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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

The Roots of Crime Hysteria
Thanks to demagogic pols and craven media, the public believes crime is
far more pervasive than it actually is

Former cop and former Giuliani-supporting conservative Eric Adams won
New York's Democratic mayoral primary chiefly because voters named the
rise of "crime" as by far the most important issue facing the city
.
True, Adams had other things going for him: plenty of union support, a
strong base as Brooklyn borough president, and a deal he cut with
leaders of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community

to allow their yeshivas to continue to fail to provide their students
with competent secular educations (apparently outbidding Andrew Yang on
that score). But it was almost certainly Adams's message about
"public safety" that carried him across the finish line over his
closest competitors, centrist bureaucrat Kathryn Garcia and progressive
Black civil rights lawyer Maya Wiley.

Thing is, voters almost always have misguided impressions of the state
of violent crime, both locally and nationally. This is due to the
politicians who demagogue the topic and the local media-especially on
television-that hype up individual incidents, telling the story that
their sources in the police departments want told. The common message of
the pols and the media can be summed up in five words: "Be afraid. Be
very afraid."

In November 2020, the Gallup organization published a study
demonstrating that "Perceptions of Increased U.S. Crime [were] at
Highest Since 1993
,"
even though crime was nowhere near its highest levels. In the past,
Gallup noted, a perceived rise in crime was usually felt by those who
associated themselves with the party out of power. In 2016, Republicans
en masse bought into Trump's hysterical campaign to demonize
America's cities and people who lived in them, especially immigrants
and minorities. Recall his horrific inauguration

speech, in which he painted a false picture of what he called
"American carnage
."
It was a curtain-raiser for the rest of his presidency, during which he
continued to lie about rising murder rates

even as violent-crime rates declined in the nation's largest cities.

This malicious nonsense reached a gruesome crescendo during the 2020
Republican convention, when the Trumpists chose New York City as the
alleged ground zero of an American Hellscape in which public safety was
a thing of the past. One convention speaker, New York cop union
president Patrick Lynch, tried to evoke a phony atmosphere of terror,
slandering his city

and blaming the "radical left" for having "hijacked and dismantled
the criminal justice system," and for having "passed laws that made
it impossible for police officers to do our job." They did this, he
explained, because their "goal" was violence and chaos. "What they
want is a justice system that stops working altogether ... wherever
Democrats are in power, the radical left is getting exactly what they
want."

Singing from the same songbook was the possibly even more lunatic Rudy
Giuliani, who warned viewers, "Don't let the Democrats do to America
what they have done to New York." Rudy told a right-wing fairy tale

about an imaginary "New York City, once described as America's crime
capital, [which] had become by the mid-1990s America's safest large
city. Now today, my city is in shock. Murders, shootings, and violent
crime are increasing at percentages unheard of in the past. We're
seeing the return of rioting and looting. During riots, this Democrat
mayor, like others, has often prevented the police from making arrests.
And even when arrests are made, liberal, progressive DAs released the
rioters so as not to disrupt the rioting."

In fact, everything

this often drunken troll said was a lie. Violent crime in NYC had been
in decline for years
.
The city was experiencing far fewer murders than it did when he was the
mayor in the 1990s. Murders did spike in the first six months of 2020
-as
they did almost everywhere in America at the beginning of the
pandemic-but remain on pace to be far lower than they were at the end
of Giuliani's time in office. What's more, the city is in the midst
of "a 2 percent drop in overall reports of all major crimes
,
the police say. Rape reports, for instance, are down 25 percent, and
grand larceny has dropped 20 percent." And while there had been a
recent rise in killings and in gun violence, it came "after seven
years of record-breaking calm when murders dipped to below 300 one
year-2017
-for
the first time since the 1950s."

J.D. Vance, the Republican Yale Law School grad and venture capitalist
who is enjoying massive funding from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel
for his hapless Ohio Senate campaign, recently trotted out some of the
same bullshit with a tweet that read
, "Serious
question: I have to go to New York soon and I'm trying to figure out
where to stay. I have heard it's disgusting and violent there. But is
it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?" Alas, there is no point in
bothering Vance with the truth, but Ohioans might be interested in
learning that the rate of murders per 1,000 residents in NYC is now
5.31, while in Vance's hometown of Cincinnati, it's 8.43. (And
don't even ask about Columbus
.) Are
Ohio Republicans as dumb as Vance gives them credit for being? We'll
see.

As to the unhelpful role of the media-especially local media-in
perpetuating this fantasy, I found this Twitter thread by Nicholas
Grossman , a
professor of international relations at the University of Illinois,
which shed a great deal of light on the relationship between media hype
of crime and the false perceptions of the people who consume it. You
will need to click on the link to see the charts, but as he notes,
violent crime across the United States fell between 1993 and 2016-a
decline that the public didn't always notice. "You can see the
actual drop in crime reflected in perception at first, but then
perceived crime rose as actual violent crime kept declining." Grossman
also finds an "increasing gap between those who say crime is rising
nationally and those who say it's rising locally: about half of the
people who believe it's rising nationally now say it's not rising in
their own communities." All this, Grossman says, "strongly suggests
that the perception of high crime is driven more by media and
politicians than by personal experience or day-to-day observation."

The problem of the gap between the perceptions of crime rates and actual
crime rates has long interested scholars. Here's a paper on "The
News Media's Influence on Criminal Justice Policy: How Market-Driven
News Promotes Punitiveness
"
that argues: "The news media are not mirrors, simply reflecting events
in society. Rather, media content is shaped by economic and marketing
considerations that frequently override traditional journalistic
criteria for newsworthiness." The Center for American Progress also
notes

that "Black Americans, and black men in particular, are
overrepresented

as perpetrators
of crime in U.S. news media. This is especially true when looking at the
incidence of violent crime. For example, one study
of
late-night news outlets in New York City in 2014 found that the media
reported on murder, theft, and assault cases in which black people were
suspects at a rate that far outpaced their actual arrest rates for these
crimes."

All of the above is not the only reason New York Democrats chose a
"law and order" candidate over more progressive ones. But these
distortions are going to keep happening until more liberal Democrats
find a way to step up and deal with it.

I spend most of my scholarly energy these days studying the politics and
culture of American Jewry, and so I was looking forward to gleaning some
contextual information from the Public Religion Research Institute's
new report, "The American Religious Landscape in 2020
."
This turned out be a problem, however. At one point, the study tells me
that American Jews are 1 percent of the population, and in another they
are 1.9 percent. (The latter is likely true.) I also read that "About
one in five (22%) Jewish Americans identify as Republican, 44% identify
as Democrat, and about three in ten (31%) identify as independent,"
but in the charts the report provides, the numbers are 26 percent, 64
percent, and 9 percent, respectively, which are almost certainly far
more accurate.

This coming Saturday at 2:30 p.m. ET, I will be participating in a panel
with author Marie Arana, the literary director at the Library of
Congress and former editor of the Washington Post Book World, entitled
"Cancel Culture in Today's Literary Landscape," as part of the
1455 "Celebrating the Art of Storytelling" literary festival. My
panel was inspired by this Altercation column of April 23
.
You can find out how to register for the talk here
.

I'll be back soon, I promise, with more music, but in the meantime,
please do yourselves a favor and listen to the terrific historical
podcasts made by Joe Alterman with Ben Sidran
.
I am not related to Joe; I might be more talented and better-looking if
I were. You may know Sidran if you know even a little about jazz, but
you might not know that he has a doctorate in American studies and is
the author of the fine study There Was a Fire: Jews, Music and the
American Dream , which
has been recently updated and reissued. In the meantime, there's this
,
in "honor" of Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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