How we talk about our cities matters
The latest Republican screed about crime, roughly the 8,000th piece on the subject from a prominent party member in the past year, contained a real head-scratcher.
People in Connecticut, it seemed to say, should be scared of the big city, and not just any city — New York City.
We should stop comparing state crime rates to other places, the piece read, “as if the victims of violent crime in our own backyard are somehow comforted that New York City is even more dangerous than New Haven.”
New York City? Does the writer not know the conservative go-to for crime is Chicago? Maybe it’s all about the local angle. Either way, even with some numbers up since the start of the pandemic, New York has been and remains an overwhelmingly safe place.
Connecticut Republicans who are scared of New York City apparently still think it’s 1993, which is fitting since that was about the last time they had any new ideas. It’s OK, guys; the big city is not going to hurt you.
It’s not about New York, of course. Connecticut Republicans are trying to use fear as a motivation for votes. Partly this is just politics, but it’s also doing real harm to the state.
Because when an entire political party talks about Connecticut’s cities almost exclusively in terms of crimes committed within them, it sends a familiar signal to the rest of the state. These places, suburbanites are told, are safe to ignore. The implicit message is to just stay away.
Bob Stefanowski, who announced his second candidacy for governor a few days ago, wants the state’s top job, and in a recent opinion column, written with fellow Republican stalwart Len Fasano, he went on at length about the constant violence and irredeemable dangers of Connecticut’s cities, citing “drive-by shootings in Bridgeport, executions in Waterbury, armed carjackings in New Haven.”
The explicit message is that we’re all supposed to be scared of crime all the time, and also blame it on the party that’s currently in control. You have to work hard to find facts to back up that assertion; crime is real, of course, but, despite what politicians say, is not necessarily the dominant reality for the hundreds of thousands of people who live in Connecticut’s cities every day.
Again, this isn’t about them. Suburbs remain ascendant, so it’s about appeals to fear, especially where crimes aren’t happening. It’s a bankrupt strategy, but it appears to be what they’re going with.
It’s normal, and fine, for challengers to go after incumbents. Ned Lamont is not remotely above criticism.
Neither would anyone argue that Democrats do all they can to make our cities better. Taking real action, on housing, zoning, transportation, education and more, would affect the lives of those precious suburbanites, and no one wants to risk that, and so problems are allowed to fester.
But it bears repeating that Republicans
who go on at length about crime are arguing against opponents who don’t exist. No one is dismissive of crime, and no one, on any side, is arguing homicides don’t matter. There are, though, real questions about what can be done.
If there were a direct line between more police officers and less crime, we’d know what to do. There isn’t. And the Republican crime-fighting plan they’ve been touting for months (without bothering to say how they’d pay for it) is dismissed by critics because it’s such blatant political pandering. Crackdowns rarely work out the way they’re intended to.
It’s not easy to have a nuanced conversation about issues like this, but it doesn’t appear Bob and his followers are interested in having a nuanced discussion. They want to bludgeon opponents into submission. And it might even work. Certainly, the entire diminished cohort of Republican leaders in Connecticut is on the same page, and supporters online act almost gleeful when heinous crimes are committed, as if it somehow proves whatever their point is supposed to be. It doesn’t.
It’s an unsatisfying answer to say we don’t always know why crime goes up or down or what could be done to change it, but that doesn’t make it untrue. We know the harms that supposed tough-on-crime policies have caused. And it’s also true that trying to make half the state scared of the other half is an odd way to run for public office.