Altercation: Getting Real on Crime and Punishment

Republicans and New York’s ‘Democratic’ mayor demagogue on the issue, even as many real Democrats fail even to engage it.

by

It wasn’t so long ago that even scholarly sources were insisting that the Black Lives Matter protests had significantly shifted the public discourse and “incited a change in public awareness of BLM’s vision of social change and the dissemination of antiracist ideas into popular discourse.” Even so, that was then. It sure wasn’t the case during the November 8 election, at least in New York, where Democrats cratered and cost their party control of the House of Representatives in significant measure owing to exactly those issues on which BLM supporters sought to change peoples’ minds.

True, the “anti-crime” hysteria was undertaken in the service of electioneering, as Fox News’s coverage of crime “fell off a cliff” once the votes were counted. But the hyping of scary crime stories has long been a staple of both local news and conservative political campaigns. Back in July 2021, Altercation addressed “The Roots of Crime Hysteria” in the context of the New York City mayor’s race, a phenomenon that helped deliver the vote to the Republican-in-Democrat’s-clothing Eric Adams. He now continues to trumpet this narrative to the detriment of Democrats both statewide and nationally.

Read more Altercation

What is so infuriating is the fact that not only are the statistics employed by the mainstream media often wrong, but so, too, are their assumptions about how voters view the issue and what they want from their leaders who seek to address it. The Vera Institute recently undertook a deep dive into this question and found that voters continue to view the problem from a multiplicity of perspectives that require a far more sophisticated response than simply telling Democrats to either change the subject or embrace the Republican narrative of being “tough on crime.” What they found was that the country did not follow the example of New York. Instead, “the $157 million bet by Republicans on ugly, Willie Horton-style crime scare tactics during election season to take down Democratic candidates did not pay off. Many factors were at play for why, unlike in years past, crime fearmongering as a national campaign strategy failed the GOP.”

Vera found that “[a]ccording to exit polls, and consistent with Vera’s crime and safety exit survey results, other issues—the economy and abortion—rose to the top for most voters.” In fact, “3 out of 5 survey respondents said this year’s election campaigns did not affect their awareness of crime as an issue. But exit polls also found that crime and safety mattered most to 11 percent of voters in making their voting choices.” But the polls also led to the conclusion that Democrats need to emphasize “safety” above all, before even beginning to discuss issues like fairness, equity, better mental health support, etc. when addressing voter concerns. This is especially true because “this issue is a high priority for key segments of the Democratic base, including 73 percent of Black women voters and 58 percent of Black men voters.”

The issue that Republicans—and many in the media—most exploited in New York was the state’s 2019 bail reform law, which eliminated the use of cash bail for most misdemeanors and some nonviolent felony charges, for people charged with crimes while out on parole or probation—or those who have pending felony charges or convictions. The law, according to Vera, “has benefited more than 8,000 New Yorkers who returned home to their families, jobs, and communities instead of awaiting trial in jail, and no credible evidence has been found to link the reform to increases in crime.” But with a major assist from Mayor Adams, it was desperately demagogued by Republicans, who blamed it for the rise in violent crime in the city. Democrats proved unwilling to defend the law, and instead either changed the subject to more popular topics or embraced Republican-lite solutions. This failed, naturally. One of the few clichés about politics that is actually true is that “it’s not what you say about the issues; it’s what the issues say about you.” Run away from your own positions and voters will accurately dub you an untrustworthy coward (see under “Maloney, Sean”), as the complete opposite approaches evident in the successful responses by John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and J.B. Pritzker in Illinois clearly demonstrated.

The issue that Republicans—and many in the media—most exploited in New York was the state’s 2019 bail reform law.

Meanwhile, not only does Eric Adams continue to reify the Republican rhetoric on all crime-related issues, he also is going to great lengths to make the problem appear worse than it is. For instance, Gothamist reported that according to a motion filed by public defenders in Manhattan Supreme Court, Mayor Eric Adams and the NYPD used “sealed criminal court records in a political move meant to argue that bail reform was causing a rise in repeat crime.” Naturally, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post blew Adams’s publicity stunt into a story headlined “10 Career Criminals Racked Up Nearly 500 Arrests Since NY Bail Reform Began,” and that was followed by other reports tying repeat offenders to the failure of bail reform. Ironically, as the lawsuit notes, they picked the wrong ten unnamed offenders, who, it turned out, were actually eligible to be held on bail despite the 2019 law that so upset Adams and the NYPD. (Adams, Gothamist also reports, has, in addition, “shown no signs of moving on a major campaign promise to publish a list of police officers the NYPD is watching for violent or otherwise unseemly behavior.”)

The net result of the misreporting of both the rise in crime itself as well as the hype it enjoys across so much of the mainstream media is that, as Phillip Atiba Goff, professor of African American studies and a professor of psychology at Yale University and a founder and the CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, explained in a New York Times op-ed, “The Root Cause of Violent Crime Is Not What We Think It Is.”

He notes that “[t]he tough-on-crime narrative acts like a black hole. It subsumes new ideas and silences discussions of solutions that are already making a difference in people’s lives. And it provides bottomless succor to politicians who are more interested in keeping themselves in power than keeping people safe.” Instead, he posits that a “message of ‘strong communities keeping everyone safe’ [can] open the minds of Republican voters, Democratic voters and many in between. It is backed up by science. Academics, government commissions and even many police chiefs have agreed with the substance behind the message for decades. And there is evidence, including the results of last month’s midterms, that it can work politically on a larger scale.” (Please do click on his op-ed to see examples, with evidence for the claim that these policies are better for both communities and politicians seeking re-election, as there are too many such citations for me to describe in the space I have here.)

From a purely political standpoint, I thought New York’s public advocate (and Brooklyn College alumnus) Jumaane Williams made a strong case in The Nation for how progressives “must [and can] do a better job speaking to people’s fears and presenting an affirmative case for our workable, effective policies on public safety.” Williams notes that “progressive justice reforms have been shown again and again to not be a cause of this increase in crime, regardless of what tabloids and elected officials have counterfactually insisted. Hyperbolic coverage of crime has spurred voters to align with the party that has long been—erroneously—perceived as better on these issues.” What’s more, under the “disingenuous fearmongering is real fear. Under the statements and statistics are real individuals and families facing pain and loss as a result of violence in their neighborhoods.” And, “Too often, progressives are characterized as not caring about that pain, because, too often, progressives are quick to minimize the realities of crime and violence because of the compassion inherent in progressive ideology and policy.” Again, read his piece to get the full benefit of his argument.

In news completely unrelated to crime hysteria, media hype, and unfair blame attached to the city’s poor and nonwhite populations, there’s a new entrance at 110th Street to Central Park dedicated to the exonerated “Central Park Five” called “The Gate of the Exonerated.” It was dedicated this week, 20 years after five Black and Latino men were wrongfully convicted of rape and later exonerated using DNA evidence. They were arrested as teenagers amidst a panic over their alleged 1989 gang rape of the famed “Central Park Jogger”; at the time and even still today, our idiot ex-president apparently stands by his call to give them the death penalty. (The jogger’s name is Trisha Meili, who later authored a memoir that dealt with the event. We spent two years in graduate school at Yale in the early 1980s and I both liked and admired her.)

“What’s new in the world of We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel?” you ask. Not nearly as much as there should be, in my unbiased opinion. But I did write this piece about Israeli attitudes toward American Jews in Haaretz, and this piece about the bad bargain right-wing Jews made in giving a pass to right-wing Christian antisemites for so long in The Nation. Oh, and in this week’s New Yorker, there’s a lovely brief review that employs the words “fearless,” “scrupulous,” and accurately notes that my book’s purpose “is not to flatter readers, no matter their ideological camp, but, rather, to scrutinize mythologies and fairy tales.” Take a look.

Now for some holiday cheer:

(By the way, the 94-year-old Lehrer, a mensch of mensches, just released all of his songs into the public domain—though he says it’s temporary.)

A second Trump administration will cement a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court for a generation, and put our collective future in the hands of someone who will be virtually unchecked by our institutions. The country has shifted rightward, and the reverberations will ensue for potentially the next few decades. In this climate, a robust independent media ecosystem will be more important than ever. We're committed to bringing you the latest news on how Trump's agenda will actually affect the American people, shining a light on the stories corporate media overlooks and keeping the public informed about how power really works in this country.

Quality journalism is expensive to produce, and we don't have corporate backers to rely on to fund what we do. Everything we do is thanks to our incredible community of readers, who chip in a few dollars at a time to make our work possible. Any amount you give today will help us continue reporting on what matters to our democracy.

You can help power this newsroom by making a one-time donation or by becoming a member today.