Flipping the Script on Public Safety
By Caroline Nobo and Jorge Camacho
Crime and public safety played a starring role in the Midterm election cycle with both parties centering the debate around policing and punishment and resorting to rhetoric and platitudes like “tough on crime” and “defund the police.” Both parties missed the larger point that voters understood: You can’t police your way to a safe and thriving community. Crime and public safety hit at the heart of what voter’s care about most—the safety of themselves, their loved ones and their communities—which make them easy issues to oversimplify and exploit.
Calls for de-funding the police by select factions on the left after George Floyd’s murder gave the right fodder to call Democrats “soft-on-crime” and “anti-police.” And despite achieving key policy victories like bail reform and marijuana decriminalization in many states, many voters, including past supporters, tied their growing sense of insecurity to these policies, blaming them for increasing crime and disorder.
Republicans seized on this and ratcheted up the “soft-on crime” attacks ads in the months leading up to Election Day with an advertising blitz decrying the dissolution of public safety under Democratic control. Democrats countered by pointing to data showing that crime has risen across the country, including within Republican strongholds, and that there is no causal link between their reforms and increases in crime. Initially, Republican attacks on Democrats seemed to be working. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll published November 6, registered voters said they trusted the Republican Party over 20 points more than Democrats to handle crime.
Yet, while Republicans successfully put Democrats on the defensive in key Democratic strongholds like New York and California, they failed to win sizeable political gains nationwide. Why? Stated simply, it’s because voters are more sophisticated than this. They know that safety isn’t just the absence of crime, but the presence of something more, something positive: community vitality.
Community vitality, as the term implies, refers to the notion that both individual and collective security hinges on well being in multiple areas, including personal and community economics, social cohesion, and, yes, public safety. Achieving community vitality requires investments in areas from employment, education, and social welfare to environmental resilience, housing, and policing. As people and those around them feel more secure in each of these areas, so too do they feel safe and perceive their communities as safe.
In fact, the Vera Institute’s pre-election opinion research bears this out. When voters from both parties were asked to select the top factors that would make communities safer, the most popular answers were “people having jobs,” “quick first-responders,” “well-lit streets,” good housing,” “good schools,” and “my neighbors.” These factors ranked well-above “hiring more police.”
Since crime is just one of many components that factor into perceptions of safety and security, this may explain why Democrats, despite all their pointing to comparative crime statistics across both time and geography, found it so difficult to counter the narrative that they were at fault for both rising crime and a growing sense of insecurity. Even with some crime spikes right now, America’s crime rates remain at historic lows. But these statistics don’t matter if the community is experiencing multiple crises in nearly all other areas that shape their feelings of safety and security.
This may also help explain why Republicans, with their near singular focus on crime as a political rallying cry, could not broadly capitalize against Democrats’ vulnerabilities. Having failed to articulate a vision that encapsulates all the other components under the community vitality umbrella, Republicans threw their eggs into one basket, an investment that at one point may have yielded returns but that has become less reliable as people’s conscious understanding of their own well being has grown more sophisticated.
Moving beyond the midterms, both parties would be wise to take stock of their respective public safety platforms because the tough vs. soft on crime rhetoric alone doesn’t appear to be working. Perhaps voters want a positive message coupled with affirmative solutions—not only ones that address how we punish crime, but also how we prevent it and address its sources.
To be sure, public safety requires a complex set of proven policies that address issues such as over policing, mass incarceration, and bail reform, but it cannot be achieved without a plan for community vitality at its core.
Caroline Nobo is a Research Scholar in Law and Executive Director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School
Jorge Camacho is a Clinical Lecturer in Law and Policing, Law, and Policy Director of the Justice Collaboratory