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Opinion | Crime: Red Delusions About Purple Reality [1]
['Paul Krugman']
Date: 2022-10-24
One factor is visibility. As Bloomberg’s Justin Fox has pointed out, New York City is one of the safest places in America — but you’re more likely to see a crime, or know someone who has seen a crime, than elsewhere because the city has vastly higher population density than anyplace else, meaning that there are often many witnesses around when something bad happens.
Another factor may be the human tendency to believe stories that confirm our preconceptions. Many people feel instinctively that getting tough on criminals is an effective anti-crime strategy, so they’re inclined to assume that places that are less tough — for example, those that don’t prosecute some nonviolent offenses — must suffer higher crime as a result. This doesn’t appear to be true, but you can see why people might believe it.
Such misconceptions are made easier by the long-running disconnect between the reality of crime and public perceptions. Violent crime halved between 1991 and 2014, yet for almost that entire period a large majority of Americans told pollsters that crime was rising.
However, only a minority believed that it was rising in their own area. This tendency to believe that crime is terrible, but mostly someplace else, was confirmed by an August poll showing a huge gap between the number of Americans who consider violent crime a serious problem nationally and the much smaller number who see it as a serious problem where they live.
Which brings us to the efforts by right-wing media and Republicans to weaponize crime as an issue in the midterms — efforts that one has to admit are proving effective, even though the breadth of the crime wave, more or less equally affecting red and blue states, rural and urban areas and so on suggests that it’s nobody’s fault.
It’s possible that these efforts would have gained traction no matter what Democrats did. It’s also true, however, that too few Democrats have responded effectively.
In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul was very late to the party, apparently realizing only a few days ago that crime was a major issue she needed to address. On the other hand, Eric Adams, New York City’s mayor, has seemed to feed fear-mongering, declaring that he had “never seen crime at this level,” an assertion contradicted by his own Police Department’s data. Even after the 2020-21 surge, serious crime in New York remained far below its 1990 peak, and in fact was still lower than it was when Rudy Giuliani was mayor.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/24/opinion/rising-crime-democrats.html
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