Defunding the Police: a case study in Wisconsin, North Carolina, and other states with mixed data in the G.O.P
In my many years in politics, I have never seen a more destructive slogan than “defund the police.” In fairness to my beloved Democrats, only a tiny slice of the activist left supports defunding. This election season, I cannot find any actual Democrats running on that nonsense. The overwhelming majority of Americans – including most Black Americans and most Democrats – oppose defunding police. Still, the political damage from that slogan has been real.
That wasn’t the unusual part. Republicans have painted the Democrats as hostile to the police in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and other states. Even though there is mixed data on crime, the tactic of the G.O.P seems to work in many races.
The Crime Problem in the U.S.: A Comment on Paul Begala, a Former CNN Consultant and a Clinton Political Consultant
Editor’s Note: Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and CNN political commentator, was a political consultant for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992 and served as a counselor to Clinton in the White House. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his. CNN has more opinion on it.
Republicans might say the crime issue is about cities and not states. Okay. Check out Jacksonville, Florida. It’s a Republican-run city and it has a murder rate that is nearly double that of New York City. Kevin McCarthy’s hometown of Bakersfield, California also has a Republican mayor. Its murder rate is much higher than Nancy Pelosi’s beloved San Francisco. And while murder rates don’t tell the entire story, they do contribute to communities overall sense of wellbeing – or lack thereof – in the communities where they live.
Tuberville bragged to the crowd at A Trump rally that Democrats want crime because they want to take over. They want to get control over what you have. He said that Democrats want to get something back for Black Americans who were victims of slavery.
When Crime Meets Crime: The Case of Sen. Cortez Masto, Florida Attorney General Adam Laxalt, and Rep. Val Demings
My friend Bakari Sellers spoke for many when he said, “Tommy Tuberville can go to hell.” Bakari noted that as a college football coach, Tuberville made millions from the unpaid efforts of Black athletes. It is particularly galling to hear such racism from a former college coach who got rich because of African American men risking life and limb on the gridiron.
Beyond telling politicians who traffic in racist attacks to go to the devil, how should Democrats deal with crime? First, let me suggest how not to talk about it.
The example is Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto. Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt is running in a close race with Democrat Cortez Masto in the Senate. Cortez Masto was attorney general before Laxalt, and has worked as a federal prosecutor. Her husband is a former law enforcement officer and she is running ads touting her support from law enforcement. She has even earned the support of the Republican police chief of Reno.
Cortez Masto was so effective as a crime-fighter that when Laxalt took over as AG, he called her “a role model,” and when he was running for attorney general he said she had done “an excellent job.” Will her hard-on-crime credentials bring her back to the Senate? I don’t know. But if she weren’t leaning in on crime, this race might already be over.
Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) is another Democrat who is unafraid of the crime issue. When you go to her campaign website, just below the standard “Donate Here” plea, there is a photo of Demings in a police uniform.
Demings spent 27 years in that uniform, rising to become Orlando, Florida’s first female police chief. In one campaign ad, she strides purposefully across the screen, as if walking the beat, as images of her in uniform are projected behind her.
The voiceover details her record: “The most dramatic decrease in violent crime…” Then the candidate speaks: “In the Senate,” Demings says, “I’ll protect Florida from bad ideas like defunding the police. That is crazy. She concludes by saying, “It’s time to send a cop on the beat to the Senate.”
Demings trailed incumbent Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) by five points in a recent poll, but Rubio is either taking no chances or panicking. In a controversial ad, he accused Demings of supporting a “radical left agenda”, including “turning boys into girls.” (Fact check: WESH-TV in Orlando labeled Rubio’s claim “False.”)
Both Cortez Masto’s and Demings’ election races are too close to call. Both women are showing Democrats how to handle crime by standing up for it.
Many Democrats cannot point to years of being a prosecutor or cop. They can read and promote the study by Third Way. Democrats are doing a much better job of fighting crime than Republicans, at least when it comes to the metric of homicide rates.
It turns out that in 2020, the murder rates in the states Trump carried were 40% higher per capita than in the states Biden won. In fact, eight of the 10 states with the highest per capita murder rates voted for Republican nominees in every presidential election this century. Alabama is number four of the top five murder rates byMississippi, Louisiana, and Kentucky.
Democrat Eric Adams is a Shameful Lying on the Crime in New York City, as Revealed by CNN’s Amy Hochul
The governor’s race and contests for as many as four US House seats largely in the suburbs may be costly for the Democrats.
“The concern over crime is real. It is acute,” said Rep. Mondaire Jones, a progressive Democrat who lost a primary to represent parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn after Maloney opted to run for a redrawn suburban seat that also included parts of Jones’ district. “But once this election is over, I hope people have an honest conversation about how Democrats like Eric Adams have validated a hysteria over crime that is uninformed and that has been debunked.”
The Democrat who works on campaigns in New York said that he helped make the attacks seem less partisan by being an important validator in the city.
Other Democrats argue this has it backwards. While they criticize Republicans for being cynical, racist and taking advantage of a situation fostered by the flu, they insist they would have been better off if they spoke to the fear and frustration voters feel.
But what many Democrats are left with as they approach the end of campaigning in New York is a potentially devastating example of failing again to break a decades-long paradigm of Republicans capitalizing on calling them soft on crime.
Zeldin has taken to regularly mentioning Adams on the campaign trail, to the point that some Democrats have joked that he could just run clips of Adams talking about crime as his closing ads.
There are national ripples: Democratic groups like the Democratic Governors Association are moving in millions of dollars to prop up Hochul in a deep-blue state instead of spending that on tight races elsewhere, with Vice President Kamala Harris flying in on Thursday in one of her own last campaign stops and President Joe Biden heading to Westchester County, north of New York City, on Sunday to rally with the governor. Republicans, meanwhile, are seizing opportunities to pad a potential House majority by targeting seats that Democrats had been counting on as backstops.
Appearing on “CNN This Morning” on Friday, Hochul said there’s never been a governor and mayor in New York with as strong a relationship as the one she has with Adams. She acknowledged that violent crime is up, as well as the fact that the issue is caused by voters’ sincere fears, but said Republicans weren’t having a discussion about real solutions.
The retiring moderate Democrat, who served in Nassau County, said at first that she was encouraged by Adams. She said that he knows the problem but hasn’t shown he has focused enough on the issue to make a difference.
Rice said she has heard from people who live outside of the city who do not like the stories about Adams spending late nights at expensive restaurants while other people are murdered on the subways.
Democrats hold Rice’s seat on Long Island which is one of the two that are seen as at risk. Democrats are in danger of losing two seats north of New York City, one held by Pat Ryan and the Lower Hudson Valley district of Sean Patrick Maloney.
“It is an issue for voters, but it is not because they have personally experienced crime in the Hudson Valley or their neighbors are talking about crimes committed in the Hudson Valley as much as it is the narrative pushed by the industrial fear machine at Fox and the New York Post describing New York City as a lawless hellscape,” Maloney said in an interview. That is raising concerns among suburbanites.
CNN has learned that a long time ago, in conversations and in a March memo sent around by the DCCC, a warning was given to other House Democrats to be prepared to fight back against opponents who claimed that they were weak on crime. The guidance started with telling candidates to be firmly against calls to “defund the police” but also to talk about the more than $8 billion Democratic lawmakers had secured for law enforcement in bills such as the American Rescue Plan.
He pointed out that he voted for legislation to fund body cameras and plate reading technology for local police departments in his district, as well as the gun control measures enacted over the summer.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/politics/eric-adams-new-york-crime-midterms/index.html
Eric Adams and the state of the affairs: When crime meets politics: where we can fight for justice and public safety in New York, and where we need to go
He also stood by a remark he made last July – catching several Democratic operatives’ attention at the time – when he stood with Adams on the steps of the Democratic National Committee headquarters and called him “a rock on which I can build a church.”
“What I meant was he had a genuine desire for justice and fairness in our system, and he was respecting good policing as well as understanding the need for public safety.” There is a chance he may not get everything right. He knows that we are not where we should be. I agree with his efforts to clean it up.
Conversations about crime in New York are bound up in the debate over reforming the bail laws, and in well-worn internal political power struggles among officials. In phone calls and meetings at the beginning of the year, Adams urged top officials in Albany to change the laws, warning them that crime would likely be a major political liability in the fall, according to people familiar with the conversations.
Legislative leaders have already passed two partial rollbacks, including one supported by Hochul earlier this year. Suburban members had warned them of their actions, but they have not done more.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/politics/eric-adams-new-york-crime-midterms/index.html
New York City has a Hero – a Crime Stopper, Not a Role. The Case of Major E.B. Adams
Adams has charged that the “insane broken system” of bail laws now puts criminals back on the street who then tend to get back to committing crimes. The number of people who were taken into custody for multiple offenses in the first six months of the year in New York increased by 14 and 88 percent, respectively. The mayor’s office also pointed to statistics that show double-digit jumps in recidivism for felony, grand larceny and auto theft.
Crime statistics don’t tell a simple story as much as political ads do. The Westchester County executive in New York stated in a report in February that there had been a 25% drop in crime in the area.
Rape, robbery, felony assault, Burglary, grand larceny and auto theft are all up in New York from the year before, despite murder and gunfire being down in the city.
The former prosecutor who is endorsed by police unions in the House race for Long Island said that a lot of the story is of New York City crime. “We’re making sure law enforcement is supported – and other than gun crime, we’re keeping crime down here.”
But Adams spokesman Maxwell Young said the mayor’s job isn’t to put a rosy spin on things in a way that could benefit Hochul’s or any of the other candidates’ campaigns.
“We can’t, and won’t, ignore the reality,” Young said. “Those who claim we aren’t making progress or, conversely, that we’ve been crying wolf aren’t paying attention and have no idea what they’re talking about.”
You need to convince people you are worthy to lead and follow their lead, not argue with them, Thies said. “The mayor became mayor by listening to and advocating for people in high-crime communities – he’s not going to abandon them now.”
Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat, whose district covers Upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, points to how many systemic, as well as larger societal and economic issues, are involved in making a real impact on crime – and that Adams has only been on the job for 10 months.
Biden hosted Adams in the White House weeks after he won the mayoral primary and then offered him a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich as they traveled to New York to talk about gun violence. Adams drew on the same coalition of pragmatic, working-class and African American voters which propelled Biden to the Democratic nomination.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/politics/eric-adams-new-york-crime-midterms/index.html
The Rise and Fall of Crime: Everytown, New York City, the Los Angeles Neighborhood, Los Angeles, and the Chicago Runoff as a Case Study
There are some parts of the country where gun safety laws are weak that are high in crime. We needed to tell that story and done so loudly to neutralize the issue. You can’t sit idly by and wish it away,” said Charlie Kelly, a political adviser to former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s gun safety group Everytown and former executive director for the Democratic-aligned House Majority PAC.
In New York and elsewhere, some Democrats are hoping for a post- election recognition that will push them to a tougher attack on Republicans and a bolder shift to the left.
“We can’t dismiss people’s concerns,” said Justin Brannan, a New York City councilman from a moderate district in Brooklyn. It is another thing for a Republican to say, if you go outside you are going to die.
Progressives have struggled to develop a persuasive response. Some have suggested that the crime increase is mostly a right-wing talking point, but the statistics say otherwise. And voters evidently agree with the statistics:
In New York City, Eric Adams won the mayor’s race in 2021 by focusing his campaign on crime. In the Democratic primary, he lost only one of the city’s five boroughs: Manhattan, the wealthiest.
Republicans also fared well last year in Oregon, where the largest city — Portland — has become a symbol of post-pandemic disorder. Between 2019 and 2022, murders nearly tripled, vandalism incidents nearly doubled and car thefts rose 69 percent.
Karen Bass, the recently elected mayor of Los Angeles, has developed arguably the most successful progressive message on crime. A former community organizer who spent 12 years in the House of Representatives defeated a more conservative candidate not by downplaying crime concerns but by discussing them frequently. Bass was a crime victim last year.
She has tried to strike a balance by calling for both the hiring of hundreds of additional police officers and tougher punishments for abusive officers. “We must stop crimes in progress and hold people accountable,” she said in her inaugural address. We can prevent crime and community violence if we address the social, health and economy of the place where it happens.
The Chicago runoff will become the next test of whether a progressive message on crime can win in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. As was the case in Los Angeles, the more progressive candidate — Johnson — is Black, while the more conservative one — Vallas — is white.
In the past, Johnson supported calls to defund the police but he has tried to avoid the subject during the mayoral campaign. He has focused on building more housing, increasing funding for social services and expanding pre-K. He is likely to portray Vallas as out of touch with conservatives in Chicago. Vallas has been endorsed by the local police union, whose top official is a Donald Trump supporter.
At his election night party, Johnson said, “No matter where you reside, no matter what you look like, you deserve to be safer in Chicago.”