AN ANGRY, SCARED COUNTRY

Primary midterm elections began yesterday, and they confirmed what recent polls have revealed: Americans are angry.  Angry about inflation, about lingering covid, about gas prices.  And Americans are scared.  Scared of violent crime.  In San Francisco, progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin, was ousted in a recall vote because he was seen as being "soft on crime"  (the fact that crime rates in the city did not actually go up under his regime doesn't seem to matter).  This showed that in even a famously progressive city like San Francisco, fear of crime and a desire to get tough and put more cops on the street, can work.  (Plus a multimillion dollar campaign funded by conservatives against Boudin didn't hurt.)

It understandable that the public are upset about the recent spike in violent crime that happened during the pandemic.  The problem is that they are falling into the usual pattern of wanting tougher sentences  and increasing the number of police on the streets.  While these two solutions may seem reasonable, they have proved ineffective in the past.  Take prison, for example: if sending more people to prison reduced crime, then America would have the lowest crime rate in the world, because we already have the largest prison population in the world (China has a billion more people than we do, and incarcerates less people).  And increased policing also does not necessarily mean less crime; as a 2021 New York Times  article pointed out, "For decades, scholars have acknowledged that local crime rates cannot be predicted by officer strength and police budgets. Sometimes a boost for policing is followed by a drop in crime; sometimes it isn’t."  The article went on to mention that increased policing leads to more arrests for low level crimes, which leads to more tension between police forces and the public.

Personally, I think that the recent spike in violent crime can be chalked up to the pandemic; first of all, the pandemic obviously upset and scared Americans, and when Americans get upset and scared, a lot of them go to the gun store.  Gun sales have boomed to record highs in the past two years, with all the potential violence that can bring.  Also, the pandemic has put the entire country on edge; just look at the increase in negative effects that have hit the country since it began: divorces are up, so is depression, drug and alcohol use, overdoses, traffic deaths, I could go on.  Given all that, the increase in violent crime is just one part of a pattern. Really, it's not surprising that people forced to stay inside start to get on each other's nerves, and conflicts that might have ended in shouting matches before, now often end in violence. As a study from the Council for Criminal Justice in February of 2021 said, "domestic violence incidents increased 8.1% after jurisdictions imposed pandemic-related lockdown orders."  It's really important to remember that this pandemic has been transformative, an experience that no one alive has endured before, and the effects of it will be felt for years to come.

Look, I understand that a politician who responds to the public's fears about the recent increase in violent crime by saying that violent crime was worse in the past (which is true) and that the crime rates will probably decrease as the world moves away from the pandemic (which I also think is true), will get clobbered by the voters, but I still think that more police and tougher sentencing is not the answer.  

The big problem with crime in this country is that Americans seem to reject or ignore a simple fact: the US has a higher crime rate than most industrialized countries because it has a higher child poverty rate than most industrialized countries. (A UNICEF study of child poverty in 2012 found that the US had the second highest child poverty rate in the industrialized world).   Really, is it any shock that children that live in neighborhoods where they risk exposure to lead paint or asthma from poor air conditions, and who attend underfunded public schools that treat them like prisoners, often wind up becoming criminals?  That's why it's so frustrating to hear that voters want something done about crime when one of the best tools to prevent crime came and went during the pandemic: the stimulus money for families with children.  During the pandemic, both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations passed stimulus plans that included $300 a month for each child in families making $150,000 a year or less.  While not a lot of money, it lifted millions of children out of poverty.  Sadly, when that money ran out, a second bill that would have made the payments permanent, failed in the Senate.  

Along with reducing child poverty, other common sense ways to lower crime rates include more funding for impoverished public schools, more after school programs, and, heck, even cleaning up vacant lots and putting in more street lights have shown positive results.  These solutions may not bring the strong feeling that locking up bad guys has for Americans raised on cop shows, but they actually provide better results in the long run at a lower expense.   We already have enough people in jail and enough cops on the street.