Harris’ win may show shift in approach
It was a time-worn tactic that once scared people into voting their fears and not their hopes.
During his first debate in June with Lee Harris, his Democratic opponent for Shelby County mayor, GOP candidate David Lenoir said Harris would be soft on violent criminals because, as a state senator, he voted against a bill for stiffer penalties for people who illegally possess firearms. The debate was sponsored by the Kiwanis Club of Memphis.
Lenoir repeated that charge in July, during a debate sponsored by the Memphis branch of the NAACP.
Harris, however, said his vote wasn’t about being soft, but about being sensible; such a law, he said, would have targeted non-violent offenders and sent people to prison for 10 years even if they didn’t use the gun. But Lenoir wasn’t done. His campaign tried to fuel more foreboding thoughts about Harris by sending out a mailer - #TaxHikeHarris - in which Harris’ skin was darkened and he was holding a bag of money with dollar bills aflutter.
Kind of like showing that someone who was light on crime might not be one to be trusted with taxpayer’s money.
That didn’t scare away enough Shelby County voters, though. Harris won with more than 55 percent of the vote.
And what his victory shows, among other things, is that candidates can no longer rely on accusations of being weak on crime as a Hail Mary strategy.
Of course, this isn’t to say that Shelby County doesn’t struggle with crime. It is, after all, where Memphis, the nation’s third most violent city, is located. In the county, murders, robberies, assaults and other violent crimes increased by 7.9 percent from 2016 to 2017.
Yet at the same time, Memphis is also the nation’s poorest large metro area. And in Shelby County, the poverty rate is 20.8 percent – higher than the national poverty rate of 14 percent and the state poverty rate of 15.8 percent.
On top of that, African-Americans in Shelby County, who have an incarceration rate nearly double that of whites, also struggle with a poverty level that is more than three times that of whites.
Knowing that, and knowing that poverty is inextricably tied to crime, it doesn’t take much to figure out that solutions to crime don’t solely in making criminals disappear, but in eliminating the poverty and hopelessness that often creates them. Nowadays, many people get this. “I think people see our laws differently than they did back in the 1980s and 1990s,” said Valerie Colvin Peavy, general manager of The Office @Uptown restaurant near downtown. “We’re building more prisons and taking more people out of the community, and we’re not seeing any benefit from it.
“With all the restorative justice programs around the country, people are looking at other ways to deal with crime.”
A frequent Uptown diner, Bob Brown, said: “I think his (Harris) idea is right. You can’t just keep incarcerating people. The solution is jobs and opportunity.”
This is why Lenoir’s jab at Harris during two forums over his vote against yet another draconian measure didn’t amp up enough frightamong voters to put him over the top.
It failed because many people are seeing the cost of prisons and mass incarceration siphon money from education
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and other resources that could be used to battle the poverty and dysfunction that fuels criminality.
One study even showed that victims of crimes aren’t clamoring for longer prison times.
A poll commissioned by the Alliance for Safety and Justice, a criminal justice reform group, found that by a 2-to-1 margin, victims preferred that the system focus more on rehabilitation than punishment. Also, when victims were asked to rank the main causes of crime, drug and alcohol addiction was number one, followed by poor parenting and lack of job opportunities.
Too few people in prison ranked dead last.
Apparently, Harris tapped into that sentiment when he repeatedly emphasized reform and tackling poverty. Lenoir spoke of reform as well.
But these days, when talk that hints of supporting draconian approaches to crime is mixed with talk of reform, at best it comes across as insincere, and at worse, it comes across as a dog whistle to conjure old stereotypes about Democrats caring more about criminals than victims.
In the end, what Lenoir didn’t realize is that he was behind the times; that even though Shelby County has a high crime rate, people want their resources used to address the issues that fuel crime.
That’s understandable – especially since the stigma of having a prison record has contributed to an AfricanAmerican unemployment rate of 10 percent, compared to a white unemployment rate of 3.9 percent in Shelby County.
And to many, any politician who would support laws that would worsen that situation are far more scary.