But What About Crime?
Inoculation against election season messaging
It’s twenty-nine days until the midterm elections. But you already knew that as we’ve all been inundated with campaign ads for at least a month. And it will only get worse.
One theme in Republican ads is concern over crime, usually shared with grainy images of the opposing candidate overlayed with images of police tape or scary images of criminals. This editorial cartoon from Joe Heller makes the point.1
As I’ve written before, it’s not surprising that concerns over crime show up on opinion polls. First, media loves crime stories and that elevates citizen concerns. Second, it is a perennial concern largely unconnected to what’s going on with real crime data. Third, there’s always something to point to in the data or in recent news to use to make the “they don’t care about crime” argument.2
I’ve also argued in prior newsletters that crime should only be a relevant matter in elections for mayor or county sheriff. Any position higher than that, say Congressperson or Senator or President, has little leverage on criminal justice policy. And yet because concerns over crime and personal safety trigger emotive responses more than logical responses, these soft-on-crime accusations are effective.
Here are a couple of examples of how the emotional appeal works. Consider this opinion piece Mark Theissen wrote in the Washington Post this week. He picks out random data points to argue that Americans should fear crime and act accordingly on November 8th. Notice how he explains away moderating numbers.
The murder numbers are cumulative. The record-breaking homicide rate in 2020 did not recede to pre-pandemic levels in 2021; it continued and got even worse — effectively wiping out two decades’ worth of declines in deadly violence. To suggest this is an improvement is like telling a Florida community that saw a record storm surge that an additional four-inch rise in floodwaters is an improvement. There is no “improvement” until the waters have receded.
I really don’t know what that means, especially since the increase in violent crime is relatively recent after a 25 year period of decline. But the news coverage has operated inversely to what the data show, as Philip Bump observed in this piece. Also, critiques of law enforcement and minimizing the challenges is never one-sided, as this remarkable piece of satire from Radley Balko makes clear.
But pointing out how to read data properly or calling out politicians’ hypocrisy is not effective at giving people tools to make informed decisions. We need to take serious steps to counter the emotional narrative. That involves inoculation.
I loved teaching social psychology over the course of my career. Students find it relevant to so much of their lived situations as it focuses on more interpersonal or intergroup issues. Topics like attraction, prejudice, perception, aggression and the like all rang true for my students. I particularly liked the section of the course dealing with attitudes and persuasion. Within that, I was always fascinated by William McGuire’s work on inoculation.
After the past two years, everyone should understand the idea of inoculation. Where the body’s natural defenses are weak against a virus, a vaccine with a small amount of the virus is given to the patient and those natural defenses kick in, providing longer-term protection.3
McGuire argued that we are often vulnerable to persuasive appeals, especially when we aren’t practiced at defending against them. In his experiments, he introduced a version of a persuasive appeal and then provided the counterargument. I remember that one version of this exposed subjects to an argument that teeth-brushing had negative effects. The experimental group was given a version of the argument in advance and the control group wasn’t. Those who were prepared were less impacted by the negative argument.4
Let’s take the standard complaints about crime and apply some simple inoculation. I’ll present the claim and then provide a response with which one could protect against this claim.
Reforming Cash Bail Lets Criminals Go Free! The most recent version of this claim has shown up in the Wisconsin Senate race. Critics have argued that Mandela Barnes’ support of legislation to reduce mandatory cash bail shows not only that he is weak on crime, but could actually have kept on the street people like the driver in the Waukesha “Christmas Parade Massacre” last year. This claim has shown up in recent ad buys opposing Barnes even though he argued back in September that that wasn’t the case (which PolitiFact scored as “Mostly True”). The larger issue here is the assumption that our default policy should be to keep the majority of people charged locked up because some small number of them might commit some offense while awaiting trial.5 But the vast majority of those who can't pay a cash bail aren't hardened criminals and are actually presumed innocent until adjudicated. Keeping them in jail solely because of finances actually increases tax expenditures and makes it harder for jailers to focus on serious offenders. Analyses of the reform bills have shown that there is little downside to cash bail reform. Consider this report from the Brennan Center:
The Times Union reviewed state data on pretrial releases between July 2020 and June 2021, identifying nearly 100,000 cases where someone was released pretrial in a decision “related to the state’s changed bail laws.” Just 2 percent of those 100,000 cases led to a rearrest for a violent felony; of these, 429 cases led to a rearrest for a violent felony involving a firearm. Roughly one-fifth of all cases resulted in a rearrest for “any offense,” regardless of severity, such as a misdemeanor or nonviolent felony.
Don’t Defund Police, Hire More Police! The heart of this claim stems from the George Floyd protests of 2020. Some progressive activists and city councils suggested that we should lower police budgets (usually to divert resources to other crime intervention entities). This was immediately characterized as “failing to support law enforcement” — especially from news reports with input from police unions. “Defund the police” was never more than a bad slogan held up by a subset of progressive activists, but that hasn’t stopped critics from making it a blanket accusation against Democrats.6 Just last week, ABC gathered data from 100 cities and counties where they owned stations. They found that out of 109 entities, eight cut budgets by more than 2% and in ninety-one budgets increased by at least 2% between 2019 and 2021. Nearly half of the entities increased spending by more than 10%. It is true that there are vacancies in many departments but this is likely due to retirements and not political rhetoric.7 As part of the Covid relief package of 2021, the Biden administration has encouraged municipalities to spend resources on expanding police numbers, especially if spent on community policing as opposed to reactive enforcement.8
Criminals Need Long Sentences! This has been a staple of attacks on John Fetterman in the race for Pennsylvania Senate. As Lieutenant Governor, Fetterman served as chair of the Board of Pardons. In that role, he oversaw the Board’s work in evaluating whether those incarcerated should have their sentences commuted or be granted pardons. During the Wolf-Fetterman administration, technological changes have made it easier for people to apply to have their case heard by the Board. As PennWatch notes:
The board oversees two forms of clemency: pardons for people who are not incarcerated and sentence commutations, meaning sentence reductions, for people who are in prison and believe they are reformed and have been over-sentenced.
As a result of the Board’s actions, Governor Wolf has pardoned low-level offenders and commuted (shortened) life sentences. This is the way that Pardons and Parole work. People plead their case regarding the intended rehabilitation or an overly harsh sentence and that case is empirically reviewed. There is no evidence that doing so increased crime. We know this because the pandemic gave us a test case. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, a criminal justice reform advocated shared this remarkable data:
To protect those most vulnerable to covid-19 during the pandemic, the Cares Act allowed the Justice Department to order the release of people in federal prisons and place them on home confinement. More than 11,000 people were eventually released. Of those, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) reported that only 17 of them committed new crimes.
That’s not a typo. Seventeen. That’s a 0.15 percent recidivism rate in a country where it’s normal for 30 to 65 percent of people coming home from prison to reoffend within three years of release.
Of those 17 people, most new offenses were for possessing or selling drugs or other minor offenses. Of the 17 new crimes, only one was violent (an aggravated assault), and none were sex offenses.
To recap, crime is up everywhere but it’s not clear why.9 Eliminating or lessening cash bail is consistent with our philosophy of innocent until proven guilty and doesn't increase offenses. Nobody defunded the police. Having people complete rehabilitation is what we always said we wanted and keeping them in prison doesn't decrease our crime risks.
I could write a similar take on claims regarding inflation, grocery prices, or the costs of gasoline.
But for now, perhaps you are inoculated against the grainy commercials about crime. A month from now — once the midterms are over — we probably won’t even be talking about it.
Thanks to Religion News friend Fr. Thomas Reese who keeps his twitter feed full of excellent cartoons like this one.
You could do the same analysis about inflation and the economy. Critics blame the Democrats for the current state of affairs without pointing to specific causal factors or sharing what they would do if in control (other than vague talk about energy independence and deficit reduction — neither of which would impact cost of living in the intermediate term).
The vaccine deniers don’t really dispute this point. They just argue that what’s being injected isn’t the virus but a one-world control mechanism turning us all into Bill Gates adoring zombies.
I assume that McGuire debriefed all subjects to let them know that teeth-brushing was, in fact, good. Unless, of course, he was a shill for Big Dentistry.
This is analogous to the 2016 Skittles image that Don, Jr. shared about Syrian refugees. He showed a big bowl of the candy and suggested that only two of them were poisoned. The logic was that we can’t allow in any refugees because a finite number were dangerous.
Because they weren’t vocal enough early enough to denounce this position that most of them didn’t hold.
The same in happening in education and health care. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, we really need to pay more attention to demography.
The tragedy of the 15 year old mass shooter in Raleigh last week underscores how much of police action is responsive not preventative.
Especially since we’re not able to use the plethora of guns as part of a causal argument!