The Politics Of Crime

There’s a reason for that old journalism mantra “if it bleeds, it leads.” Most people are concerned about their own safety, for one thing, and are more likely to read about threats that might affect them. And crime is (superficially) straightforward and easy to understand. Good guys versus bad guys.

The characteristics that explain media’s focus on crime also apply to political campaigns, particularly at the local level. Here in Indianapolis, the Republican candidate for mayor has run a campaign almost entirely focused on the incumbent’s asserted inability to reduce criminal activity, insisting that he–the Republican–“has a plan.”  (Presumably, the incumbent doesn’t?) 

This campaign strategy–and the interminable advertisements hawking it–really annoys me.

For one thing, it ignores the fact that criminal activity in Indianapolis is hardly unique; our problems mirror national ones. This single-minded and exaggerated focus on crime also ignores the multiple other areas of governance that a mayor is responsible for providing. (Listening to those ads, you’d be forgiven for thinking this guy is running for sheriff, not mayor.)

Of course, the campaign in Indianapolis is pretty standard GOP strategy. The “law and order” party (a label that–given MAGA and Donald Trump–makes sentient Americans laugh) continues to scream about crime–which it almost always attributes to urban areas. (After all,  Blue cities are where most of those scary Black folks live…)

The data begs to differ.

Republican politicians often treat it as an established fact: Where they are in power, crime is low. Where Democrats are in power, crime is high.

“Republican-run cities are doing very nicely because they arrest people when you have crimes,” Donald Trump told Tucker Carlson last week.

“The cities and these left-wing states allowing criminals to run wild on our streets, that doesn’t work,” Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, said in March, citing New York in particular.

But party rule does not drive crime. Consider DeSantis’s state, Florida. Its homicide rate was roughly 50 percent higher than New York’s in 2021. Florida’s two most populous cities, Jacksonville and Miami, each had a homicide rate more than double New York City’s last year, even though both had Republican mayors.

 As the article points out, the data shows no connection between political partisanship and crime. “To put it another way, prominent Republicans are misrepresenting the country’s crime problem.”

The linked article referenced a number of reasons for America’s stubborn crime rates, especially the widespread availability of guns.

Access to guns is another major factor, particularly for murders. Guns make any conflict more likely to escalate into deadly violence, and they can embolden criminals. On this issue, there is a partisan divide — Democrats are more comfortable regulating firearms — and that could help explain higher levels of violence in Republican states, especially in the South. It can also explain violence in cities, which get a lot of guns from Southern states with laxer laws.

Indiana’s legislature, which is dominated by rural interests and which includes a number of members who are widely considered “gun nuts,” has ensured that the Hoosier state’s gun laws are as lax as those of any Southern state, if not more. 

Mike Leppert recently had a column on the costs of that laxity. In the wake of the last mass shooting, he wrote 

We don’t ever talk about what it all costs. No, in most circles, it doesn’t get a mention. An accounting of the cost of guns is rarely undertaken, and when it is, the numbers are so shocking and enormous, the study usually falls victim to the post-truth era in which we live.

After confirming that in the year since “permitless” carry became the law in Indiana, gun related crime increased, Leppert wrote

As reported by Casey Smith of the Indiana Capital Chronicle on Aug. 21, accidental shootings are on the rise. Smith wrote: “Since July 2022, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department (IMPD) has been tracking accidental shootings, specifically. IMPD found non-fatal, accidental shootings more than doubled in February 2023 compared to February averages in the last 5 years. There were as many as 75 such incidents for the last half of 2022, and more than 75% of those were self-inflicted.”

There’s a cost to each one of them. Medical costs. Emergency responses. Productivity loss….

Everytown Research and Policy published its sweeping report on the cost of guns in July of last year. The number? $557 billion annually, or nearly $1,700 for every resident in America.  Not every gun owner. Not every NRA member. Every resident….

What does culture get for this Faustian bargain? Gun owners get freedom. They get a false sense of safety and security. They get identity.

The rest of us just get the tab.

And Republican candidates supported by the NRA get dishonest talking points…..

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Crime And Policing

I keep harping on the difference between “what” and “how”–and the too-often-unrecognized importance of “how.” I’ve been frustrated, for example, by public reactions to recent Supreme Court decisions that have largely focused upon agreement or disagreement with the holdings– ignoring the Court’s far more concerning willingness to break Constitutional rules about standing and jurisdiction.

That tendency to focus on the “what”rather than the “how” also characterizes most public debates about crime. Most pundits begin with the assumption that public safety requires more policing, and even critics of police misbehavior rarely dispute that assumption. They just want better hiring and training practices.

So I was fascinated by a New York Times essay by noted legal scholar Radley Balko titled “Half the Police Force Quit; Crime Dropped.”

Balko began with what we all know–the horrific incidents that have become common are not the result of “rogue” officers–they reflect institutional cultures.

In a staggering report last month, the Department of Justice documented pervasive abuse, illegal use of force, racial bias and systemic dysfunction in the Minneapolis Police Department. City police officers engaged in brutality or made racist comments, even as a department investigator rode along in a patrol car. Complaints about police abuse were often slow-walked or dismissed without investigation. And after George Floyd’s death, instead of ending the policy of racial profiling, the police just buried the evidence.

The Minneapolis report was shocking, but it wasn’t surprising. It doesn’t read much differently from recent Justice Department reports about the police departments in Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, Albuquerque, New Orleans, Ferguson, Mo., or any of three recent reports from various sources about Minneapolis, from 2003, 2015 and 2016.

Balko points to a common response by many in law enforcement: all this criticism is preventing police from doing their jobs “right.” Many officers- defeated and demoralized–quit. Fewer police, more crime.

Lying just below the surface of that characterization is a starkly cynical message to marginalized communities: You can have accountable and constitutional policing, or you can have safety. But you can’t have both.

As Balko notes, calls for more police fail to take into account the ways in which police brutality and misconduct erode public trust, and how that erosion of trust affects public safety. He then points to the experience of a prosperous Minneapolis suburb.

Golden Valley is 85 percent white and 5 percent Black — the result of pervasive racial covenants.

“We enjoy prosperity and security in this community,” said Shep Harris, the mayor since 2012. “But that has come at a cost. I think it took incidents like the murder of George Floyd to help us see that more clearly.” The residents of the strongly left-leaning town decided change was necessary. One step was eliminating those racial covenants. Another was changing the Police Department, which had a reputation for mistreating people of color.

Golden Valley hired a high-ranking Black policewoman and a Black Chief of Police, prompting members of the overwhelmingly white police force to quit — in droves. And police unions continue to warn officers against joining the Golden Valley force, despite excellent pay and a relatively low crime rate.

What happened after the police force lost some half of its officers?

Crime declined.

Balko concedes that Golden Valley is far from a perfect model; it’s a wealthy community with very little crime. But he also notes that its experience isn’t unique, either.

When New York’s officers engaged in an announced slowdown in policing in late 2014 and early 2015, civilian complaints of major crime in the city dropped. And despite significant staffing shortages at law enforcement agencies around the country, if trends continue, 2023 will have the largest percentage drop in homicides in U.S. history. It’s true that such a drop would come after a two-year surge, but the fact that it would also occur after a significant reduction in law enforcement personnel suggests the surge may have been due more to the pandemic and its effects than depolicing…

At the very least, the steady stream of Justice Department reports depicting rampant police abuse ought to temper the claim that policing shortages are fueling crime. It’s no coincidence that the cities we most associate with violence also have long and documented histories of police abuse. When people don’t trust law enforcement, they stop cooperating and resolve disputes in other ways. Instead of fighting to retain police officers who feel threatened by accountability and perpetuate that distrust, cities might consider just letting them leave.

In Indianapolis, the Republican candidate for mayor is basing his campaign largely on his “plan” to improve public safety–a plan to hire more police officers and to “let them do their jobs.”

He clearly doesn’t understand that we won’t get to “what”–less crime–unless we address the importance of “how.”

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Politics And Perception

Every so often, there will be a vigorous debate on social media that hinges on perception–is this dress blue or gold? What color are these shoes?  The arguments can get pretty heated, with viewers insisting that those who see a different color must be defective in some way.

There are scientific efforts to explain these opposing views.(Apparently, when context/background varies, so will people’s visual perception.)

Context and background probably explain other differences in perception–for example, the prevalence of criminal activity.

The linked article from the Washington Post was prompted by the recent spate of irrational shootings–a teenager sent to collect his younger brothers, who rang the doorbell at the wrong house; a woman driver who pulled into the “wrong” driveway; cheerleaders who approached the “wrong” car in a parking lot.

Across the country this month, at least four men have opened fire on someone who’d stumbled upon their space, resulting in one death, two injuries and a car pocked with bullet holes. The apparent acts of snap-aggression have reinvigorated the debate around the prevalence of “stand your ground” laws in the United States and a pressing question: Why are people so quick to pull the trigger on strangers?…

Experts blame a cocktail of factors: the easy availability of guns, misconceptions around stand-your-ground laws, the marketing of firearms for self-defense — and a growing sense among Americans, particularly Republicans, that safety in their backyard is deteriorating. (emphasis mine)

Survey research confirms that fear of the “other”–and a growing belief that pretty much anyone could be a dangerous “other”–is more widespread among Republicans, who are also more likely to own guns. The gap is significant.

Since 2020, the share of Republicans who said that crime is rising in their community has jumped from 38 percent to 73 percent, according to the latest Gallup numbers from last fall. Among Democrats, that same concern climbed only 5 percentage points to 42 percent, marking the widest partisan perception gap since the polling firm first asked the question a half-century ago.

There is a reason Republicans are convinced that crime is growing: GOP strategists have encouraged Republican candidates to dwell on fear of crime and to level accusations that “woke” Democrats are insufficiently supportive of police and too protective of “those people.” (Here in Indianapolis, that strategy was employed by a Republican candidate in the recent primary, who won that primary largely by running repeated, offensive ads describing a violent hell-hole of a city most of its residents didn’t recognize.)

Not surprisingly, Rightwing media is culpable for spreading misinformation about crime.

The perception that life is getting more dangerous has spread on the right as GOP leaders and pundits repeatedly argued, without evidence, that immigrants and protesters are jeopardizing American peace. Conservative news channels have devoted more airtime to violence than their center- and left-leaning competitors: Over the past three years, for instance, Fox News anchors and guests spotlighted crime 79 percent more often than those on MSNBC and twice as much as voices on CNN, according to a Washington Post analysis of closed captioning…

So–what does accurate data tell us? (What color is that dress, really…)

A Washington Post crime analysis of 80 major police departments’ records found that reported violence across the country in 2022 was lower than the five-year average.

And over the longer term, the National Criminal Victimization Survey showed the number of people reporting sexual assault, robbery and other physical attacks is overall much lower now than in the 1990s and has not increased in recent years.

Homicides and thefts did rise during the pandemic, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data —but even then, that rise did not reach the levels of the 1990s. (It is worth noting that when it came to homicides, states with stand-your-ground laws had a 55 percent higher homicide-by-firearm rate in the past two years than the states that didn’t have such laws.)

The 28-year-old grandson of the 84-year-old White man who shot Black teenager Ralph Yarl, told officers that his grandfather was perpetually “scared to death. It’s the paranoia and fear…. It was the 24-hour news cycle — Fox News, OAN, all that stuff — pushing the civil division. Everybody is just so scared all the time.”

Context and background.

It’s one thing when you see a gold dress and I see a blue one. It’s something else entirely when I see a neighbor looking for directions and you see one of “those people” looking to rob or otherwise harm you–someone posing a threat that requires you to get your (always handy) gun and “stand your ground.”

The politicians and media outlets inculcating paranoia in their drive for power and profit are every bit as guilty as the armed and terrified citizens they’ve encouraged to pull the triggers.

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Intellectual Honesty

Today is primary Election Day in Indianapolis, so at some point this evening we will know the identities of the major party candidates for mayor of the city, and for City-County Council.

I’ve previously noted my concerns about the Republican campaign commercials urging more policing and less oversight as the remedy for (massively-exaggerated) urban crime, and as I was reviewing some files I’d kept, I came across an opinion piece from the New York Times that is particularly relevant to that approach.

The essay was by David French, who describes himself as a “conservative independent.” French left the Republican Party in 2016, “not because I abandoned my conservatism but rather because I applied it. A party helmed by Donald Trump no longer reflected either the character or the ideology of the conservatism I believed in, and when push came to shove, I was more conservative than I was Republican.”

The essay grappled with a question that has become much more salient in our highly partisan debates: Are instances of police misbehavior attributable to “bad apples”? Or do they signal deep and systemic problems with American policing?

French notes that our answers to that question reflect a massive partisan divide.

Every year Gallup releases a survey that measures public confidence in a variety of American institutions, including the police. In 2022, no institution (aside from the presidency) reflected a greater partisan trust gap than the police. A full 67 percent of Republicans expressed confidence in the police, versus only 28 percent of Democrats.

Why do Republicans and Democrats see the issue so differently?

The instant that a person or an institution becomes closely identified with one political “tribe,” members of that tribe become reflexively protective and are inclined to write off scandals as “isolated” or the work of “a few bad apples.”

Conversely, the instant an institution is perceived as part of an opposing political tribe, the opposite instinct kicks in: We’re far more likely to see each individual scandal as evidence of systemic malice or corruption, further proof that the other side is just as bad as we already believed….

There are good reasons for respecting and admiring police officers. A functioning police force is an indispensable element of civil society. Crime can deprive citizens of property, hope and even life. It is necessary to protect people from predation, and a lack of policing creates its own forms of injustice.

But our admiration has darker elements. It causes too many of us — again, particularly in my tribe — to reflexively question, for example, the testimony of our Black friends and neighbors who can tell very different stories about their encounters with police officers. Sometimes citizens don’t really care if other communities routinely experience no-knock raids and other manifestations of aggression as long as they consider their own communities to be safe.

French points out that whenever authority is combined with impunity, corruption and injustice will result. That’s as true of institutions on the Left as on the Right.

The police, after all, possess immense power in American streets, often wielded at the point of a gun. Yet the law systematically shields them from accountability. Collective bargaining agreements and state statutes provide police officers with greater protections from discipline than almost any other class of civil servant — despite the fact that the consequences of misconduct can be unimaginably worse. A judge-made doctrine called qualified immunity provides powerful protections against liability, even when officers violate citizens’ civil rights. Systemic police corruption and systemic abuse should not have been a surprise.

As French admits, he was surprised. He came late to the recognition that his reflexive defense of the “rotten apple” theory was wrong.

The lesson I’ve taken has been clear: Any time my tribe or my allies are under fire, before I yield to the temptation of a reflexive defense, I should apply my principles and carefully consider the most uncomfortable of thoughts: My opponents might be right, my allies might be wrong and justice may require that I change my mind. And it may, in all likelihood, require that I do this again and again.

This admirable example of intellectual honesty–the willingness to question one’s own assumptions and be guided by evidence rather than tribalism–is all too rare on both sides of the political divide. Good public policy–and good public officials–result from dispassionate analysis of evidence, not from a reflexive defense of our political “team.”

Here in Indianapolis, I guess we’ll see after the polls close whether pandering to what French calls the  “darker elements” of the Republican admiration for police pays off….

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A Not-So-Subtle Candidate

It’s primary election season, and in Indianapolis, the parties are wrapping up their races for the Mayoral nominations.

Indianapolis–like every urban area over 500,000–is a majority-Democratic city. When I first became politically active, it was a reliably Republican stronghold; I served as Corporation Counsel in a Republican administration headed by four-term Mayor William Hudnut. That GOP dominance lasted for thirty years.

Times–and Republicans–have changed.

Our current Mayor, Joe Hogsett, will be running for a third term. He’s a Democrat, he has lots of campaign money and he has the advantages that come with incumbency. (Of course, he also has the disadvantages that come with incumbency; in his case, a widely-criticized faintheartedness that his opponents are honing in on.) He’s widely favored to win the Democratic primary–and, given the significant Democratic tilt of the electorate, the general election.

The Republican primary is dominated by two candidates–Abdul Shabazz, a lawyer, media figure and longtime political pundit, and Jefferson Shreve, who is using a significant portion of the millions he made when he sold his business to blanket the airwaves. And when I say, blanket, I mean blanket–his ads are unavoidable. (I watch very little television, but I’ve seen what seems like thousands of them.) The ads ignore his primary opponent and focus on the Mayor, who–in Shreve’s telling–has presided over the “crumbling” of the city.

Shreve talks a lot about “leadership” (which he doesn’t define).  When I saw his spots the first few hundred times, I found them basically content-free, with the single exception of wildly exaggerated claims about crime–a problem that he proposes to solve with “leadership.”

Crime is the only actual issue raised by Shreve’s ads. Fair enough–it’s a real problem here as well as across the country, although we are hardly the hell-hole his ads describe. Shreve’s approach to the issue, however, is troubling. He will “let the police do their jobs.”

In an interview with Axios Indianapolis, Shreve was asked whether police reform has gone too far or not far enough. His response was instructive.

We don’t need police reform to make Indianapolis safer, we need more, better-paid police officers.

What that means comes through loud and clear.

Indianapolis, like all major cities, needs to police its police. There are many admirable officers in IMPD, and the force has made consistent good-faith efforts to educate its members about cultural differences and language barriers. But–again, like most cities–we’ve had episodes where officers have engaged in aggressive and/or inappropriate behaviors–times when they have acted in ways inconsistent with their training.

When I listen to the Shreve commercials, what I hear is “when I’m Mayor, I’m taking the restraints off. In my administration, the police will always be right. I’ll have their backs no matter what.

Perhaps that is an unfair reaction, but several other people I’ve spoken interpret it the same way. That is, I know, totally anecdotal, but it does reflect national differences between the parties on issues of policing.

The Republican emphasis on law and order has gone hand-in-hand with reflexive and uncritical support for the police. Republican politicians warn that even modest efforts to restrict police tactics will make communities less safe. They also tend to attribute criminal behavior to minorities–and to focus on street crime rather than corporate or other white-collar criminal behavior.

Democrats have been more supportive of criminal justice reform, increased police accountability and transparency. Democratic candidates tend to express concerns about police brutality, racial profiling, and excessive use of force, and to call for the implementation of policies to address those issues.

Criminal justice scholars tell us that aggressive policing approaches have been disproportionately applied in communities of color, and that, politically, “law and order” policies  purporting to be tough on crime are particularly appealing to White Republicans who hold negative attitudes towards minorities and immigrants. A 2018 study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that White Republicans were more likely than other groups to believe that police officers treat whites and minorities equally, despite almost daily disclosures to the contrary.

Republican politicians are far more likely to frame crime and violence as problems caused by minorities and immigrants– framing that has been shown to motivate the GOP base. Maybe I’m unduly cynical, but that’s the actual message I hear conveyed–a message underscored in the accompanying, grainy videos– by those unending Shreve advertisements.

On the other hand, perhaps I’m just overreacting to the sheer number of those fatuous commercials….Maybe there’s more to this candidate than his promise to “let the police do their jobs” and his assurances that such unquestioned support defines “leadership.”

Unless Abdul beats him on May 2d, or he runs out of money, I guess we’ll find out.

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