Democratic Pundits Have A Pernicious Crime Problem

This story was produced in partnership with The New Republic. 

In Democrats’ seemingly endless election postmortems—and in the postmortems on the postmortems—a persistent theme has been to blame the reddening of blue states like New York and New Jersey on crime in their big cities. On Pod Save America, the political commentator Ezra Klein emphasized the importance of taking crime seriously as a factor in voters’ decisions. To explain why he wasn’t surprised by blue states’ “sharp red shift,” he said: “Because if you just talk to anybody who lives in them, they are furious. And this idea that, like … ‘Crime is actually down, this is all just Fox News’—like, shut the fuck up with that.” Klein argued that when it comes to crime and criminal justice policy, fact-checking is a political dead end for Democrats. Instead, Democrats need to “talk to some people who live near you” and grasp “the sense of disorder rising”—a disorder fueled by migrants, homeless encampments, turnstile jumping, and crime in general. In San Francisco, he noted, “the fury is overwhelming.” As evidence, he pointed to the losses of reform prosecutors and the defeat of San Francisco Mayor London Breed.

At bottom, Klein’s claim was that it’s bad politics to respond to people’s fears about crime by saying that crime is actually down (even though it is) or by pointing out that their fears are the product of misleading press coverage (even though they are). In other words, facts don’t matter, the vibes do, and we need to govern in response to the vibes. 

At a fundamental level, I agree with Klein. He’s right that we cannot fact-check our way out of a fear of crime; I’ve said this myself. As a quant type, I find it depressing to admit, but politics are about vibes, and vibes cannot be fact-checked. This is especially true when it comes to crime, where fear is often a reflection of deeper anxieties about noncrime disorder, about outside threats, about social upheaval and change. Fact-checks that say (very true) things like, “We are in the midst of a historic drop in homicides” can’t really address those deeper currents.

But on another, equally fundamental level, I disagree with what the New York Times journalist, influential podcaster, and longtime wonk is saying. Because the vibes are coming from somewhere. And for most people, the vibes about crime are not coming from their lived experiences. Crime is not like inflation, a phenomenon everyone experiences because everyone buys stuff. Instead, crime is densely concentrated geographically and among certain people, in the areas that suffer the most from poverty, unemployment, and government disinvestment. When a prominent journalist on a widely popular podcast tells listeners to “talk to some people who live near you,” the people he’s referring to are probably not going to be those living in the areas where crime is most common—they are, rather, going to be those whose lives are least likely to be affected by crime.

It is among this group that, in Klein’s telling, “the fury is overwhelming.” But where does the fury fueling the bad vibes come from? From the media. From a media that routinely misrepresents crime and tends to ignore the voices of those actually affected by the policies: bail reform, reform prosecution, policing alternatives, and so on. 

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Here are two powerful examples of how the media shapes misleading vibes about crime for those who rarely experience it.

A 2022 analysis of media coverage of crime in New York City paints a damning picture of how the news distorted people’s perceptions. Toward the end of the analysis, a graph compares two values: actual shootings in New York City and mentions of shootings in local media, from 2019 to the end of 2022. For most of the graph, the two are uncorrelated at best; spikes in shootings often produce no change in coverage, and coverage sometimes spikes even as shootings remain flat. In 2022, in the run-up to a crucial federal midterm election, however, the picture becomes much worse: Shootings themselves remain almost completely flat, but the coverage of them soars, hitting levels about three to four times higher than during previous periods with similar levels of gun violence. As Politico noted, these “blood and guts headlines” helped Republicans claim one open New York House seat and take three more from Democratic control.

The report, published by Bloomberg, made clear that the spike in crime coverage had nothing to do with actual violence and everything to do with Eric Adams’s launching his campaign to become mayor. People’s sense of violence stemmed from the narrative-driving efforts of a tough-on-crime politician and the media’s willingness to advance that narrative.

Along similar lines, there was basically zero discussion in the press of striking data, released last summer by the Major City Chiefs Association, that suggested we were on pace for a historic drop in homicide rates for the second year in row, a drop that could wipe out the 2020–21 spike in lethal violence. The 2020 surge—which was bloody, and merited attention, to be clear—received breathless coverage. But nowhere near the same attention was given to the reversal of the trend, even though a two-year decline of nearly 30 percent is an almost unprecedented reduction in violence. So of course, per Klein, the “people who live near you” are filled with “rage” over violence: People who generally only experience trends in homicide vicariously, through the media, had been subjected to constant coverage of a rise in crime and heard next to nothing about a stunning complete reversal.

In other words, why did New Yorkers think violence was up when it was really flat or down? Because of what they were told. And Klein’s theorizing glosses over this. He’s right that people are upset and that anger puts constraints on political possibility. But we have two options: to simply accept that anger as some sort of exogenous thing we cannot change, and govern accordingly, or to ask the difficult questions about why people feel as they do and what might be done to help them feel differently.

Perhaps worse than the media’s emphasis on crime spikes, however, is that coverage of crime policy, especially of reform efforts, rarely elevates the voices of those who favor reforms—those who are not gentrified white voters but are the people most touched by crime, violence, and ineffective policing and prosecutorial policies.

Notice who was missing? There was not a single quote from a single person or family impacted by the bailout. Not one person was asked what it meant to have a mother or wife or child or friend home from the dangerous New York City jails, one of which was just found in contempt by a federal judge for failing to stem overwhelming violence. Not one person was asked what it meant to be free from those places. Even when addressing the potential risks of the bailout, those who actually faced the risks were ignored in favor of takes from elite lawyers and politicians whose perceptions of those benefits and risks are surely shaped by their lack of direct exposure to them.

A remarkable example of this is how The New York Times covered an effort by the nonprofit advocacy organization Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights to bail out every woman and child in the New York City jail system in October 2018. The Times published three articles on the plan, two before it happened and one after. These were not short pieces: Together, they came to 2,500 words, and all were published in the A-section of the print paper. In this prime media real estate, whose voices were heard? The reporters quoted two elected district attorneys, the mayor’s office, two current and one former City Council members, the police commissioner, the head of the correctional officers’ union, the director and a lawyer for RFK Human Rights, and a senior public defender.  

Further aggravating this error, the article noted that fears about the bailout may have been misplaced because the rate of reoffending was remarkably low. But that was offered as the sole metric of success. There was no discussion of the affirmative good the bailout might have done: family dinners, parents at school events, mothers and children retaining and trying to rebuild the bonds that incarceration can fray. The coverage rendered the humans at the heart of the bailout—the people whose lives motivated the RFK Human Rights experiment in the first place—invisible. They, and their experiences, were treated as irrelevant. 

The clear message to the readers, whether intended or not, was that the actual subjects of the policy do not matter. This, in turn, implies that reforms have only downsides, and that we should only fear them. The only way the reform succeeds is if reoffending rates stay low or close to zero. In this framing, there are basically no benefits to offset the potential costs—because the beneficiaries are ignored. So when a reform goes wrong, we should feel, well … fury and rage at those who adopted it. How can reforms look like good governance when the media silences the beneficiaries and dedicates exactly zero words to talking about the good these policies do?

In the short term, of course, Klein is surely right: Democratic politicians are going to have to contend with the vibes as they are, particularly as they are felt by Times readers and Pod Save America listeners. But journalists have an obligation to confront their own role in producing those vibes. There has been a 30-plus percent decline in homicides in Oakland, a nearly 40 percent decline in New Orleans, a nearly 40 percent decline in Philadelphia. Baltimore may end the year with fewer than 200 homicides for the first time since 2011. Journalists do not get to take fury at alleged bad governance as a given when they encourage that fury with the stories they choose to tell—and not to tell.