Ron Adar/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images
New York Police Department officers respond to a shooting in Times Square, May 8, 2021.
Former cop and former Giuliani-supporting conservative Eric Adams won New York’s Democratic mayoral primary chiefly because voters named the rise of “crime” as by far the most important issue facing the city. True, Adams had other things going for him: plenty of union support, a strong base as Brooklyn borough president, and a deal he cut with leaders of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community to allow their yeshivas to continue to fail to provide their students with competent secular educations (apparently outbidding Andrew Yang on that score). But it was almost certainly Adams’s message about “public safety” that carried him across the finish line over his closest competitors, centrist bureaucrat Kathryn Garcia and progressive Black civil rights lawyer Maya Wiley.
Thing is, voters almost always have misguided impressions of the state of violent crime, both locally and nationally. This is due to the politicians who demagogue the topic and the local media—especially on television—that hype up individual incidents, telling the story that their sources in the police departments want told. The common message of the pols and the media can be summed up in five words: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
In November 2020, the Gallup organization published a study demonstrating that “Perceptions of Increased U.S. Crime [were] at Highest Since 1993,” even though crime was nowhere near its highest levels. In the past, Gallup noted, a perceived rise in crime was usually felt by those who associated themselves with the party out of power. In 2016, Republicans en masse bought into Trump’s hysterical campaign to demonize America’s cities and people who lived in them, especially immigrants and minorities. Recall his horrific inauguration speech, in which he painted a false picture of what he called “American carnage.” It was a curtain-raiser for the rest of his presidency, during which he continued to lie about rising murder rates even as violent-crime rates declined in the nation’s largest cities.
Voters almost always have misguided impressions of the state of violent crime, both locally and nationally.
This malicious nonsense reached a gruesome crescendo during the 2020 Republican convention, when the Trumpists chose New York City as the alleged ground zero of an American Hellscape in which public safety was a thing of the past. One convention speaker, New York cop union president Patrick Lynch, tried to evoke a phony atmosphere of terror, slandering his city and blaming the “radical left” for having “hijacked and dismantled the criminal justice system,” and for having “passed laws that made it impossible for police officers to do our job.” They did this, he explained, because their “goal” was violence and chaos. “What they want is a justice system that stops working altogether … wherever Democrats are in power, the radical left is getting exactly what they want.”
Singing from the same songbook was the possibly even more lunatic Rudy Giuliani, who warned viewers, “Don’t let the Democrats do to America what they have done to New York.” Rudy told a right-wing fairy tale about an imaginary “New York City, once described as America’s crime capital, [which] had become by the mid-1990s America’s safest large city. Now today, my city is in shock. Murders, shootings, and violent crime are increasing at percentages unheard of in the past. We’re seeing the return of rioting and looting. During riots, this Democrat mayor, like others, has often prevented the police from making arrests. And even when arrests are made, liberal, progressive DAs released the rioters so as not to disrupt the rioting.”
In fact, everything this often drunken troll said was a lie. Violent crime in NYC had been in decline for years. The city was experiencing far fewer murders than it did when he was the mayor in the 1990s. Murders did spike in the first six months of 2020—as they did almost everywhere in America at the beginning of the pandemic—but remain on pace to be far lower than they were at the end of Giuliani’s time in office. What’s more, the city is in the midst of “a 2 percent drop in overall reports of all major crimes, the police say. Rape reports, for instance, are down 25 percent, and grand larceny has dropped 20 percent.” And while there had been a recent rise in killings and in gun violence, it came “after seven years of record-breaking calm when murders dipped to below 300 one year—2017—for the first time since the 1950s.”
J.D. Vance, the Republican Yale Law School grad and venture capitalist who is enjoying massive funding from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel for his hapless Ohio Senate campaign, recently trotted out some of the same bullshit with a tweet that read, “Serious question: I have to go to New York soon and I’m trying to figure out where to stay. I have heard it’s disgusting and violent there. But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?” Alas, there is no point in bothering Vance with the truth, but Ohioans might be interested in learning that the rate of murders per 100,000 residents in NYC is now 5.31, while in Vance’s hometown of Cincinnati, it’s 8.43. (And don’t even ask about Columbus.) Are Ohio Republicans as dumb as Vance gives them credit for being? We’ll see.
“The perception of high crime is driven more by media and politicians than by personal experience or day-to-day observation.”
As to the unhelpful role of the media—especially local media—in perpetuating this fantasy, I found this Twitter thread by Nicholas Grossman, a professor of international relations at the University of Illinois, which shed a great deal of light on the relationship between media hype of crime and the false perceptions of the people who consume it. You will need to click on the link to see the charts, but as he notes, violent crime across the United States fell between 1993 and 2016—a decline that the public didn’t always notice. “You can see the actual drop in crime reflected in perception at first, but then perceived crime rose as actual violent crime kept declining.” Grossman also finds an “increasing gap between those who say crime is rising nationally and those who say it’s rising locally: about half of the people who believe it’s rising nationally now say it’s not rising in their own communities.” All this, Grossman says, “strongly suggests that the perception of high crime is driven more by media and politicians than by personal experience or day-to-day observation.”
The problem of the gap between the perceptions of crime rates and actual crime rates has long interested scholars. Here’s a paper on “The News Media’s Influence on Criminal Justice Policy: How Market-Driven News Promotes Punitiveness” that argues: “The news media are not mirrors, simply reflecting events in society. Rather, media content is shaped by economic and marketing considerations that frequently override traditional journalistic criteria for newsworthiness.” The Center for American Progress also notes that “Black Americans, and black men in particular, are overrepresented as perpetrators of crime in U.S. news media. This is especially true when looking at the incidence of violent crime. For example, one study of late-night news outlets in New York City in 2014 found that the media reported on murder, theft, and assault cases in which black people were suspects at a rate that far outpaced their actual arrest rates for these crimes.”
All of the above is not the only reason New York Democrats chose a “law and order” candidate over more progressive ones. But these distortions are going to keep happening until more liberal Democrats find a way to step up and deal with it.
I spend most of my scholarly energy these days studying the politics and culture of American Jewry, and so I was looking forward to gleaning some contextual information from the Public Religion Research Institute’s new report, “The American Religious Landscape in 2020.” This turned out be a problem, however. At one point, the study tells me that American Jews are 1 percent of the population, and in another they are 1.9 percent. (The latter is likely true.) I also read that “About one in five (22%) Jewish Americans identify as Republican, 44% identify as Democrat, and about three in ten (31%) identify as independent,” but in the charts the report provides, the numbers are 26 percent, 64 percent, and 9 percent, respectively, which are almost certainly far more accurate.
This coming Saturday at 2:30 p.m. ET, I will be participating in a panel with author Marie Arana, the literary director at the Library of Congress and former editor of the Washington Post Book World, entitled “Cancel Culture in Today’s Literary Landscape,” as part of the 1455 “Celebrating the Art of Storytelling” literary festival. My panel was inspired by this Altercation column of April 23. You can find out how to register for the talk here.
I’ll be back soon, I promise, with more music, but in the meantime, please do yourselves a favor and listen to the terrific historical podcasts made by Joe Alterman with Ben Sidran. I am not related to Joe; I might be more talented and better-looking if I were. You may know Sidran if you know even a little about jazz, but you might not know that he has a doctorate in American studies and is the author of the fine study There Was a Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream, which has been recently updated and reissued. In the meantime, there’s this, in “honor” of Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos.
