Melissa Harris-Perry: Hey, everybody. It's MHP. This is The Takeaway. It's good to have you with us. Now, in a lot of places around the country voting is already happening and we're less than a month out from the final day to cast a vote for the midterm elections. Candidates and races, well, they are ramping up their campaign ad spending.

Speaker 2: Just follow the money.

Melissa Harris-Perry: If you do that, you can see which messages candidates are hoping we'll get them across the finish line first. According to data from AdImpact, while abortion-related messaging has been central for Democrats, Republicans nationwide have increased their spending on ads that focus on crime.

Speaker 3: 2020, murder in Cincinnati at an all time high.

Speaker 4: Homicides are up 91%.

Speaker 3: Greg Landsman's response, defund the police.

Speaker 5: The socialist squad is leading the charge to defund our police. No surprise crime is on the rise. Mandela Barnes would eagerly join their squad.

Speaker 6: John Fetterman wants to release convicted murderers from prison. We all know Fetterman loves free stuff, but we can't let him free murderers.

Melissa: According to a new Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, crime is now in the top four issues that voters think are most important. We asked how you're feeling about crime where you live.

Anthony: I'm Anthony. I'm from Cleveland, Ohio. I believe that crime is up, especially petty crime. I actually blame the police for this because I believe with all of the backlash that police have been facing over the last couple years, that they've decided that they're going to just lay back.

Dave: Hello, this is Dave in Los Angeles County. I live in a rather suburban area. The times when I've seen the most challenges have been while riding the metro. Tempers are running high. One time someone almost assaulted me and another time two people were on the brink of drawing weapons.

Melissa: For Whitney in Seattle this issue is very personal.

Whitney: I wasn't feeling too worried about crime in my neighborhood until the middle of the day, this July, on a work day, I heard some popping sounds. I looked out the window and there was a man shooting at another man in front of my house. That's when I started to understand what the gun epidemic is really doing in this country.

Melissa: As always, we appreciate you sharing your stories with us. Here on team Takeaway, we were really trying to understand this issue of crime. The best data we have right now does suggest that violent crime rose significantly during the pandemic. The FBI released its latest crime report earlier this month and found that homicides were up by 4%, but there's a lot missing from that data. Roughly a third of police departments nationwide, including the two largest, New York City and Los Angeles, they didn't provide data. Here to unpack this question of politics and public perception around crime.

Ames Grawert: My name is Ames Grawert and I'm Senior Counsel in the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Rena Karefa-Johnson: My name is Rena Karefa-Johnson and I'm the Director of National Programming at FWD.us.

Melissa: I asked Rena to start by walking us through public opinion on crime and public safety.

Rena: Crime does seem to be driving a lot of people's opinions and thoughts about how they're thinking about candidates. One thing that's important for us to recognize is that that is very driven by the media coverage and political conversation about crime, which in and of itself is very disproportionate to the actual increases in crime that we're experiencing right now.

Melissa: Help me to understand how our perceptions of crime might be different or similar to, for example, our perceptions of the economy.

Rena: The media has a humongous way of how people think about their perceptions of crime and perceptions of safety. One thing that we consistently see when we poll folks is that folks say that they feel relatively safe in their neighborhood, in their block, in their community, but they perceive that crime is on the rise out there on another block, in the big city. That tells us that the way that the media is a little bit rabid and focusing on instances of crime and violent crime, is making folks feel unsafe in a way that is untethered from their actual lived experience.

Take New York for an example, a place where folks often like to talk about crime. We've seen that the coverage of crime, the coverage of violence, the coverage of shooting far outpaces any increases that we're seeing. Then in a month, between December of 2021 and January of 2022, when shooting stayed pretty stable in New York, we saw a rapid jump in coverage about violence and shooting, and therefore, a huge increase in the ways that crime was driving overall conversations about politics, about safety, about the policy that actually keeps us safe.

Melissa: Is there something that media does that's different in one moment than in another when it comes to these questions of representing crime?

Rena: There's humongous political incentives for certain candidates who are relying on campaigning on tough-on-crime incentives to continue to drive that coverage because for them fear is political capital. We see more crime ads, more crime stump speeches relying on, I think, what to me, are very clearly outdated, very frankly, racist fear-mongering based on perceptions of anti-Black ideas about who was safe and who was dangerous and tapping into long-held foundational fears that pit Black folks against overall American safety.

Melissa: Ames, I want-- Rena has really set the table here around what is crime, what are we talking about when we're talking about crime? The other day, I experienced really some-- I realized just how rampant crime is because I was driving down the road, and I think that the speed limit was maybe around 35, and people were passing me at 50 miles an hour. There must have been two dozen acts of crime that I saw just there as people passed me. Then later in the day, I was on my college campus and I saw at least 10 young people, who I know are not yet 21, drinking beer. Am I right in seeing that crime is way up?

Ames: That's such an interesting question and brings to mind questions about what do we consider crime? What do we consider public safety? It's a really tough question to answer, especially because when it comes to many acts that are deeply harmful to people and to communities, we simply don't track them. We don't have good enough data to be able to comment on whether there's an increase in some of the behavior that you're describing.

When we talk about crime, especially in the analyses that my colleagues and I write for the Brennan Center, we're really talking about a much more narrow set of offenses, those that the Federal Bureau of Investigation tracks by collecting data from state and local police departments. For the past nearly century or so that list of offenses has been about seven long murder, assault, rape, larceny, motor vehicle theft, burglary. It's a relatively smaller set of offenses that gives a limited, but still, nonetheless quite important look at what we consider to be crimes and harms to our communities.

Melissa: In a certain way, I'm really glad that you're not tracking speeding and you're not tracking 20-year-olds drinking beer on campus. That would give us a completely wildly inaccurate sense of crime. I think that's part of my pointer, Ames, is I'm trying to move us maybe into a different space, rather than thinking about law-breaking and into the language that you talked about, which is harm. What do we know about our capacity to track harm?

Ames: The unfortunate reality is that we don't do a great job in this country tracking many of the things that matter to communities. My colleagues and I at the Brennan Center study criminal justice policy and the effects of everything from shortening excessive sentences to changing pretrial detention policies. Many of these things are very difficult to study because we just don't collect data on outcomes. We know, for example, that because of bail reform, people who were arrested, but actually did nothing wrong, avoided going to jail and spending nights in jail-- where they should not have been in jail. We don't have data on those cases of people who because of recent policy changes, live better lives than they might otherwise have.

This is actually especially true in 2021. When policymakers talk about crime, they are generally talking about the list of offenses that I mentioned earlier that are tracked by local police departments and reported to the FBI, but we're in the middle of a transition in the way that the FBI collects and reports crime data. The sort of headline statistics that you hear policymakers refer to like the national murder rate, the national violent crime rate, those stats are derived from these FBI reports, but because of this switch in the way the FBI reports the data, we don't actually have a discreet precise "national murder rate" this year.

We have an upper bound estimate of what the national murder rate might have been, lower bound estimate and then a point estimate, which is the FBI's best guess. It makes it very challenging to talk about public safety.

Melissa: What do we know at this point about maybe some of the differences or similarities in how Americans frame, "This feels safe." Or, "Boy, this feels like a dangerous time"?

Rena: When we talk about tough on crime and soft on crime, that's not actually talking about how urgently we want to respond to harm. It's not actually talking about how do we reduce crime, how do we prevent crime? Very often, specifically politically, what that is talking about is a deflection away from solutions and an attempt to scapegoat individual people, individual groups of people, individual policies that have been good policies that have reduced our incarceration rates, that have made communities safer, rather than engaging in a real conversation about what makes all of us feel safe.

We have solutions to reduce violence, to reduce crime that really, really work. We've seen that when we invest in housing for folks that rates of arrest and violence go down. We've seen in New York that when young people participate in the Summer Youth Program, which is a youth employment program sponsored by the city that gives young people jobs, the youth that participate in that program have a markedly decreased chance of getting arrested for anything specifically for any felony arrest. We see that limiting access to guns can make us safer.

Melissa: All right, Ames, I want you to help me dig in empirically to the claims here that Rena is making so strongly and I think are just critical to understand. Acknowledging the limitations in data that you've already identified for us, but what do we also know about not just the descriptive, but the relational, the causal, the correlational that we're hearing here from Rena, what aspects of our social or political world do seem to be at least correlated with lower crime statistics?

Ames: I've noted that our understanding of metrics that track actual perceptions of safety and realities of safety are really fraught, but we do know, and we have good reason to believe these data are accurate, that murders rose by around 30% between 2019 and 2020. That's a sharp and disturbing increase that speaks to many communities and lives disrupted irreparably.

When you look at what might have led to that, it's very, very hard to pick out any single cause. I just want to caution people against looking at single-cause explanations for something as complicated as crime. We actually do have some ideas of what may have contributed, and this will get back to your question, one is gun violence and this is something that Rena mentioned.

If you talk to people in communities who are impacted by violence in 2020, they will tell you quite frankly that they saw people carrying guns more often, they saw people using guns, and arguments of disputes more often. That is backed up quite squarely by the data. We saw gun sales increase tremendously in 2020, and there's also very solid data showing that it took much less time for a gun legally bought in 2020 to turn up at a crime scene in 2020.

We have a very clear chain of evidence showing that guns were sold more often in 2020, they were carried more often in 2020, and they were used in crime more often in 2020. There is really strong evidence for these other solutions that go back to investing in our communities. This one research paper I just keep thinking about, and I'm somewhat surprised you don't see on the front page of every newspaper, found that Medicaid expansion in the south led to a decrease in arrests.

This is quite simply expanding the social safety net to reach more people has such a positive impact on our communities, not just in terms of health, but in terms of public safety. You'll sometimes hear people say that this investment strategy is a long-term play.

It's what you do to build enduring public safety 10 years from now, but it is not going to pay short-term dividends. That may be true, except I'll say this, that if you take that argument at face value, it suggests that the best time to make these investments was 20 years ago, but the second best time to make them is today.

[music]

Melissa: All right, let's take a pause here. We'll be back with more on the midterms and cry messaging in just a moment.

[music]

I'm continuing my conversation with Rena Karefa-Johnson from FWD.us and Ames Grawert from the Brennan Center for Justice. Now, we've been trying to think through how candidates in midterm elections are using messages about crime and public safety, like in this ad in support of Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin in New York.

Speaker 7: Then without warning, he turns violent--

Speaker 8: You're looking at actual violent crimes caught on camera in Kathy Hochul's New York, and it's getting much worse on Kathy Hochul's Watch

Melissa: Rena, talk to me about the politics of that commercial.

Rena: We've seen these ads, unfortunately, because there have been tens of millions of dollars going into them, and they're rouge they always look the same. Usually, there's a brief or vague reference to a certain policy in New York. It's often bail reform that's scapegoated or it's a certain individual candidate or gubernatorial sitting governor's soft-on-crime stance. Then we transition into deeply racist and racialized and I think shameful images of Black people, almost always Black men doing something violent that is supposed to scare us, and then the end is kind of, "Vote for me because I'm going to be tough on crime. I'm going to bring us back to those lock-them-up law and order policies."

I think it's really important and great that you brought us to talk about New York because some of the data that we have in New York about criminal justice reform is some of the strongest data that we have in support of criminal justice reform in the country. We have seen in studies that 98% of the people released under the new bail reform law, were not rearrested, not even convicted, were not rearrested for any violent felony. This idea that criminal justice reform is what's driving this scary increase in crime, it's just patently false. It's just not true.

More broadly, the idea that doubling down on mass incarceration or mass criminalization is the answer is absurd, honestly, given the data that we have. There's no question that incarceration if it's at all effective in reducing crime is among the most expensive, least effective, and most cruel ways to do that. If that is what made us safe, the United States as the most incarcerating nation in the history of the world and a nation with unprecedented police budgets, a nation that really has over-relied on jail and prison for far too long, would be the safest country in the world, and we know that that's just not true.

Ames: Just as a background, between 1990 and 2014, crime across the United States, but especially in American cities, plummeted precipitously. The national murder rate dropped by around half. You went from, in New York City a place that saw 2,000 murders in a single year in 1990, 1991 to around 400. That's an incredible transformation in the way our cities look, the lives that people can lead in our cities, and the lives that people can lead in any part of the country.

It is one of the most profound transformations in the state of our country over the last quarter century, and we don't have a perfect accounting for what caused it. My colleagues at the Brennan Center wrote a paper in 2015 called What Caused the Great Crime Decline, trying to answer this very question. They found that a powerful explanation for declining crime was improving economic conditions. It did not explain the entire decline, but it explained a great deal of it. They also found that rising incarceration rates did not explain the decline in crime. I think that's a really important point. People think that the growth of mass incarceration is one reason that crime dropped after 1990, and it just doesn't appear to be true.

Melissa: If you had a magic wand that could introduce either some new framework, some new data, some new knowledge into the public conversation about crime, what would you inject? What would you bring? What gift would you give us from your standpoint for having these conversations?

Rena: I'm a mom. I'm a Black woman. I live in a predominantly Back community in South LA that has seen an increase in gun violence. I care deeply about safety. I would argue much more so than a lot of these candidates that are using conversations about crime as deflections from talking about what actually keeps us safe and as a political football to score easy points.

I think that we should be talking to asking ourselves who we're calling credible in the conversation about safety. I think that it's the people that are talking most about the solutions and less about punishing that are the people that we should be pointing to and uplifting both in our personal lives, but specifically in those who we elect to be caretakers for our communities.

Melissa: Ames, same question for you.

Ames: What I would introduce is a certain degree of humility in the face of very complicated social phenomena and an appreciation for the nuance of this very complicated issue. There are no simple answers here and everyone that tries to advance a single-cause explanation for something as complicated as violent crime, every time they do that, they're both making it harder to talk seriously about solutions to public safety and stumbling into some pretty big traps that are laid by the data themselves, so you'll see people say that a rising crime in 2020 was a city issue.

It's not. We actually saw murder rates increase in the suburbs in rural areas. They'll say it's a blue state issue or a blue city issue. It's not. We saw murder rates increase by similar percentages in "red states", in "red cities". We'll see people try to blame criminal justice reform as Rena said, or "progressive prosecutors, and every time these explanations are advanced, they're both wrong and they distract us from having these tough conversations about what solutions we need and what investments we need to make to build an enduring and legitimate form of public safety that is that works for everybody.

Melissa: Ames Grawert is Senior Council at the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, and Rena Karefa-Johnson is the Director of National Programming at FWD.us. Thank you both for being here.

Rena: Thank you.

Ames: Thank you.

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