern about violent crime and the potential for escalating crime rates to result in nationwide devastation, big electoral losses for Democrats, and the potential reversal of trends toward urban revival gets you branded a reactionary or NIMBY. Say a little prayer for the person who worries about the future desirability of city living should violent crime rates continue to rise, or who points to rising crime as a core element of middle- and professional0class retreat from big cities and the related economic effects. And RIP anyone who owns a home and expresses concern about its potential value should violence take greater hold.

Mocking people as hysterics, yelling that they’re reactionaries, or shaming them for being among the scores of middle-class people who care about the single largest asset they will ever own and that will shape their and their children’s financial future might feel satisfying, but it’s not how you win. It’s not how you change anything for the better — it’s how you alienate potential allies and cede valuable ground.

Right now, there is a vacuum, and conservatives are filling it. Off of Twitter and off of social media, a whole lot of Americans are concerned about rising violent crime rates. Yes, Americans do routinely over-estimate how common crime really is. But crime in America is also really, appallingly common, and that really is a problem. People see that. But their concerns aren’t being heard, let alone adequately addressed, by the left. And in the meantime, the right is taking full advantage: telling Americans that crime is an even bigger problem than they imagine, that it’s concentrated in Democratic-run cities, that it’s the result of defunding the police, that liberals don’t care, that the only way to fix it is to reject the Black Lives Matter movement and the socialist left and reinvest in public order and aggressive policing. They offer a choice: live in a crime-ridden socialist Antifa hellhole, or get on the law and order train.

None of that is true. Violent crime is up in cities generally, not just Democratic-run ones; the police were not actually defunded anywhere; and the causes of this violent crime wave are complex and certainly do not come down to a hashtag or a summer of protests. But conservatives are incredibly effective here: They’re highlighting an existing problem, amplifying and exaggerating it, giving people a ready-made explanation, and offering a clear, familiar, and immediate solution.

And progressives are just saying “the thing you see in front of you isn’t actually happening” or “but no they’re wrong.”

Here’s what we could do instead: We could say, yeah, homicides are rising and that’s a huge but solvable problem — homicides in America are always disastrously high because of how easy it is for Americans to get guns, and with the economic devastation wrought by Covid, the situation has gotten even worse. Concerned citizens are right that it is an emergency when stray bullets are killing toddlers and innocent bystanders. We should attack this problem at the root, and that means the first order of business is guns, and the second order of business is the poverty and dysfunction wrought by decades of bad policies.

Make Republicans own gun violence the way Democrats have tried to make them own mass shootings: By emphasizing that far fewer of these homicides would have been as deadly, and certainly not as randomly deadly, without easy access to guns. It’s awfully hard for someone seeking retribution on an enemy to accidentally stab an innocent child or bystander to death; it’s very easy for a stray bullet to make its way into any random nearby body. Guns are problem #1, and if Republicans aren’t willing to address gun violence, it’s worth asking why they’re so soft on crime — why they don’t care if your neighborhood is turned into a shooting gallery.

Progressives can also talk about other root causes of crime in a way that doesn’t obscure peoples’ desire for changes right now. I often hear proponents of defunding the police talk about moving those funds into after-school, mental health, and anti-poverty programs, which is great, but which are longer-term solutions, and which are framed as ways to spend the money accrued from a pretty unpopular (and at the moment wholly unrealistic) budget reallocation.

Instead, we need to emphasize specific, evidence-based solutions, and talk about funding them period — not contingent on money being pulled from the police. For example: Free drug treatment programs help to immediately reduce violent crimes and property crimes, as do drug courts that focus on treatment rather than incarceration. Reasonable wages, including for folks who have done time, help to reduce recidivism rates, as does stable housing for those coming out of prison. Keeping kids in school longer — having them start kindergarten or pre-K at younger ages and raising the age at which they can legally drop out of high school — is tied to lower crime rates.

We know that a lot of violent crime is tied to drugs — not just people who use drugs, but the groups that sell drugs and fight over territory. Helping drug users get treatment reduces demand; at the same time, increasing wages, strengthening the social safety net, and offering therapy and mentoring programs to young people could go a long way in neighborhoods where selling drugs is the most lucrative job on offer for young men. The stick, already, is jail time. But if there isn’t a counterbalancing carrot — if there’s little incentive to do something different because other jobs don’t offer pay or respect, life feels random when effort remains unconnected to outcome, and incarceration feels inevitable anyway — why say no to making good money now?

These are problems with policy solutions, and Democrats could emphasize them. They must emphasize getting guns off of the streets now as the number-one most effective way to make our cities safer. They could also emphasize all of the ways in which Republicans are the ones standing in the way and making safety impossible.

What we shouldn’t do is deny reality — about crime and about policing, even when it’s inconvenient.

There are a lot of problems with American policing, the most egregious of which were rightly highlighted in last summer’s protests against police murders of black people. It’s also the reality, though, that Americans generally want more policing and not less, and that the presence of police officers is a deterrent for crime.

That doesn’t mean that progressives need to hop aboard the “more police” bandwagon — I don’t think we should. But I’m not sure it’s useful to deny the reality that there is a relationship between policing and crime rates. The useful part is looking at the other costs: High rates of violence at the hands of police (New York City alone has spent more than $1 billion in five years to settle lawsuits against the NYPD); children and teenagers who spend their young lives being harassed and sometimes physically abused by cops, and how that erodes basic trust and produces adults who understandably feel unprotected and untethered and victimized, rather than protected by, the power of the state; a division between communities that are served by the police and communities that are policed by the police.

In other words: Engage with difficult facts. Put them in context. Consider them. Propose different solutions to the problems they present. But don’t deny them.

I don’t begrudge activists for pushing the “defund the police” line, and I think it’s a very good thing to have a far-left position on the table. That’s the job of an activist. It’s also true that the job of an activist is very different than the job of a politician or a journalist or a political commentator, and we would all be better served by understanding that “the left” is not a unified bloc but rather a big tent with a variety of actors, each of whom have different roles and obligations. It’s not the job of activists to get Democrats elected, any more than it’s the job of journalists to frame facts in ways that are most favorable to progressive interests.

But given that hard reality that the police are not going to be defunded anytime soon — and that the overwhelming majority of Americans, including Black and Latino Americans, do not want the police to be defunded — it makes sense for progressive politicians and those who care about progressive political power to spend less time batting down right-wing talking points (‘but the police HAVEN’T been defunded!”) and more time offering solutions, including demands for the police to be responsive to the communities they serve and non-violent toward the people they are supposed to protect (and who pay their salaries). When it comes to violent crime, we can ask: Is the problem really a lack of policing? Or is the problem that tons of people have easy access to deadly weapons? If you look at violent crime statistics around the world, the answer is exceptionally clear.

That doesn’t mean that activists should pipe down, or even tone down their demands; they shouldn’t. It does mean that those of us who are swimming in the broader progressive ecosystem should consider our own roles and our specific aims — and if one of our aims is to get more progressives into office, or at least prevent right-wing wins, we need to reconsider how we’re talking about crime.

Just because it’s been a losing issue for progressives in the past doesn’t mean it has to be one now. We can confront it honestly — and put the blame where it’s due.

xx Jill

p.s. As often seems to happen, I spent all week writing this newsletter, only to see someone smarter than me wrote about the same topic. So if this topic is of interest, head over to New York Magazine and read Eric Levitz.

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1. Photo by Jay Rembert on Unsplash