Thread by @GeeDee215

if you read enough discoursing about crime and policing in big cities #onhere, you'll see lots of people point out that crime is at or near historic lows, and that year-over-year crime jumps are relative to those troughs.

then you'll almost always see someone say in response that bloodless stats are missing the point: who cares what the numbers are if people don't *feel* safer?

and the data show that USians are basically always primed for a moral panic around crime: a majority of people polled said over the last two decades they thought crime was going up or so even though it had been steadily falling.

53eig.ht/3b5Q0n2

here's Pew:

USians are basically always stuck in a slow, rolling moral panic about crime. And that redounds to the benefit of police departments — as has been pointed out endlessly over the last few years, police budgets keep ticking upward, regardless of the trendline for crime.

one of the most reliable spokes of this argument has been to suggest that out-of-touch liberals in cities are reflexively pushing back on tough-on-crime policies and thus waving away concerns about safety expressed by poor folks (read: people of color) in their cities.

i just want to say a few things about using the residents of these neighborhoods to make this point.

this sidesteps all the nuances in how people in any neighborhood feel about crime (and thus the police).

which voices in a neighborhood are calling for more policing? are they older or are they younger? are they homeowners or renters? bc there are ppl in every neighborhood who understand, implicitly, that the costs of more police presence is not going to fall primarily on them.

there are people who have aged out of the cohort likely to be fucked with by the cops as they move through the world. there are people who, bc of their class position, have less antagonistic relationships to civic leaders like local police officials.

these voices get a LOT of oxygen in the discourse.
@tonykcheng's research points out that, at least in NYC, that's not an accident: the cops actively cultivate + elevate the concerns of residents that essentially serve as an endorsements of more cops:

one of the things James Forman Jr. wrote about in his book (and talked about when he swung by @NPRCodeSwitch) was that in the 1990s, when crime was at all-time highs, community meetings would be full of calls for things like better housing, job training, more social services —

– the only item on these lists of demands that local, state, and federal officials ever acknowledged and follow through on was calls for more cops. it was the only thing they had any appetite for.

but it's also important to point out how much the stuff that people whose voices do get elevated want fixed isn't even "crime." it's a lot of quality of life stuff. it's a lot of old folks annoyed that young dudes are hanging out on a stoop or a corner and being loud.

you can pick up the demarcation happening in the elevation of those complaints — the neighborhood has legitimate residents on one side and then people who need to be shoo'ed away and shushed by the cops on the other.

(the quickness with which complaints about the dudes on the corner being loud is conflated with *criminality* is really telling and a separate thread)

i think we have to hold in our heads that people in Anyhood USA might be concerned about crime 1) but that doesn't mean those concerns mean they want more police in response 2) that doesn't mean pro-police voices are the median voices

3) that doesn't mean everyone in a neighborhood bears the brunt of crime or the police response to it equally 4) that doesn't mean what people are feeling uneasy about in their neighborhoods is even "crime"

last thing before i dip. so my next door neighbor, P, brings me and my lady* some ribs when he smokes them in his yard. He made a big thing of them a few weeks back, but we were out of town at a wedding, so he gave the ribs to my downstairs neighbor

*if i don't murk them first

he grabbed a package off his own porch before he walked over.

a cop on the corner – there is almost always a a police SUV on our corner — stops him. "so you're the dude who's been stealing packages, huh?"

and that becomes A Thing.

Now P is a lifelong DC resident, and he's a little older than me — he hooped on one of Rayful Edmond's "sponsored" teams when he was younger — so he knows that it was like when things were Really Really Real.

we'll text each other when there's a shooting nearby or something — to make sure our respective families are good. P also is a 6'2 Black dude with a 14-year-old Black son who is about the same height.

There is a whole textured continuum of <<threat>> and <<threatened>> that P and I talk about a lot. (And we're not at risk for victimization or formal criminalization nearly as much as a lot of people in our neighborhood are.)

but when people are talking about "crime" + cracking down on it to assuage the public's fears, somebody has to eat that cost. a lot of somebodies will.

and the ppl who want something done about all the "crime" happening understand, implicitly, that none of it will fall on them.

So yeah: next time you read a piece about how people in a Black neighborhood are concerned about crime, ask: well, which people? What specifically are they concerned about? And Does that mean they’re asking for more *police*?

Okay, now logging off for real.

Apologies for typos, as ever

some adds for clarity: when i mentioned a textured continuum of threat and threatened, i meant that me and P are both, on the demographic top line, relatively more likely to be 1) harassed by the police and 2) to be the victims of violent crime.

but *only* on the top line.

we might have more dumb run-ins with the cops than some ppl — see the aforementioned anecdote abt dropping off the ribs — there are ppl who are unhoused/who don't speak English or teenage/young adult males who are way more likely to be victims of crime AND jammed up by the cops

those ppl are usually conspicuously absent from these discussions about what neighborhoods want. they're not going to be at community meetings, for obvious reasons.

also wanted to underline the "dudes on the corner bit" some — there's a reason homelessness figures so prominently in these essays about cities like SF and "rising crime." it's a really useful conflation — and sleight of hand, tbh — bc the vibes do all the work.

The presence of criminalized people is synonymous with crime for a lot of folks. and unhoused ppl are criminalized and often v visible. as @henrygrabar wrote recently, "Crime and homelessness do not have the same causes."

bit.ly/3zWS6A1

As Grabar points out, the cities with the biggest homelessness problems are the cities with the most unaffordable rents — SF, NYC, Boston, DC, Seattle —

But cities with elevated rates of crime don’t necessarily have big homeless populations.

Another element here is the last two decades of reverse white flight back into big cities has meant that policing and criminal legal policy is being shaped by white suburbanites who are bringing their suburban sensibilities about public and private space into cities with them.

That’s a constituency that big city mayors have really solicitous of/toward. And these people are not going to be police skeptics bc they have not been and are not going to be policed.

Remember when those ppl in the new high-rise called the cops on the people at music store that plays go-go on Florida Ave and Georgia? It was almost *too* on the nose.

“lemme sicc armed agents of the state on these people for annoying me.”

Okay, done for real now.

Look at this: a councilmember, @RSGAT, says that crime isn’t up in Hartford — It’s actually the same.

The other dude says: “look, no one cares about your data! people feel like it’s up and that’s why we need more cops!”

Even the police chief said crime wasn’t up!

It didn’t matter. People are paranoid and they love cops.