If you’ve been following the midterm election campaign, you might conclude that the most important problem facing America is crime. And you’d be wrong.
Polls show that voters are more concerned about inflation, abortion and immigration. Yet crime — and ubiquitous claims that it’s surging — command the spotlight.
What is it about criminal acts that get the juices running? Is it our innate sense of justice, a primeval thirst for vengeance, the vicarious thrill of violence? Journalists and mystery writers have has long catered to the enduring appetite for mayhem. As folks in TV news say, “If it bleeds, it leads.”
The unfortunate effect of such coverage is that anecdotal evidence can be misleading. Though Pittsfield is likely considered by many of its residents to be in the grip of a crime wave, the number of violent and property offenses there reported to the FBI in 2021 declined by 19 percent, from 341 to 276.
The current fuss over crime has less to do with news coverage than with electoral politics. One of our political parties seems to be making crime its signature issue. The party’s favored tribune, Fox News, has mentioned the C-word twice as often as any competitor this year.
Fair enough. A healthy republic maintains law and order, and a surge in crime is not to be ignored. But there’s one small problem: Crime may not be surging.
Latest numbers from the FBI show that violent offenses in fact dropped by 1 percent in 2020, the most recent year for which nationwide statistics are available. Murders rose, but robberies fell. Overall, crime was vastly lower than in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.
Nobody really knows why. Democrats say that growth in jobs, income and education levels over the years may have something to do with it, since crime has long been linked with poverty and the lack of economic mobility. Other factors may be a slow decline in consumption of alcohol, as well as recent moves by some states to legalize marijuana.
Republicans counter that many crimes, like rape and shoplifting, don’t get reported. Also, that there’s a lag in FBI data collection, so a recent crime wave would not show up in the statistics.
Moreover, Republicans assert that the Black Lives Matter movement and related demands to “defund the police” have hobbled cops and emboldened criminals. The GOP wants more police, more arrests, more prisons and stiffer sentences.
Inconveniently, we’ve tried all that. President Lyndon Johnson, hoping to outflank Republican critics, launched the tough and costly “War on Crime” in 1975. His successors kept up the fight. Criminal offenses declined for a while, but they soon rebounded and stayed high for nearly four decades.
Not only was the war a bust, but poor and nonwhite Americans bore the brunt of it. Crime went from being a result of poverty to a major cause. If you have a criminal record, you can’t get a decent job, and your likelihood of re-arrest soars.
And soared it did, partly due to a 1990s vogue for “broken windows” policing. That practice was based on the theory that mass arrests for minor offenses would — like fixing shattered windows — bring an infectious sense of order to dodgy neighborhoods. Instead, the experiment’s signal achievements were ruining lives and undermining local respect for law enforcement.
Faced with such failures, criminal justice reformers — most of them Democrats — started pushing for more focused solutions. Like diversion programs that steer people in psychiatric distress to mental health professionals instead of police. Also, bail reform, so nonviolent suspects don’t sit in jail for long periods just because they’re poor.
Some cities introduced programs to take guns off the street and build trust between cops and their communities. Some states began reducing sentences for victimless offenses, helping ex-inmates re-integrate into society and restoring voting rights for felons who’d served their time.
These gentler approaches do seem make a dent in crime rates. But then, as other research shows, so does hiring more police. So, who’s right: the party that wants to get tough on crime, or the party that prefers subtler measures?
They both are. The frustrating thing about crime is that there’s no single solution. You try a lot of stuff, keep what succeeds and ditch what fails. You make those conclusions based on evidence, not emotion or anecdotes.
Besides, we’ve had enough experience with crime to know what doesn’t work: turning it into an inflammatory, intensely partisan political issue. Now, that’s criminal.