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In the presidential debate next Tuesday, we can expect to hear a lot about crime and punishment. Kamala Harris will tout her record as a prosecutor. And Donald Trump will likely claim, as he has before, that “crime is so out of control in our country . . . you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot. You get mugged. You get raped.”
Pundits long called crime a “wedge issue.” In his classic 1993 Political Dictionary, William Safire defined such an issue: “A hot-button subject that splits a coalition or constituency.” For decades, politicians used concern about violence to stoke anxiety and stir division.
Then something unexpected happened: crime rates plummeted. New York, once a symbol of urban decay, became the nation’s safest big city. (Come visit!) Democrats and Republicans united for reform. Americans agreed — lawbreakers must face consequences. But public safety and fairness are not competing interests to be balanced against each other — they go hand in hand.
All of which makes recent political trends so worrying. Yes, crime spiked during the pandemic, but violent crime is falling again. Dramatically so in many areas, and for many categories of offense. Homicides dropped by roughly 20 percent in Baltimore and Philadelphia between 2022 and 2023 and by 11 percent in New York City. But the politicians who once again seized upon crime as a wedge issue during the pandemic are still howling. Violence is falling, but demagoguery is on the rise. It’s a good moment to take stock, to sort the myths from the truth.
Take bail reform, a policy change that has attained an outsized significance. Many politicians use it as a generic term for all changes to reduce overincarceration. When someone is accused of a crime, the New York Post invariably blames “lax bail laws.” Is that a valid concern?
Economist Terry-Ann Craigie and attorney Ames Grawert, my colleagues at the Brennan Center, looked at data from 33 communities across the country, the largest study of its kind to date. Some of the cities had implemented bail reform while others had not. “Ultimately this report finds no statistically significant relationship between bail reform and crime rates,” Cragie and Grawert conclude. “In other words, there is no reason to believe that bail reform has led to increased crime.” After all, crime increased during the pandemic in areas that had changed bail laws as well as in those that maintained the status quo.
Here’s another widespread myth circulating this year: the claim of a migrant crime wave. There is no evidence for that either. Immigration certainly poses challenges, especially when border crossings surge as they did earlier in the Biden administration. But migrants simply are not more dangerous than the rest of us — in fact, the opposite. Immigrants have a similar or even lower likelihood of incarceration compared with native-born Americans. Very often, they bring down crime rates while increasing social cohesion.
None of this is new. As a 1931 report by the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement acknowledged, “The theory that immigration is responsible for crime, that the most recent ‘wave of immigration,’ whatever the nationality, is less desirable than the old ones, that all newcomers should be regarded with an attitude of suspicion, is a theory that is almost as old as the colonies planted by Englishmen on the New England coast.”
We can learn lessons from all this.
Valid public concerns about safety and disorder matter and are a key component of the national political conversation. People want the rule of law respected, and those who cause harm should be held accountable. We all want our kids to be able to walk safely to school. We all want safe communities. But decades of research indicate that public safety and justice reforms can be achieved together.
At the same time, we cannot let runaway fears of imagined crime stampede us into a return to harsh past policies. Nearly 2 million people are behind bars in this country, a population bigger than Vermont, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia combined. The system still falls most heavily on those who are economically disadvantaged and on people of color, especially Black Americans.
The answer, I think, is to recover the spirit of the bipartisan movement for change that was so promising in the past decade. The Koch brothers and George Soros linked arms. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) joined with Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY). Even Donald Trump proudly signed the First Step Act and featured formerly incarcerated Americans at the State of the Union address.
Often, public perceptions about crime lag the reality. Let’s hope that as political passions cool, this wedge issue will lose its capacity to divide us.
