USA TODAY International Edition
DON’T BE SOFT- HEADED ON CRIME
Law- and- order politicians are not really interested in your safety
Before Donald Trump became the male chauvinist pig candidate, he was the “law and order” candidate. On the first day of his presidential campaign, Trump denounced Mexican rapists and dopers spilling across the border. In his first debate with Hillary Clinton, he accused her of being afraid to even say “law and order.” Responding to the first question in Sunday’s debate, Trump returned to that theme, invoking the need to “bring back respect to law enforcement” and make America “safe.”
The law- and- order trope is inarguably potent. It is also disingenuous. And it fosters this wacky notion that America is in chaos when, in fact, violent crime is lower than it has been for decades. But never mind that. The argument for getting tough on crime has never been about reducing crime; it mostly has been about fueling racial resentments.
Running for president in 1968, Richard Nixon argued that “doubling the conviction rate … would do far more to cure crime in America than quadrupling” spending on poverty.
Why feed people when you can arrest them? Why show compassion when you can crack heads? In a time of backlash against civil rights, voters understood that law and order was largely an indictment of a social movement — and a group of people — that many whites found repugnant.
In 1984, President Reagan similarly argued that the solution to crime was not reducing poverty: “Government’s function is to protect society from the criminal, not the other way around.”
Hillary Clinton apologized this year for invoking a discredited argument about juvenile black superpredators in defending the 1994 crime bill. Trump scolded her for saying such a “terrible thing.” Then he launched into a defense of stop- and- frisk, which, he argued, effectively took guns off the streets.
That is simply not true — not, at least, as it was practiced in New York.
When stop- and- frisk was policy during the Bloomberg administration, police found guns in fewer than 0.2% of the stops, according to data unearthed by the New York Civil Liberties Union. At its height, in 2011, police made 685,724 stops — the majority were blacks and Latinos, 90% of whom were innocent.
“There were more stops of African- American youths between the ages of 18 and 24 than there were in the entire New York City population,” observed Christopher Dunn of the NYCLU.
The tactic was disavowed by incoming mayor Bill de Blasio and curtailed under Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, and the crime rate stayed down.
But then, Trump’s tough- oncrime talk never had much to do with crime or even justice. After five minority teenagers were arrested in the rape of a jogger in Central Park in 1989, Trump made headlines with full- page ads calling for the death penalty. After years in prison, all five were exonerated and given restitution by the city, which Trump called “a disgrace.” In other words, he was angry that innocent men of color finally found justice.
The world has learned a few things since Nixon mocked compassion. One big thing we have learned is that tough- on- crime policies, for the most part, are not tough on crime at all — and that compassion often works.
I recently returned from Norway, where I spent a day in Halden, the country’s showcase high- security prison. During a walk through the grounds with Are Høidal, the governor ( or warden), I asked about the forest in the middle of the grounds. Prisoners sometimes went there to pick blueberries, explained Høidal, who pointed out that “access to nature” improved mental health.
Norway has ( per capita), roughly one- tenth of the prisoners that we have in the USA. It has a recidivism rate that is a fraction of ours. “I think that there’s something global about treating people with dignity that gets results,” Høidal said.
Our get- tough policies get terrible results. They are tough on suspects ( including those arrested yet not convicted) and softheaded on crime. They turn people who make mistakes — particularly those who are minority and/ or poor — into criminals. And yet politicians like Trump keep pushing them because, in the end, they are less interested in reducing ( or being smart about) crime than in riding fear into office.
Ellis Cose, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and writer in residence for the American Civil Liberties Union, is the author of The Rage of a Privileged Class.