By Christine Rosen
Thursday, October 27, 2022
Democrats enjoy painting Republicans as the party of denialism — denial of election results, climate change, racism, “the Science,” and the like. The charge is sometimes true, particularly in the case of election results, but Democrats are loath to acknowledge that denialism is a bipartisan malady. Just ask second-time Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who never conceded her 2018 loss and is no doubt preparing another non-concession speech to deliver after her likely trouncing in November.
But there is one arena in which denialism is not merely politically risky, but dangerous: crime.
The raw numbers are disturbing enough: FBI data show murders this year continuing to rise slightly after increasing nearly 30 percent in 2020 — although the data are only partial, as they do not include statistics from many local law-enforcement agencies. Thefts and robberies have increased 20 percent in the first half of 2022, according to the Council on Criminal Justice.
Even for people who have never been the victims of crime, a breakdown of order has been noticeable in many parts of the country: from smaller crimes, such as fare-skipping on mass transit and shoplifting, that go unpunished, to organized swarms of thieves descending on retail stores in the middle of the day and clearing out merchandise, random assaults on the street, and, in cities such as Washington, D.C., more than one carjacking a day so far this year, often committed by armed juveniles as young as 13. The general feeling is one of disorder.
Which makes the message from Democrats so baffling. Democratic candidates and officeholders have engaged in a sustained denial of the experiences of Americans living through this new crime wave. As they have done with inflation (claiming that it is merely “transitory,” or caused by Big Business, or would be cured by an “Inflation Reduction Act” that, in fact, only made it worse), on crime Democrats are keen to tell voters that what they are seeing with their own eyes isn’t real.
Worse, voters noticing crime invite the charge that they are ignorantly responding to racist “dog whistles” or are part of the problem by participating in the “systemic” forces that give rise to crime in the first place. In other words, voters worrying about crime are the problem, not the criminals whose behavior has stoked their understandable fears.
For example, in the wake of yet another murder on the New York City subway, and amid a spike in violent crime on mass transit, Mayor Eric Adams sounded glib, claiming, “We’re dealing with the perception of fear,” as if this perception were not grounded in harsh realities. Violent crime on New York City mass transit is up almost 40 percent since 2019.
The message of denial is echoed by many other Democratic luminaries. California governor Gavin Newsom sanctimoniously highlighted “America’s red-state murder problem” in a recent video, as did progressive Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner, who claimed that “these states in the United States that have a rate of homicide that is 40 percent higher are MAGA states, they are Trump states.”
As Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute has pointed out, this is deliberately misleading: “Criminal homicide is primarily (which does not mean entirely) a problem that resides within large cities. The 50 largest cities in America, home to 15.3% of the country’s population, saw 34.2% of the country’s murders in 2020; 34, or 68%, of the 50 cities had Democratic mayors in 2020, while only 14 (six of which were in blue states that voted for Biden in 2020) had Republican mayors.” In other words, the red-state murder problem is really a blue-city governance problem. No wonder elected Democrats who have controlled these cities for decades want to deny that it is happening.
Governor Newsom would do well to ponder the reason that Rick Caruso, the former Republican running as a registered Democrat for mayor of Los Angeles, was closing the gap in his race with his more liberal opponent, Representative Karen Bass: his consistent and tough message about the disorder and violent crime accompanying the surge in homelessness in Los Angeles. According to a late-September poll reported by the Los Angeles Times, “among likely voters, 91% said that homelessness affects their life directly or indirectly, and 55% said that the mayor can have a major effect in solving the crisis.”
Even when Democratic politicians do notice crime, they seem more eager to make preposterous excuses for it than to denounce the behavior. Recall that when crime rose precipitously in New York City in the summer of 2020, and video evidence emerged of gangs of thieves ransacking luxury retail stores and shoplifting everything in sight at neighborhood drugstores, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that they were merely misunderstood modern-day Jean Valjeans. “They go out, and they need to feed their child, and they don’t have money, so they feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry,” she told a virtual town-hall meeting.
This denialism has proven to be an election problem for some Democrats in the midterms, with strategists worried about the party’s vulnerability on crime. Alas, they remain more focused on crafting the correct narrative than on confronting the challenge.
A recent memo from the Washington, D.C.–based HIT Strategies, a firm that does public-opinion research geared toward “Millennials, people of color, LGBTQ+ and other underserved communities,” urged Democrats to “reimagine public safety” and had lots to say about how to combat the “‘crime rising’ narrative”: “If we want to actually protect people, and not just posture and signal about being tough on crime, we have to think about prevention, not punishment. We have to address the reasons for these problems instead of spending limited city budgets on flooding the streets with cops.”
But the fear many Americans have of becoming crime victims is not just part of a “narrative,” and “flooding the streets with cops” sounds appealing to an increasing number of residents of cities such as San Francisco, Portland, Ore., Seattle, and Washington, D.C., where violent crime, homelessness, and open-air drug use have become the new normal. Telling someone who was just mugged or whose child just stepped on human excrement or a used needle at a playground that what they really need to be worried about is ending poverty is condescending, not to mention impractical. Most Americans would gladly like to help end poverty and crime; in the meantime, however, they want their families to feel safe.
Moreover, efforts by Democrats to “reimagine” public safety have yielded policies such as ending requirements for cash bail, which returns violent felons to the streets while they await trial and where a large number of them re-offend. Law-abiding people in poorer neighborhoods are the ones most at risk of becoming their victims.
The frustration of even self-identified liberal and Democratic voters on the issue of crime has yielded some interesting bellwethers for the upcoming midterms. A recent poll by the Oregonian found that even the uber-progressive residents of Portland want more police, not “reimaginings” of police. Eighty-two percent of Portland-area voters told pollsters they want more officers walking the streets in the metro area. In mid October, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin visited Oregon to lend his support to Republican gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazan. His message? If you want to get a handle on crime, elect a Republican.
Of the Democrats, Youngkin said, “They are agents of chaos. They’re not trying to solve your problems — they’re trying to stay in power.” He urged Oregonians to “take back your cities, take back your law enforcement.” Contrast this with the gauzy messaging President Joe Biden offered a week earlier when he stumped for Drazan’s Democratic opponent, Tina Kotek. Oregon is on “the forefront of change — positive change,” Biden said. Evidently, the Obama-era “We are the change we seek” will magically resolve the crime, disorder, homeless encampments, and open-air drug markets on Portland streets.
In Wisconsin, the Republican incumbent for U.S. Senate, Ron Johnson, has aired a steady stream of advertisements about crime, a good move considering the results of an October Politico/Morning Consult poll showing that 64 percent of voters say crime is a “major issue” for them and that they trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle it. His opponent, Mandela Barnes, has embraced progressive talking points on crime, telling Wisconsin Public Radio that money should be spent on a “crisis intervener or a violence interrupter” rather than on police.
As lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, Barnes also publicly supported an end to cash bail, and in a recent debate with Johnson, he doubled down on the “root causes” answer to crime. Elected officials should “make sure that communities have the resources they need to prevent crime from happening in the first place,” he said.
Barnes’s message to voters, that the answer to their concerns about crime is to throw more money at “social workers” and “violence interrupters” — whose track record in dealing with violent crime is extremely mixed — and less at traditional policing, is straight out of the Democratic playbook. The HIT Strategies memo advised just that. But “reimagining public safety” with “police divestment” and “reallocation of resources” is merely rhetorical trickery. It is defunding police at a time when crime is rising. And to voters living in high-crime neighborhoods, the appeal to focus on “root causes” such as poverty reads as an excuse rather than a solution.
A few Democrats in tough races have implicitly acknowledged voters’ concerns about crime by distancing themselves from defund-the-police policies. In New Mexico, Democrat Gabe Vasquez had fully supported defunding the police when he was a city-council member; now, as a candidate for Congress, he claims he no longer supports defunding. Democrats Cheri Beasley, who is running for U.S. Senate in North Carolina, and Val Demings, who is challenging Senator Marco Rubio in Florida, have both openly opposed defunding police.
Even if Democrats end up moderating their message, they still aren’t speaking to the existing chaos in many cities and towns — and in the process, ironically, are denying the “lived experience” of their own voters. Residents of these places are responding to conditions on the ground — and correctly placing blame on local officials who are overwhelmingly Democrats. All politics is local, as Tip O’Neill famously observed, and crime is a hyperlocal phenomenon. When voters perceive it to be out of control, those perceptions matter, because fear is a strong motivational force.
In response to these fears, too many Democratic candidates talk about crime as if blame should be placed on the law-abiding (who have not done enough for the criminal class) rather than on those breaking the law. To law-abiding people, the system as it operates today, with no cash bail, lenient sentencing, and fewer resources for police officers, seems overwhelmingly to favor the irresponsible at the expense of the safety of the responsible. And the Democratic elected officials who for decades have deflected moral responsibility away from the individuals who commit these acts and pointed instead to vague systemic forces that supposedly cause them might find that voters have finally lost patience with this approach.
Voters don’t want to “reimagine” public safety. They just want to be safe.
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