Thanks for your patience while both I and this newsletter were on vacation. You can read a little bit about my time off here.
I just got back from visiting a friend who was held up at gunpoint over the weekend and roughed up badly enough to break her arm. Not surprisingly, she was feeling beat-up psychologically as well as physically. She talked about the fear that the kids who took her purse and keys would come to her house, the revenge fantasies that made her glad she didn’t own a gun, and her frustration with the police who showed no interest in following the path of the Air Tag in her stolen purse that could have given them the exact location of the muggers who were at that very moment on a spending spree at Target using her credit cards.
My friend and I both live in Oakland, California, a city that has long had a crime problem but which, for the past several years, has reached a level where the sheer brazenness of the criminality evokes the word lawlessness. To be honest, I squirm a little even typing that word, which evokes right-wing tropes about criminals running amok in “blue” cities and seems to demand the kind of law-and-order response I’ve spent my career critiquing.
Is There A Crime Problem?
And yet, pretending the problem doesn’t exist is equally problematic. I have read countless articles about crime recently that assert, with ample evidence, that the current crime rate is lower than it has been in the past and that it’s actually on a steep decline, despite a modest increase in violence during the pandemic.
Here’s reporter Judd Legum, talking about this trend in a June issue of his newsletter, Popular Information:
New data released this week by the FBI reveals that both violent crime and property crime have dropped precipitously this year. The data, which is subject to revision, compares crime in the first quarter of 2024 with crime in the first quarter of 2023. It shows substantial drops in every category, including murder (-26.4%), rape (-25.7%), robbery (-17.8%), and property crime (-15.1%).
So why are Americans so worried about crime? A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that 63% of American voters consider crime to be a “very important” issue and another 28% call it a “somewhat important” issue. But according to an article in Mother Jones magazine, a publication I sometimes write for and generally admire, this a perception problem.
Over the past five years, polls show that Americans have grown more worried about crime, regardless of whether their cities have become more dangerous. Nationally, reported rates of violence “appear to be going down, but public perception is that people don’t feel safe and that data doesn’t necessarily feel meaningful for people,” says [Pamela] Mejia at the Berkeley Media Studies Group. She cited a phenomenon called the “mean world” syndrome: When people consume a lot of news about crime, they become convinced the world around them is a dangerous place. . . The fear creates a communications challenge for progressive DAs, says Mejia, because research shows that people process information differently when they’re afraid. If voters “are in an acute phase of anxiety, they might not be receptive to hearing the data points” or talking about solutions—“until there’s some acknowledgement that the fear exists,” she says. Rather than being idealistic or pretending bad things don’t happen, she says, it’s more effective to “give people space to feel heard in their anxiety and to move through it.”
As is so often the case, there are thus two competing views of reality being offered by the Left and the Right. Trump is pushing the American Hellscape narrative. "You can't walk across the street to get a loaf of bread," Trump said in Michigan last month. "You get shot. You get mugged. You get raped. You get whatever it may be. And you've seen it, and I've seen it. And it's time for a change."
(This statement was, naturally, a precursor to a bunch of racist and xenophobic fictions about an immigrant-caused crime wave that I will refrain from repeating here.)
In response, the Left has pushed a counter-narrative that might be called “It’s All In Your Head.” In this view, concerns about crime are merely the product of misinformation, indoctrination, and the mental stickiness of the horrifying crime stories seen on the evening news. We may not feel safe, this line of reasoning goes, but we are safe.
All of which can feel a lot like gaslighting, at least to those of us who live in high-crime parts of the country. I don’t know that we need “acknowledgment that the fear exists” (as Pamela Mejia says in the MoJo piece) as much as we need real talk about how to respond to the causes of that fear.
Crime may be down in many parts of the country, but Oakland has the highest robbery rate of any city in the nation and the fourth highest rate of car theft. The situation is bad enough that the Oakland chapter of the NAACP has asked city officials to declare a state of emergency on crime.
My neighborhood is considered one of Oakland’s safer ones. All the same, my favorite neighborhood restaurant was broken into three times last year, and the owner of my local corner store parks his car on the sidewalk in front of the store’s pull-down metal gate to prevent yet another robbery team from driving straight through the gate and helping themselves to everything within. Around here, many businesses no longer take cash because they’re tired of being robbed, and nobody in their right mind would leave so much as a jacket in their locked car for fear of triggering a smash-and-grab break-in. Catalytic converter thefts are so common that mechanics recommend installing an anti-theft device under the chassis because trying to scare off the thieves while they’re under your car can get you shot. This summer, fourteen people were shot at the Juneteenth celebration at Lake Merritt, the second time in four years that there’s been a mass shooting at the same event, making me glad I’d bailed on my plans to walk over and meet my sister at what is usually a good-vibes gathering. In other words, the day-to-day reality of crime affects everything we do, and being told that there’s 15 percent less violent crime this year than last is cold-comfort indeed.
This isn’t “mean world syndrome”; it’s just a mean fucking world.
Where The Conversation Falls Apart
Even so, progressive politicians keep insisting that we need to stop worrying and learn to trust the data. Here’s an article from the local publication Oaklandside quoting Oakland Mayor Sheng Tao.
While the data show that crime is down, Thao said, it doesn’t necessarily change the public’s perception of safety.
“A lot of people in this space may not feel safe,” she said at the Fremont High School forum. “But just know that the data … is true. Crime is decreasing, and we inherited the crime, but we were able to hone in and get it under control.”
Except, it isn’t under control. And the data doesn’t tell the whole story. Nationwide, only 42% of violent crime and 32% of household property crime was reported to the police in 2022, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and the vast majority of those that were reported weren’t solved. In 2022, just 12 percent of property crimes and 37 percent of violent crimes were solved. Using FBI data, the Pew Research Center has found that the rate at which law enforcement agencies “clear” cases — either because the perpetrator has been charged or the victim declined to press charges—has declined precipitously. “Nationwide clearance rates for both violent and property crime are at their lowest levels since at least 1993,” their report explains.
Police have never been great at solving crime, which is why prevention is so important. But that doesn’t mean that we’re supposed to shrug off the crime that wasn’t prevented. If you feel like you have no recourse, that nothing will be done to address something wrong and frightening that happened to you, it’s not surprising that you feel unsafe. Research has found that one of the most important needs crime victims have is to know that they won’t be victimized again and that no one else will be either. If you were victimized in 2022 and the person who hurt you still hasn’t been caught, you’re probably not going to feel all that relieved by the news that crime rates have incrementally declined in 2024.
What Do We Mean By Law and Order?
It seems likely to me that one reason Americans put crime high on their list of concerns is because we live in an unusually violent country, where guns are plentiful, the streets are often empty, and the social safety net is badly frayed. Less crime, in other words, is still way too much. We have an out-of-control opioid epidemic, rising homelessness, and an astonishing amount of untreated mental illness. In wealthy regions like mine, we also have a stark and very obvious income differential, with very rich people and very poor people living side by side. Plus, our system of policing is so broken that people are faced with an unappetizing choice of either being Over-Policed or Under-Policed or Both, and the political discourse rarely explores the slogan-free territory between “Thin Blue Line” and “Defund the Police.”
While the right has long claimed crime as its particular bogeyman and has used it to demonize both cities and the people who live in them, the left seems to have no idea how to talk about the issue—or about other quality of life concerns—in a way that doesn’t invoke solutions like incarceration, surveillance, and giving free reign to the police. There is, overall, not just a failure of imagination when it comes to tackling crime, but also a failure of rhetoric. It’s as if we don’t know how to talk about crime in a way that centers community and commonality.
I was talking about this last month with a friend who served in Greece’s leftist SYRIZA government. In that conversation, he said something in passing that stuck with me for days: “Safety is a human right.”
The phrase stunned me, both because it seemed so evidently true and because it was so very far from the way the American left usually talks about crime. People on the right, however, invoke this idea all the time, albeit not in the same language.
“What people in New York and in L.A. and in Chicago are learning is that, if you don’t have security, there is no prosperity,” Matt Gaetz recently told the New York Times. “If you can’t let your loved ones walk down the street and engage in commerce and enjoy life, you already are a prisoner.”
I hate to find myself agreeing with Matt Gaetz on any topic, but he’s not wrong about this. Remove the references to commerce and prosperity and he’s basically saying the same thing my friend is saying: safety is a human right.
The reason you don’t often hear people on the left saying so is because they are worried about authoritarian solutions—with good reason. The argument Gaetz and others of his ilk are making is that there are only two options: either the bad guys are imprisoned or the good guys are.
But that’s not actually what Americans want. The Vera Institute, a think tank that advocates for alternatives to incarceration, recently did some polling on this very topic. They tested three kinds of political messages about crime to see which one resonated. The first was a “serious about safety” message that focused on investments in community solutions to prevent crime. The second was a message that focused—like politicians in my town—on the truth about declining crime rates and the need to give the police more resources. The third came straight from the GOP playbook: “a conservative message criticizing the ‘defund’ movement and vowing to restore ‘law and order.’”
The results? A majority of respondents said that the following statement was the one that came closest to their view:
We all want the same thing: safe communities to live in that are free of violence. We deserve leaders who are serious about safety and will fully fund things that are proven to improve people’s quality of life, like good schools, job opportunities, and affordable housing.
A successful test message that went even farther mentioned mental health and addiction treatment and “getting illegal guns off the streets.” It outpolled a GOP tough-on-crime message that emphasized increased police funding and longer prison sentences by 8 points.
In other words, voters who are concerned about crime aren’t actually asking to go back to the incarceration era. But they don’t want to be patronized or gaslit either. When people talk about crime, it’s partly a shorthand for the feeling that we live in a civil society that no longer feels civil. Safety isn’t just an absence of crime; it’s the presence of social connection, of resources, of solutions. Telling us that the problem is all in our heads isn’t going to help.
With a sigh,
Dashka
Upcoming Public Events
I’ll be at the Northern California Book Awards on Saturday, September 8 at 2pm at the San Francisco Main Library’s Koret Auditorium, and so will many other amazing authors. Here are some of the nominees:
I’ll be talking about Accountable, The 57 Bus, and banned books at the Central library in Houston, TX on September 26 at 10 am central time.
Members of the Berkeley High School Right Writers Club will interview me on stage at the North Branch of the Berkeley Public Library on October 8 at 6 pm, with an audience Q&A to follow.
Dr. Devorah Heitner and I will be teaching a virtual two-part workshop for educators and administrators on Accountability in the Digital World: Navigating the Complex Social Media Landscape in Partnership with our Students on November 12 and December 10 from 2-5 pm, sponsored by the California Teacher Development Collaborative.
I’ll be in Boston for NCTE on November 22-24, participating in a number of exciting sessions about media literacy, having challenging classroom conversations, and Escargot. Stay tuned for more details!
Re feeling valued: I spent two years in Switzerland, as a ten year old and as an 18 year old. Both times, I felt devalued. Yes, their streets are clean and the trains run on time. But one must adhere to the social mores. I was scolded by my teacher for not knowing the word pumpkin in French ("why don't you know it?"), scolded by a store clerk for trying on a piece of clothing without permission, and so on. As a teacher, I felt both valued and devalued, depending on the parent/principal involved. And society devalued me as a teacher. "Just a teacher." Luckily, most of the parents were respectful and valued me. In my hometown, I feel valued daily. Friendly shopkeepers, friendly neighbors, people offering to help, passersby smiling and saying hello. And surprising to me, I have felt valued as a retiree/older person. People show me respect and helpfulness and kindness.