There are two kinds of “crime waves”: Invented and real.
In the era of yellow journalism, crime was a circulation-builder, so newspapers played up crime stories when other news was slow. Crime might not have increased, or gone down, but the heightened media coverage conveyed an impression to the public that a crime wave was occurring.
Sensational headlines aside, crime rates fluctuate over time, so there are temporal spikes in crime. These fluctuations often are tied to demographics; when you have a larger population of young people, you’ll tend to have more crime.
In America, crime overall has been dropping in recent decades, because the last population bulge is aging out of crime-committing age. An exception is the homicide rate, which began climbing sharply in 2020 with the onset of the pandemic.
Experts are somewhat baffled as to why homicides are increasing, and there likely is more than one reason (see story here). But when you look at the facts, the “Democrats are soft on crime” argument is weak, not least because the highest murder rates are occurring in red states (see story here).
It’s tempting to attribute this to their lax gun policies, but people who analyze the data find stronger correlations with low education, poverty, and limited access to government assistance programs. These are characteristics of states with high rates of gun violence (e.g. Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana).
The GOP tried to exploit crime in the 2022 elections, with surprisingly little success. Crime ranked high among Republican voters’ concerns, but far less so with independents and swing voters, who had other priorities. Vox notes, “In many of the high-profile races where the Republican sought to make crime a major issue, the Democrat ended up winning by a larger margin than expected.” (See story here.)
Why didn’t it work? For starters, GOP efforts to paint Democrats as police “defunders” and tie them to protest violence weren’t backed by facts. While some activists called for “defunding the police,” the Democratic Party and its candidates never endorsed that messaging, and as the 2022 campaign heated up, they overtly disavowed it. In addition, Democrats passed pro-police legislation, and the GOP undoubtedly was hurt on this issue by the Capitol riot violence against police.
I’d guess voters are also more likely to blame mass shootings and school shootings on Republicans than Democrats because of GOP resistance to keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people.
Vox says post-election research suggests crime may have boosted Republican voter turnout in some races, such as Sen. Ron Johnson’s in Wisconsin. But in others, low-quality GOP candidates drove away independents and even some Republican voters.
Still, Republicans retain an inherent advantage in crime politics, because their black-and-white messaging — “support the police” and “lock ’em up” — is easier for low-information voters to process and remember. Crime solutions that actually work, e.g. addressing the root causes of violence, and studies showing higher incarceration rates don’t reduce crime, are harder to explain and less likely to be accepted by voters who don’t think about issues.
Policing does make a difference, and diverting resources from police risks giving criminals a freer hand. Studies back this up. But this doesn’t mean there aren’t policing issues that call for reforms. American policing isn’t exactly broken, but it needs a lot of work. However, greater resources for mental health and social work should be in addition to, not at the expense of, police agencies and should be used to complement police work.
In politics, crime is mostly a political football, because neither politicians nor voters go to the effort of thinking about real-life crime and its causes. Plus it’s an issue that readily lends itself to demagoguery and use of smear tactics.
Still, it’s a real problem. On that score, I trust Democrats more than Republicans, because they’re motivated to solve the actual problem, whereas for Republicans it’s another stone to throw and use to stoke white fear in political campaigns.