If there’s a Republican running for office where you live, chances are good you’ve heard about the crime wave in your city, state or region.
Here in California, these crime wave claims, all-too-often repeated verbatim in news media, are said to be caused by police departments stretched thin, defunded by Democrats, and hamstrung by laws aimed at criminal justice reform.
San Diego’s proactive policy of including licensed psychiatric techs on mental health calls is cited in an Associated Press 2022 story (Headline: ‘Overwhelmed’: Cops combat violent crime as ranks dwindle) as an example of measures police departments are taking to combat personnel shortages.
In the District 4 supervisor contest, candidate Amy Reichert has “public safety” as a central tenet of her candidacy. Violent crime is up, she says. The Sheriff’s Department (which doesn’t patrol most of her district) is short staffed. And criminals should serve their time and not be eligible for early release when they still pose a threat to public safety.
She’ll do this by opposing the “defund the police” movement and using her position to promote recruitment.
The problem with Reichert’s claims is that they’re fabricated, taking small data out of context, and playing to the mistaken belief by a majority of Americans about crime on the rise. (Crime has been falling over the past few decades.)
Here’s a snip from a city press release:
San Diego Police Chief David Nisleit will be joined by Mayor Todd Gloria on Thursday to release the 2022 annual crime statistics, revealing an overall decrease in crime and keeping San Diego as one of the safest big cities in America. Overall crime citywide in San Diego decreased 7.5% in 2022.
And then there’s this bit of news via Popular Information:
Comprehensive data for 2022, released by the FBI on Monday, tells a very different story. And preliminary data suggests that 2023 could feature one of the most dramatic declines in violent crime in modern history.
In 2022, homicides were down 6.1%, according to FBI data. The nation’s murder rate, the data shows, was 6.3 per 100,000 people. This figure is below 2020 levels, but slightly higher than 2019. Still, since 1991, the rate of murder has dropped 36%.
Nationwide, the FBI reports that the violent crime rate, including homicide, dropped “an estimated 1.7%” in 2022 compared to the year before. The rate of violent crime is the lowest it has been since 2014, and is nearly half of what it was in 1991 and 1992.
Data for 2023 shows a continued decrease, according to data from the first half of the year. According to crime analyst Jeff Asher, quoted in the Popular Information reporting:
Asher finds that preliminary data indicates that the nation is witnessing the “largest annual percent changes in murder ever recorded.” Murder, for example, was “down about 12 percent year-to-date in more than 90 cities that have released data for 2023, compared with data as of the same date in 2022.” While Asher acknowledges that these trends could change somewhat, this number is still “astonishing.”
There has, I should note, been an uptick in property crime (still below levels seen two decades ago). And there will always be jumps and drops in crime reporting. The things to use as a basis for understanding community safety are long term trends, which continue to decline.
What you might see on discussion forums about crime like NextDoor and Citizen is driven by the economic model of creating engagement through fear.
By the way, a study by the Economic Policy Institute found that wage theft cost workers nearly $50 billion annually, while property accounted for roughly $30 billion in economic losses in 2019. It should surprise nobody that the 13,293 law enforcement agencies reporting to the FBI don’t include white collar crimes victimizing working class people.
A not-so-curious jump (11%) in auto theft is driving this category. Which, as it turns out, is focused on certain models of Kias and Hyundais, companies that refused to install theft protection. Videos gaining wide circulation on Tik Tok and other platforms have triggered a crime fad with easy as pie instructions for stealing those cars with nothing less than a screwdriver.
Crime waves as described in political campaigns (and most of the media) are, in fact, calls to incite a moral panic, as described in Alex Karakatsanis’ Copaganda Newsletter:
Moral panics about different kinds of crime almost always lead to vast expansion of the machinery of state repression, whether they be this absolutely bizarre “crime wave” reported by the press in Victorian England or contemporary U.S. moral panics like the 1980s “crack babies,” the 1990s “super predators,” or the absurd 2021-2022 “organized retail theft.”
They can also be acute creations of a particular news moment, such as when local and national media did 309 articles about a single Walgreen’s shoplifting incident in 2021.
So what’s the point of these induced moral panics?
Typically, the political response is to increase funding for street level law enforcement. Politicians who don't agree or question proposed strategies involving bigger appropriations can expect a propaganda campaign (usually funded by police unions) accusing them of being soft on crime.
San Diego City Council member (and candidate for the County Board of Supervisors) Monica Montgomery-Steppe is a recent local recipient of this treatment in the months prior to the August primary. Fortunately, the police unions failed in their effort to get somebody they considered more ‘friendly’ on the November ballot.
Putting the tough on crime routine into the general context of politics, it’s a tarred brush wielded by those who believe the world would be a better place if governmental agencies engaged in more “sorting” of undesirables to facilities constructed by government (and run by private corporations). Ultimately, it’s NIMBYism writ large.
Most politicians are not going to come out and say those things. Instead, we’re served weasel words about dangerous criminal justice reform or herding the city’s homeless into a camp.
By injecting fear into discussions about the ways and means we choose to live by, the fact that the criminal justice system is infrastructure gets glossed over.
It’s fair to compare the county jail, for instance, to local roads, where potholes might or might not get patched provided there is public pressure to do so.
Consider the investigation into the death of inmate Jerrell Dwayne Lacy last year, as detailed by Jeff McDonald in today’s Union Tribune. (highlighting added by me)
Just over a week later, on the morning of the day he died, Lacy “denied any signs and symptoms of COVID during a group health check,” investigators said. But a little more than an hour after that, sheriff’s records show Lacy was escorted back to the jail medical unit.
“In an interview with homicide detectives, Deputy 1 stated, ‘the entire module in (housing unit D) was yelling man down ,’ ” investigators wrote. “Deputies entered and escorted Lacy to third floor clinics. Jail video surveillance showed when Lacy exited his cell, he fell to the ground.”
The CLERB report said one incarcerated man told investigators that 30 minutes passed between the time Lacy collapsed and deputies arrived to help. Another man said the delay was more like 45 minutes; a third person said the call box in his cell was not functioning.
The Sheriff’s Department was unable to provide video of events prior to 11:06 a.m. on the day Lacy died, the review board report said.
Generally speaking we/government made decisions about crime based on what “everybody knows” more than a century ago. If crime is declining over the long haul with less gun enforced personnel on the streets, maybe it’s time to reconsider that proposition.
This will be a difficult process, not unlike what the feds are trying to do with the mono or duopolies dominating our economic landscape. Powerful forces have rigged the process at almost every turn, and when a reformer promises change the attacks get personal. And there’s always a ginned up crime wave at hand, along with the mythology of defunded agencies and dead black people (typically George Floyd these days) holding law enforcement back.
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More News to Peruse
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It's Now Open Season on Seniors Via Daily Kos (The really big disadvantage of Medicare Advantage; just ask those 30,000 patients Scripps Health won’t be treating, thanks to insurers refusing to cover care.)
The business model for these insurers is to make money, not to provide good quality health care. The US ranked 23rd among countries for its public health system, according to US News and World Report. The OECD 2023 report shows that the US spends more on administrative costs, but less on long-term healthcare, than other wealthy countries. The reason for this is simple; our health care is being run by private insurance and equity firms, there is not universal coverage, barriers exist for those who cannot afford insurance, etc.
50% of seniors are now enrolled in MA programs, threatening the foundation of Medicare itself, turning a popular public health program into a money-making enterprise for profit-driven insurance companies.
The goal of MA programs is to capture 100% of those over 65. When this is accomplished, there will be no incentive other than profit for companies running these plans. There is every reason to believe that our current ranking of 23 will fall even lower.
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Conservative Southern California school board members face likely recall over firing of superintendent Via Politico
The as-yet unscheduled recall election signifies trouble for not just Miner and Ledesma, but also a batch of newly seated Republican school boards in Southern California that have embraced cultural wedge issues in recent months.
Organizers of a recall campaign in Temecula, where trustees also fired the superintendent and adopted a new transgender student policy, have until Dec. 8 to qualify a recall election in that city northeast of San Diego.
Both districts adopted policies requiring schools to alert families if their child identifies as transgender or non-binary, which critics say could put the student in danger if their parents were unaware and violates privacy guarantees under the state constitution.
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Just askin’
Thank you for peeling the veneer back on Republican’s scare industry. Facts in context matter. Truth matters. Thank you for providing both.