The crime election, plus a roundup of news and commentary 11.29.22

Top reads: Dwayne Betts oped, “The Search for Beauty in a Prison Cell”; Larry Krasner and the limits of law and order politics;  Dorothy Roberts on the need to repeal the racist and destructive Adoption and Safe Families Act. 

The crime election

Now that the election is over, coverage of crime on Fox News has plummeted – discussion of violent crime on the network was down 63% over the week prior, according to Media Matters. Other networks have followed suit — here is Philip Bump of the Washington Post with the receipts. The coverage tracks electoral strategies, not actual public interest in the issue. Perhaps we could remember this in two years.  

Meanwhile, the Albuquerque police chief admitted - after the election was over - that crime has in fact been decreasing. Crime was a huge talking point for Republicans during their election. 

Did the fear mongering crime narrative work, though? For the most part, no! With an asterisk by NY;  I discussed this in my post-elections recap. Here are some good articles that have come out since, which cover the attempts to win elections on a fearsome crime narrative and how those attempts mostly failed: Mother Jones, Buzzfeed, and NY Magazine. One aggravating coda to this is that the New York Times is now, after publishing many misleading crime hysteria articles leading up to the election, noting that overblown crime narrative helped Republicans in NY, yet they make no admission that they were key drivers of it (see here and here, for example). 

As we digest the impact (or lack thereof) on the American psyche of the media-driven crime narratives, you might be interested to check out this thread I did a while back on how Americans think about crime.

Politics

• Voters approved Measure A in Los Angeles, which will allow the County Board of Supervisors to remove a sheriff from office for misconduct. I’m very interested to see whether and how this changes the notoriously corrupt and violent department. 

• Republicans in PA's lame-duck House recently voted to impeach Philly DA Larry Krasner over disagreeing with the policies he ran and won on twice. As they were voting, final vote tallies showed these legislators that they are on track to losing their majority after making Krasner their campaign boogeyman.

• Civil rights attorney Pam Price has won her race for Alameda (Oakland) DA, running on a progressive platform.  

Solutions and Wins

• Oregon Governor Kate Brown pardoned around 45,000 people for marijuana offenses, relieving those people of $14 million in associated fines and fees.  

• South Dakota voters approved the expansion of medicaid, becoming the 39th state to do so. This is not only humane and good for extending health and life, but also looks like a big win for reducing incarceration. According to a recent study, medicaid expansion cut arrest rates by 20–32%, and arrests for violence by 19-29% in the first three years. 

• A colleague pointed me to this study from last year finding that blocks with houses that received money from the city for basic repairs experienced a 21% decrease in crime. 

Commentary and Analysis

• Michelle Alexander and John Legend teamed up for this oped in the Chicago Tribune calling for proper implementation of the much-maligned Pretrial Fairness Act. Meanwhile, the Cook County sheriff is doing his best to undermine the law by placing extremely stringent restrictions on movement for people on electronic supervision (against the spirit of the law), preventing people from going on essential errands. The Intercept has a fantastic report.

• An LA Times columnist interviewed Mariame Kaba and Rebecca Solnit on the topic of hope. Kaba reminds us that “hope is a discipline,” embedded in the daily practice of actions to improve lives.    

• Dorothy Roberts called for repealing the dreadful Adoption and Safe Families Act, which, among other horrible things, sped up termination of parental rights for families where the parent is incarcerated and other family members are unable to take the child.   

• The Prison Policy Initiative published its rundown of winnable reforms for 2023. 

• An educator released a plea to reduce the number of police in schools in the wake of Uvalde. 

• Clint Smith visited holocaust remembrance sites in Germany and reflected on the differences with practices in the U.S. 

Research  

• The Better Government Association published a report on Chicago’s police misconduct settlements, which account for a very large share of the city’s total settlement spendings. 

• Researchers at the Vera Institute have done new calculations on the social costs of policing, finding them to be much higher than usually is accounted for.  

• I was interested to read this twitter thread by Lukas Althoff at Princeton, which shares new evidence that a Black family's socioeconomic status today strongly depends on their historical exposure to racially oppressive institutions.