Don't listen to centrist Democrats about crime
They're wrong on the policy and wrong on the politics.
Public Notice is reader funded. Support us by becoming a paid subscriber 👇
If President Trump installed a guillotine where the White House Rose Garden used to be and started kidnapping and then beheading one Democratic member of Congress every day at noon, in a matter of days there would be an article in The Atlantic titled “Beheading Opposition Politicians is Wrong, But Democrats Need to Rethink Their Opposition to the Death Penalty.”
The author would write, “Make no mistake: I don’t support publicly executing your political rivals. But if Democrats want to win close elections in the future, they have to position themselves in the moderate center of public opinion on the death penalty. Voters may have doubts about Trump’s methods, but he’s tapping into their real feelings, and Democrats should pay heed.”
That was essentially where the thoughts of a great many centrists turned after watching the federal government’s assault on the city of Washington DC. They began by accepting the laughable premise that the squads of masked goons setting up checkpoints and walking around the National Mall and other tourist-heavy areas of the nation’s capital are there to address “crime,” then pivoted to their default argument about any controversial issue, which is that the Democratic Party has become too liberal and must move to the center by adopting a warmed-over version of whatever Republicans are offering.
“For too many years, we were weak and in the wrong place on these fundamental issues of law and order,” said Jonathan Cowan of the centrist Democratic group Third Way. “Trump Is Right That DC Has a Serious Crime Problem,” one Atlantic headline read, with the inevitable “But he has the wrong answer for how to fix it” subtitle. Because they had not quite made the point, the magazine published another article, titled “Trump Gains When Elites Downplay DC Crime” a few days later.
“I am loath to defend Trump’s takeover of policing in DC,” the author wrote, but the “elites” simply must be taken to task.
“The diva of distraction is putting on a show,” Maureen Dowd of the New York Times told us. “But progressives should not fall into Trump’s trap and play down crime, once more getting on the wrong side of an inflammatory issue.” Josh Barro agreed, with a piece titled “Democrats Must Do Better Than Ignore Elevated Crime in DC.”
“Fighting crime in DC cannot end with Trump’s show of force,” wrote the Washington Post editorial board, in an editorial that included this scalding condemnation: “Trump’s efforts to put more law enforcement and armed troops on the streets of DC will probably have limited value.” The message is that Democrats have to both govern and communicate more like Republicans: Get a little tougher, and tell everyone you too want to crack down.
This is terrible advice. It’s wrong on the policy, and it’s wrong on the politics.
“Tough on crime” doesn’t work
Anyone who knows anything about crime will tell you that it’s an extraordinarily complicated issue, both in what produces it and how it can be reduced.
Crime is affected by everything from economics to housing to education to, yes, policing, but there is little evidence that being “tough” — that is, imposing long sentences for minor offenses or unleashing police to intimidate and harass residents — actually reduces crime.
But “tough” policies are attractive to politicians who are looking for crowd-pleasing solutions that don’t require much in the way of creativity or hard work. And that’s not just true of Republican places. One example: Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the NYPD instituted a policy of widespread “stop-and-frisk,” under which police had millions of aggressive, hostile interactions with New Yorkers, mostly Black and Latino men. When crime fell in the city during that time, advocates rushed to credit the policy. Then a series of lawsuits limited the practice, and the progressive Bill DeBlasio took over from Bloomberg in 2014 pledging to curtail it.
As stop-and-frisk was dramatically scaled back, critics kept predicting that crime would explode. Instead, crime in New York kept falling.
Even before then, criminologists had known that stop-and-frisk as a policy does little to reduce crime, but does erode the relationship between police and the citizenry. The same goes for many “tough” polices, including the militarization of police forces.
As one meta-analysis of studies of disorder policing — sometimes called the “broken windows” strategy of going after low-level misbehavior and signs of disorder as a strategy of reducing crime — concluded, “the strongest program effect sizes were generated by community and problem-solving interventions designed to change social and physical disorder conditions at particular places. Conversely, aggressive order maintenance strategies that target individual disorderly behaviors do not generate significant crime reductions.”
To sum up, aggressive policing doesn’t reduce crime, but it does make people resent the police. It has also been found to increase the fear of crime. This is a double bonus for authoritarian politicians like Trump, creating a feedback loop from which they benefit: Crackdowns make people more fearful, and that fear can be used as justification for more crackdowns.
Democrats are having real success
Even as Donald Trump tries to argue that every city run by Democrats (especially Black Democrats) is a hellhole where everything is getting worse, there are plenty of examples of Dem mayors making extraordinary progress on crime. What they have in common is that they have implemented comprehensive strategies that include the police but integrate a wide set of officials and community representatives to simultaneously address issues including housing, education, the availability of summer jobs and recreational opportunities for vulnerable young people, and more.
For instance, Mayor Michelle Wu created that kind of strategy in Boston, and the result has been a steady decline in crime; in 2024, the city registered only 24 homicides, the lowest number since 1957. Homicides are up somewhat this year, but crime in almost every other category — including robbery, assault, burglary, and car theft — is down from last year. Perhaps not surprisingly, Wu is extremely popular and looks to be cruising to reelection this November; a recent Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll showed her with a 66 percent approval rating and leading opponent Josh Kraft (the son of the owner of the New England Patriots) by 30 points.
Or consider Baltimore, long used by conservatives as an example of out-of-control crime. Mayor Brandon Scott was elected in 2020 promising to reduce crime in the city, and after taking office his administration created a comprehensive strategy built on three pillars: “(1) Public Health Approach to Violence, (2) Community Engagement and Interagency Coordination, and (3) Evaluation and Accountability.”
What comes through reading about these programs is that they require a great deal of coordination, are extremely labor-intensive, and take time to work. But the effects in Baltimore have been dramatic: The city had 334 homicides in 2022, 262 in 2023, 202 in 2024, and only 86 so far this year.
Which might lead one to ask: Why isn’t every Democrat holding up a success story like Baltimore’s to tout the superiority of the progressive approach to crime? The answer may be that most Democrats profoundly misunderstand the politics of the issue.
The politics of crime are not what centrists would have you believe
Republicans, centrist Democrats, and pretty much the entire political media believe that the politics of crime are simple: The public wants politicians to be “tough,” which means harsh policing and punishments, and Democrats fail when they show themselves to be “weak.” But that’s not actually what polling and history show.
It’s true that as in many different areas, the Republican position is easier to put on a bumper sticker and appeals to the darkest human impulses. But if toughness was all that mattered, then Donald Trump — who for years has expressed his desire for more police brutality — would be the most popular president in history on the issue of crime. But in 2024, he had only a small advantage over Kamala Harris on the issue — and it depended on what policy was being asked about. Today, by 56-44 percent, Americans say they don’t have confidence in Trump’s ability to “effectively handle law enforcement and criminal justice issues,” according to the Pew Research Center.
Perhaps what’s going on is that even though they don’t particularly like what they’re seeing from Trump, the public does in fact think that Democrats are weak — but not because the party’s preferred policy solutions lean more toward comprehensive approaches to crime. Instead, Democrats communicate weakness in ways that have nothing to do with policy details.
For instance, the idea of defunding the police, which got a lot of discussion after George Floyd’s murder, is not all that popular — but there are also virtually no elected Democrats in national office who advocate for it. Yet in every recent election, Republicans have lied about that fact, claiming that the whole party and pretty much all of its candidates running anywhere want to fire all the cops. And how do too many Democrats react to that charge? By condemning progressives in their own party, and sometimes the party as a whole, for being too weak on crime.
But that only reinforces the two key Republican arguments: that what matters is whether you’re strong or weak, and that Democrats are the weak ones. But the truth is that nothing makes you look weaker than cowering in the face of attacks and not showing the courage of your own convictions.
It’s true that Democrats have the harder job here. They’re the ones who care about governing and are held to account for whether it succeeds, which means they have to design and implement complex policies. Trump and Republicans, on the other hand, can just send out a bunch of thugs to walk around harassing people, which takes almost no thought or planning and produces lots of dramatic video, communicating that they’re being tough. They can rely on the media to sensationalize individual crime stories (especially at election time) and accept that Republicans are acting out of good-faith concerns; you’ve probably noticed how disconcertingly common it is for coverage of Trump’s authoritarian attack on DC to proceed from the premise that its purpose actually has something to do with crime.
But Democrats can start turning things around by holding up the people in their party who are actually working hard on this issue and succeeding. Brandon Scott talking about how he actually brought down crime in Baltimore is more effective than the blathering of some “strategist” whose answer to everything is that Democrats should act like Republicans.
The right response to Trump’s authoritarianism isn’t to say “maybe he has a point.” It’s to attack him and his allies for their dishonesty, their thuggishness, and their failures. That’s how Democrats avoid looking weak.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate this edition, please do your part to keep Public Notice free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading.
I agree with pretty much everything in the article, but would add that the media, local and national, shape the public's perception of crime just as much as aggressive policing. I live near Chicago, yet another city governed by a Black mayor (Brandon Johnson) where crime is declining. But you wouldn't know that from local news broadcasts, which usually lead with live coverage of at least three violent incidents because the story "there were ten fewer murders in the city than on this date a year ago" doesn't generate many exciting visuals. So suburban and rural voters across America believe that nearby big cities are war zones and will quietly (or not-so-quietly) approve when Trump imposes martial law on every municipality with a population over 500,000.
Economic inequality is the elephant in the room.
We have an enormous amount of people working full time that struggle to maintain financial equilibrium. One emergency like a health problem and they are under water with little in the way of resources to regain their footing. That is getting worse.
We talk about the identity crisis with young men, but don’t address the biggest root cause. These guys will never be able to buy a house, have a decent car or get the girl of their dreams.
Then we clutch our pearls about the complexity of solving problems with young men.
The federal minimum wage is $7.25. And at the other end of the scale we have individual billionaires with hundreds of billions of dollars!
Ya think these young men don’t seethe with resentment about that?
Do you believe these people feel like they have a stake in America? The disenfranchisement of young men in the USA is a tinder box. If we want to lower the crime rate, start there.
The resentment is real and growing.
Centrist Democrats enable this.