And just a few weeks ago, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who was facing multiple political challengers attacking her for being too soft on crime, announced she would not seek re-election in the fall. It is behind only COVID-19 and, again, ahead of affordable housing and racial injustice in New York City. An April poll found that crime and violence were the second most important issue - the second most important issue - for likely Democratic primary voters in New York’s mayoral election. But in other places, we’re seeing different reactions, cities like Minneapolis and Atlanta, which, at one point, were centers of the Defund the Police movement, they recently announced plans to invest millions towards hiring more police officers. On the one hand, Philadelphia’s progressive district attorney Larry Krasner, who’s been a symbol of the move against mass incarceration and against warrior policing, he fended off a primary challenge this week. So far, with the rise in violence still pretty early, the politics are moving in different directions. And voters are least likely to take the long view when there is blood in their community and fear in their lives right now. And state violence often creates street violence. That is politics failing people in the most profound way. And it’s left many communities terrified of and traumatized by the very people they’re supposed to trust to protect them. And it did not make people that much safer. The mass incarceration and warrior style policing that emerged out of that era had terrible, terrible costs. You don’t have to look further than the U.S.‘s own response to the crime wave of the 1970s and 1980s. When violence arises, the result is this politics of fear, of punitiveness, of scapegoating. But violence is also damaging, then, in this other way. It makes inequality worse through all the dynamics I just mentioned. Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey makes this important point where he says that crime is, in part, generated by inequality when you have communities that have suffered from economic inequality for a long time. Families are far less likely to escape poverty. They’re more likely develop attention disorders and problems with impulse control. Children, in particular bear this for their lives. But there’s also the less direct cost, when violence is present, public spaces empty, businesses closed or refuse to move in. There is the child who sees someone shot right in front of her and carries that trauma forever. There’s loss of life, of safety, grieving families, bullet wounds that don’t end in death, but they do end in lifelong paralysis or brain damage. There’s the direct cost of the violence, of course. You cannot overstate the damage this kind of violence does to people in their communities. And if you look at the early numbers of 2021, there’s no reason to think that’s slowing down. Murders are up across the board in basically every major city in the US.
So that is the single largest one year increase since 1960. This depends a bit on what estimate used, but in 2020, homicides were up anywhere from 25 percent to almost 40 percent nationally relative to 2019. So I want to talk today about one of the really scary trends we’re seeing across cities all over the country right now, which is that violent crime is spiking. I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” on the wicked problem of crime and the messy politics of safety. Do Liberals Have an Answer? James Forman Jr.