Crime Is a Legitimate Political Issue
People fear getting attacked and getting their stuff stolen, and habitual thieves and violent criminals are bad people
The Left is going through the five stages of grief on the crime issue. For awhile, they were stuck in Denial. When upticks in the crime rate first appeared, a whole lot of people started saying that it was all BS. Republican talking points! Racist propaganda! Target was going to move its stores out of San Francisco anyway! If you look at the larger crime rate rather than homicide statistics, there was no increase!
For the most part, they’ve moved on from that. Reality has pulled them out of this position- we continue to see chain stores pull out of major cities and put stuff behind locked cabinets, more statistics have come out showing the crime rate is increasing, and there have been some really vivid anecdotes such as the CNN crew who got their equipment stolen from a car while parked at San Francisco City Hall to cover the crime issue!
So now we’ve moved past Denial, as well as Anger (the oft-repeated claim that any concern about crime at all is racist, or that crime is a product of white supremacy), right into the Bargaining phase. People have taken up the argument that crime isn’t that bad and why is everyone so worried about it? John Hamasaki is no rando- he is a prominent San Francisco liberal lawyer, former member of the Police Commission, and a recent Democratic candidate for District Attorney up there:
I can, of course, think of many urban areas here in Southern California where you can park your car with $10,000 worth of stuff and not have it broken into, including most of the City of Los Angeles and its suburbs, San Diego, and plenty of other smaller communities. And throughout the nation there are urban areas that refute Hamasaki’s tweet— indeed, you can even do it in Midtown Manhattan!
But leave aside the fact that Hamasaki is telling a whopper, and look at the deeper meaning of what he is saying. He’s essentially saying that getting your stuff stolen (even $10,000 in stuff, which would be 1/7th of a typical American’s yearly income, i.e., would require 3-4 months work after taxes to replace) is no big deal, it’s part of what happens when you live in the city and you shouldn’t worry about it!
And at bottom, this exposes the extensive class privilege behind a lot of what is supposed to sound like pro-working class Left rhetoric about how crime isn’t so bad. If you are a wealthy elite lawyer in San Francisco like Hamasaki is, sure, you can cope if you lose 10 grand to thieves who break into your car. (Of course, in reality lawyers like Hamasaki don’t park on the street and get their stuff stolen— they park in underground garages at fancy skyscrapers and, when they can, bill their clients for it.) You know who theft hits hard? Poor and working class people.
Homeless people have their belongings stolen all the time. You see, it turns out, one of the best ways to protect your stuff from being stolen is to not have it out on the street every day, because you have an apartment or house you can put it in. And if you are poor and have a house to live in, your neighborhood is far more likely to have a high crime rate and a lot of burglaries. It turns out thieves often can’t afford penthouse apartments in Beverly Hills, and it is easier for them to rob poor people’s houses in neighborhoods with less policing and private security, less burglar alarms, and less likelihood that they will seem “out of place” in the neighborhood.
And I am sure I don’t have to tell you that poorer neighborhoods also have higher rates of violent crimes as well. Their kids have to go to school in these conditions, and their classmates will often include some thieves and even violent gang members.
At bottom Hamasaki’s class privilege is enormous. Yes, if you are a rich person in the city who can rely on security to protect yourself and your family, can take precautions to reduce the chance of theft, and can absorb an occasional loss to thieves anyway, it’s easy to dismiss crime concerns. It’s easy to say that it’s all really racism. Indeed, it’s even easy to get into what you might call the “Robin Hood” position, where one thinks of crime (especially theft) as some justified and heroic effort by the masses to strike back at The Man. But all of that is a luxury. If you are poor, any theft is devastating to your life (and in fact can even throw you into homelessness or food insecurity), the police protection of your family is inadequate and you can’t afford private measures, and the last thing you want is your kids to be drawn into a life of crime and the possibility of prison.
And this, ultimately, is why I urge the Left to get past the other stages of grief and get into Acceptance that crime is a legitimate issue in politics. The revolution is not going to be led by street criminals who are stealing staples and drugs from the local Target so they can fence them and raise money to buy drugs or just because they don’t want to work for a living. But what will in fact happen is you are going to end up with poor public services in urban areas, and the victims are going to be the homeless and poor folks who can’t just order everything they need from Amazon and DoorDash.
Moreover, if you really think it is racist to want to catch and jail criminals, why is it that the only people whose interests are taken into account in this calculus are the criminals? As between a homeless person of color who gets his stuff stolen and a thief of color who takes said stuff, I don’t think there's anything racist at all about siding with the homeless victim and wanting to see the thief arrested and thrown in jail. The homeless person is a moral actor facing bad life circumstances; the thief is a person with no care for how his actions affect his fellow human beings. Crime is one of the big reasons that life sucks for so many members of racial minority groups in the United States; in a more enlightened society, we might be asking “What animus do a bunch of people on Twitter who celebrate crime as a feature of cities while having the means to avoid it themselves hold against the working class people of color who are all too often its victims?”.
At any rate, we need to do something against crime, that something has got to include arresting, prosecuting, and jailing thieves and violent criminals who tear at the social fabric, and we need to figure out how to do the necessary policing and prosecuting in the least abusive way possible. And if the Left doesn’t figure out how to this, voters will eventually turn to the Right, who will try to do the same thing while not doing it in the least abusive way possible. That’s not going to turn out better for the Left, and it’s a big reason why a lot of urban governments in the 1970’s through the 1990’s were headed by Republican mayors who didn’t give a hoot who the police were abusing.
This is great.