Republicans Are Blowing Their Chance on Crime

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, July 11, 2021

 

If you want to really get to know a city, go straight from the airport or the city limits to its worst neighborhood. You’ll know it when you get there. There isn’t anything more authentic, more local, or more organic than crime.

 

But you may have to go looking for it to find it.

 

You could spend a month in Chicago or Philadelphia without seeing with your own eyes that those cities have serious crime problems. Until the catastrophic mayoralty of Bill de Blasio, the same was true of New York City: In my six years living in our nation’s greatest city in its happier, pre-Sandinista years, I saw very little visible, street-level crime. The same was mostly true of my years in Philadelphia, and the same has been mostly true of my considerably less extensive time in Chicago and Los Angeles.

 

And one of the reasons our political conversation doesn’t know what to do or say about crime is the fact that it is dominated by . . . people like me.

 

Of course I saw very little crime in New York: I lived in a neighborhood with a median income well into the six figures — next door to Tribeca, where the average household income is pushing seven figures. And New York City is a highly segregated place, both economically and racially: One in four New Yorkers is black, but in my neighborhood that number was one in 50 — almost 90 percent of the neighborhood was white or Asian. More than 80 percent were college graduates, and more than a third had a graduate degree. Of course there was some crime — somebody was selling my neighbors cocaine, and who knows how those Wall Street guys actually pay the rent? — but the streets were safe and quiet. In Philadelphia, I lived in the last of the old WASP enclaves, within walking distance of a cricket club and a polo field. Most of the misdemeanors were perpetrated by Villanova undergraduates. In New York, as in Philadelphia, Chicago, and many other cities, most of the violent crime happens in a small number of neighborhoods that are not overwhelmingly populated by high-income, college-educated white people.

 

(Especially if they play polo.)

 

Of course, the lawmakers, journalists, and intellectuals who dominate the policy-making conversation understand that at some abstract level. Sometimes, we even visit those high-crime areas, talk to locals, and write about it. Still, we mostly see that world as tourists or visitors. We don’t live there. In a perfect world, that wouldn’t matter — but we don’t live in that world and cannot rely on philosopher-kings to make the law. We have to rely on ourselves, with our own necessarily limited points of view. I saw crime in Philadelphia and Chicago and other places when I went there to write about crime and related issues. But crime is, to a considerable extent, its own world, rarely intruding into the daily lives of the people who have the power to change things in this country.

 

And in the immediate future, that yawning social divide is going to get wider as the need for members of the classes to share physical space continues to decline. Some people were shocked by the brazenness of a handbag hijacking at a San Francisco Nieman Marcus that was caught on video last week, but the scene is, unfortunately, not that unusual: I saw approximately the same scenario, including the line of waiting getaway cars, at a Saks Off Fifth in a tony Dallas neighborhood not very long ago. Similarly, I used to sometimes see some pretty shady stuff on my way to my office when I was working in Philadelphia’s central business district, and I was grateful for my concealed-carry permit.

 

But that was America B.C.: Before COVID. Fewer of us go to offices now, and the shutdowns accelerated the move to online commerce that already was under way. I don’t think I had ever ordered groceries online before the epidemic — now, I do. So do an increasing number of my neighbors. And big retailers are moving to the Internet even faster than consumers: Walgreens, that clearinghouse of urban necessities, is closing up shop in San Francisco in part because of the city’s uncontrolled crime. (We used to call it “shoplifting,” but it is now more accurately characterized as looting.) Target is closing California stores for the same reason. Other retailers are following suit.

 

And the high-income, educated professionals who have such an outsized footprint in our national life and now work from home in greater numbers than ever? They are really not going to notice — they don’t have an office to commute to, and they’re home to receive deliveries. Shopping malls are no longer the great agorai of American life, and the office is no longer the scene of our most intensive daily social interactions.

 

On top of the economic divide is a racial divide: Poverty plays out very differently in poor white rural America than it does in poor black urban and rural America and poor Latino urban and rural America — those Appalachian counties suffering from unbelievable poverty may have high rates of opiate addiction, but for decades they had crime rates that were substantially lower than the national average and violent-crime rates that were half the national average. That is still the case in places such as Lee County, Va., which has a poverty rate pushing 30 percent, a median household income about half the national average — and a violent-crime rate about half the national average. In much of Appalachia, even as rising crime rates elsewhere have driven the overall rural crime rate higher than the national average, violent-crime rates remain relatively low. At the same time, rural counties with largely black populations have some of the highest violent-crime rates in the country: Coahoma County, Miss., and Phillips County, Ark., have household incomes similar to Lee County’s, but in recent years they have at times outpaced high-crime cities such as St. Louis and Baltimore in their murder rates, lagging behind only Orleans Parish, La., in 2017.

 

Democrats already are hearing footsteps before the midterm elections, and crime is on their radar. But the Democratic Party is even more thoroughly dominated by college-educated urban/suburban professionals than the GOP is, and its progressive activists favor an anti-crime program that is mostly ludicrous: subsidies for make-work summer jobs in an economy in which the number of current job openings is almost identical to the number of currently unemployed workers; dumping money on social-work agencies and other full-employment programs for college-educated Democrats; more money for shiftless ATF bureaucrats who wouldn’t track down a straw-buyer if you pointed a gun at them; and, though it may only be whispered, funding city police departments.

 

The crime that captures the American imagination is violent, urban, and black. Black critics who have ruefully noted that the 21st-century opiate crisis has been treated remarkably more liberally than the 1980s–90s crack-cocaine epidemic are not wrong to point this out. It is an area where we do well to tread lightly.

 

But tread we must.

 

And any intelligent anti-crime program will have to begin with a recognition that there are in effect separate criminal ecosystems with distinct pathologies that operate differently in different communities: black, white, Latino, rich, poor, urban, suburban, rural, immigrant. We should understand these as genuinely distinct phenomena rather than approach them as “crime,” categorically, drawing only superficial correlations with community features. While it is easy to lampoon the stale “root causes” talk of vintage-sweater-vest progressivism, understanding what is actually going on with crime is going to require a deeper and richer engagement with local leaders — leaders with local knowledge — in a variety of communities that we might describe genuinely as “diverse.” Without that, we’ll end up with a policy-making conversation in which well-intentioned outsiders impose their own narrative — and, irrespective of whether they intend to, their own interests — on situations and communities with which they are only superficially familiar.

 

This is of particularly urgent political concern for Republicans, who have conceded the cities to the Democrats and now are slowly conceding the suburbs. The crime boom and progressives’ generally unserious response to it have been political gifts to them — or would have been, if they knew what to make of them. The misgovernment of New York City by Democrats kept that party out of the mayor’s office for most of a generation, during which time the city thrived under the leadership of Republican mayor Rudy Giuliani and quondam-Republican mayor Michael Bloomberg. With the city reeling, Republicans had an opening to offer a viable alternative to progressive incompetence. Naturally, they blew it, nominating celebrity vigilante and talk-radio loudmouth Curtis Sliwa, a minor asteroid in the galaxy of Trump-adjacent buffoonery, while the Democrats have put forward Eric Adams, a black retired police captain, sometime Republican, and vocal critic of the police-defunding movement. They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

 

Crime is not a standalone issue. It interacts in complex ways with concerns ranging from immigration to globalization and the cultural ascendency of social media, contributing to the sensation among many Americans — particularly older, white, rural Americans — that the country is out of control. (“Not out of control,” the critics will answer, “only out of their control.” And that’s not entirely untrue.) We have been here before: In The Search for Order, Robert H. Wiebe wrote that American politics was convulsed by “visions of a society unhinged” at “the end of the eighties . . . and [into] the early nineties.” He was writing about the 1880s and 1890s, but the story remains familiar.

 

It was not long ago that Republicans, including such conservative stalwarts as Rick Perry, were at the forefront of criminal-justice reform, taking seriously such issues as mental-health care and drug decriminalization. That moment seems to have passed, though there continue to be modest but important advances in reddish places such as Tennessee. If national Republicans have something more to say on this or any other issue than “Joe Biden is senile and the election was rigged!” then now would be an excellent time to speak up.