No. of Recommendations: 8
Is that what is a actually happening now?
Yes.
This isn't just a made-up issue that the GOP has constructed out of whole cloth. They successfully ran on public concerns about declining social order during the last election. And we know that they had the better of the issue because we're seeing Democratic elected officials in these jurisdictions changing their policy positions on things like homeless encampments in public places and criminal justice reform (especially reduced incarceration for minor offenses). That's something you wouldn't see if general public perception about social order hadn't changed for the worse. And of course, polling demonstrated that respondents felt that crime was increasing and that things were getting more dangerous.
The Democratic response of, "you guys are wrong, look at these statistics" didn't work very well politically. Because it misdiagnosed the problem. Voters weren't saying, "I believe that specific crime rates per capita are rising across a municipal area." They were saying, "I feel like the places that I go are now more disordered and less safe than they used to be."
Whether the Democrats are right about whether cities are getting less safe, it doesn't matter. If people believe they're less safe than previously, then it doesn't matter whether that's actually true.
And as I've tried to point out in this thread, the people who believe that cities are less safe are probably justified in believing that to be true, for a few reasons. The first is that the pandemic really did change how cities looked. Tons of people stopped going to central business districts and downtowns and using mass transit systems. That in itself will make people who are in those areas think that something's wrong - if there are fewer people in an area than there should be, that's a danger sign. But it also makes failures in social order stand out more. If there's the same number of people engaging in disordered behavior but fewer orderly people around them, it seems like the problem is worse. Having a large number of people is also an inhibitor to disordered behavior - the "eyes on the street" theory of social order.
And the second is that people experience cities in different ways - people who live in the suburbs and commute for work are going to experience some parts of the city, while people who live within the city limits are going to experience vastly different parts of the city. If you reprioritize criminal justice to go after more serious offenders more than minor offenders, you can reduce the amount of serious crime. That's probably a good outcome! It will make the places where serious crime tends to happen actually be a lot safer, and those areas will feel a lot safer as well! But if you're a person who isn't ever going to those parts of the city, that won't affect your experience of the city. And if the parts of the city that you go to start getting more disordered because of these new priorities, you won't care about (and probably won't believe) the even true statistics that show that crime is falling in the municipality overall. Things are getting worse where you are and for the types of disorder you experience - and the fact that aggravated battery or domestic sexual assault is falling on the other side of town doesn't change that for you.
