[Republicans and New York’s ‘Democratic’ mayor demagogue on
the issue, even as many real Democrats fail even to engage it.]
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ALTERCATION: GETTING REAL ON CRIME AND PUNISHMENT  
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Eric Alterman
December 23, 2022
The American Prospect
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_ Republicans and New York’s ‘Democratic’ mayor demagogue on
the issue, even as many real Democrats fail even to engage it. _

New York Mayor Eric Adams holds a press conference, November 23,
2022., NDZ/STAR MAX/IPx

 

IT WASN’T SO LONG AGO THAT EVEN SCHOLARLY SOURCES were insisting
that the Black Lives Matter protests had significantly shifted the
public discourse [[link removed]]
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
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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
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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.

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
[[link removed](1).pdf]
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
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bet by Republicans on ugly, Willie Horton-style
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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 [[link removed]] that “[a]ccording to
exit polls
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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
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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
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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 [[link removed]], “has
benefited more than 8,000 New Yorkers
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who returned home to their families, jobs, and communities instead of
awaiting trial in jail, and no credible evidence has been found
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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
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as the complete opposite approaches evident in the successful
responses by John Fetterman in Pennsylvania
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Illinois
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clearly demonstrated.

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
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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
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“10 Career Criminals Racked Up Nearly 500 Arrests Since NY Bail
Reform Began,” and that was followed by other
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reports
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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
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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
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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
[[link removed]] by science.
Academics
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government commissions
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and even many police chiefs
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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
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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_
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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.

===

* New York City; Crime and Politics;
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