Two recent Washington Post opinion pieces parse the discussion of crime in the presidential race, which has thus far largely focused on crime levels, not on how to prevent crime.
In the first piece, Philip Bump, a national Washington Post columnist, notes that Trump’s claims about violent crime increasingly diverge from reality. To support his stance, Bumps points out, Trump he is citing different, and older, crime data.
In the second piece, James Forman Jr. and Maria Hawilo assert that, instead of focusing on her ability to stand up to criminals, Kamala Harris’s campaign should sharpen its focus on criminal justice reform.
In his column, Bump quotes Trump’s rhetoric during a recent campaign stop. "The crime is so out of control in our country," Trump said. "You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot. You get mugged. You get raped, you get whatever it may be. And you’ve seen it and I’ve seen it, and it’s time for a change. We have to bring back our cities. We have these cities that are great cities where people are afraid to live in them, and they’re fleeing the cities of our country.”
Trump’s contentions about rising crime are not supported by reality, Bump writes. But to support his points, Trump cites data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicating a 43 percent increase in reported crime victimization from 2020 to 2022 – an endpoint of two years ago. Meanwhile, Harris uses different data from the FBI that shows a clear decline in violent crime since Trump left office. Other recent year-over-year data shows a big drop in homicides in American cities, Bump notes.
The second opinion piece suggests that voters, tired of the same hyperbole, may want to hear a more nuanced discussion about crime.
“Harris and other Democrats should pause before assuming that winning elections requires them to abandon meaningful criminal justice reform,” write Forman, who teaches at Yale Law School, and Hawilo, who teaches at Loyola University of Chicago Law School. Together, they edited, along with Premal Dharia, of “Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change.
‘Can Harris speak to voters worried about crime and those concerned about over-punishment at the same time? We think so,” write the two law professors. “The key is to focus on policies that resist mass incarceration and reduce crime at the same time.”
Among their suggestions for Harris are a focus on an expansion of federal funding for education in prisons because people who take classes while in prison are 43 percent less likely to be reincarcerated and are 13 percent more likely to find jobs. Or a roll back of the thousands of regulations — often called “collateral consequences” — that trail people with a criminal conviction for decades after they’ve served their sentences, keeping them from working, finding a home and voting. Or a nationwide expansion of trained, unarmed civilians to respond to calls that don’t require a police officer, a movement that has now expanded to 100 communities that have developed civilian teams to respond to mental health, addiction and homelessness.
“Harris has an opportunity to help the nation begin to see the ways in which mass incarceration harms everybody, including communities that up until now might have thought themselves immune,” Forman and Hawilo opine. “If she succeeds, in a list of firsts, Harris could add one more: our first anti-mass incarceration president.”
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