Highlights
This article is available as a podcast on YouTube.
Are progressives hurting their own causes with what they say about crime?
“We are doing our best to get Democrats to talk like normal people and stop talking like they’re leading a seminar at Antioch.”
“It shows that people don’t think Democrats want to hold criminals accountable at all.”
Are progressives (or conservatives) more interested in groupthink than in communicating clearly or effecting change?
CrimeinAmerica.Net-Chat GPT’s “Top 10 Sources for Crime in America” based on primary statistical sources with trusted secondary analysis.
Author
Leonard Adam Sipes, Jr.
Former Senior Specialist for Crime Prevention and Statistics for the Department of Justice’s clearinghouse. Former Director of Information Services, National Crime Prevention Council. Former Adjunct Associate Professor of Criminology and Public Affairs-University of Maryland, University College. Former police officer. Retired federal senior spokesperson.
Former advisor to presidential and gubernatorial campaigns. Former advisor to the “McGruff-Take a Bite Out of Crime” national media campaign. Produced successful state anti-crime media campaigns.
Thirty-five years of directing award-winning (50+) public relations for national and state criminal justice agencies. Interviewed thousands of times by every national news outlet, often with a focus on crime statistics and research. Created the first state and federal podcasting series. Produced a unique and emulated style of government proactive public relations.
Certificate of Advanced Study-The Johns Hopkins University.
Author of ”Success With The Media: Everything You Need To Survive Reporters and Your Organization,” available at Amazon and additional bookstores.
Crime in America.Net-“Trusted Crime Data, Made Clear.”
Quoted by The Associated Press, USA Today, A&E Television, the nationally syndicated Armstrong Williams Television Show (30 times), Department of Justice documents, US Supreme Court briefs, C-SPAN, the National Institute of Health, college and university online libraries, multiple books and journal articles, The Huffington Post, JAMA, The National Institute of Corrections, The Office of Juvenile Justice And Delinquency Prevention, The Bureau of Justice Assistance, Gartner Consulting, The Maryland Crime Victims Resource Center, The Marshall Project, The Heritage Foundation via Congressional testimony, Law Enforcement Today, Law Officer.Com, Blue Magazine, Corections.Com, Prison Legal News, The Hill (newspaper of Congress), the Journal of Offender Monitoring, Inside Edition Television, Yomiuri Shimbun (Asia’s largest newspaper), LeFigaro (France’s oldest newspaper), Oxygen and allied publications, Forbes, Newsweek, The Economist, The Toronto Sun, Homeland Security Digital Library, The ABA Journal, The Daily Express (UK) The Harvard Political Review, The Millennial Source, The Federalist Society, Lifewire, The Beccaria Portal On Crime (Europe), The European Journal of Criminology, American Focus and many additional publications.
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A comprehensive overview of crime for recent years is available at Violent and Property Crime Rates In The U.S.
Opinion
A conversation with a female crime victim in Washington, D.C. about released inmates, “the system is referring to them as returning citizens. They are not returning citizens; they are criminals released from prison, and one scarred me forever. Why the hell is the justice system trying so hard to make my life difficult?”
Politico: The ‘Woke’ Words Democrats Should Cut From Their Vocabulary
A new memo identifies 45 words and phrases for Democrats to avoid, alleging the terms turn voters off. They span six categories — from “therapy speak” to “explaining away crime.”
In a new memo, shared exclusively with POLITICO, the center-left think tank Third Way is circulating a list of 45 words and phrases they want Democrats to avoid using, alleging the terms put “a wall between us and everyday people of all races, religions, and ethnicities.” It’s a set of words that Third Way suggests “people simply do not say, yet they hear them from Democrats.”
“We are doing our best to get Democrats to talk like normal people and stop talking like they’re leading a seminar at Antioch,” says Matt Bennett, Third Way’s executive vice president of public affairs. “We think language is one of the central problems we face with normie voters, signaling that we are out of touch with how they live, think and talk.
In recent weeks, this has become a bit of a thing, with comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman highlighting how insane Dems can sometimes sound.
Erickson (Third Way’s senior vice president) mentioned crime as a key issue on which Democrats need to recalibrate, citing Trump’s “invasion of D.C.”
“It shows that people don’t think Democrats want to hold criminals accountable at all,” she said. “Like we don’t care about violent crime and we don’t care if someone hurts someone, that they should be held accountable. That’s not true. We’re afraid to say that because we’re afraid that someone is going to criticize us for being too ‘tough on crime.’”
Progressives
I started my career in law enforcement and stayed in federal and state government justice agencies after college. My progressive colleagues had little of that experience. They were influenced by everything liberal. Their views of the justice system were based on minimal hands-on experience. It was mostly philosophy and ideology rather than direct contact with victims or offenders. They dismissed the data they didn’t like.
USDOJ employees saw this as a problem for a national, well-known anti-crime program and asked me to transfer to “assist” their narrative. It didn’t work.
Even decades ago, progressive comments about crime and criminals (sorry, returning citizens) made me cringe. It was as if they were deliberately trying to turn people off.
It’s not a matter of liking or disliking progressives; I’m pragmatic enough to get along with everyone. Progressives have understandable goals. Their approach is that the system doesn’t need to be so harsh. We should provide second chances to people caught up in the justice system. Cops should be guardians and not warriors. We shouldn’t demonize people who commit crimes; it’s not in society’s best interest.
But I had to ask them if they realized that their words and phrases could hurt or confuse more than help. They emphatically disagreed. They felt that I was “corrupted” by my experience in the justice system.
In Defense of Progressives-What Would Jesus Do?
In defense of progressives, Jesus explicitly called for people to visit and assist prisoners, a core tenet of Christian charity. The New Testament reinforces this message. Christianity calls for second chances and compassion for wrongdoers. Other religions express similar philosophies.
Some think that progressives are clueless, but they embrace a philosophy that many agree with. How many of our national leaders called for compassion? Wasn’t it Abraham Lincoln who said, “I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.” Many of our modern Presidents made similar statements to advance their social agendas.
Sorry, I’m not a cultural warrior. Progressives may be misguided when it comes to crime and criminality. But it’s a tad challenging to tell Jesus and his followers that they are fundamentally wrong.
Then Came The Defund The Police Movement
I was willing to respect progressive thought up to a point. That pretty much ended with the defund the police movement after questionable acts on the part of a small number of cops.
Democratic strategist James Carville said support from some on the left for the push to defund the police has become a major hindrance for the party’s candidates, including Vice President Harris during her presidential campaign. “We could never wash off the stench of it,” Carville said in an interview with The New York Times. He added that the phrase “defund the police” is “the three stupidest words in the English language.”
That was it for me. Progressives had crossed way over the line. They were willing to be the bigots they claimed to be against by negatively judging the group (i.e., one million cops and civilian employees) based on the actions of a few, the same underpinnings of any form of prejudice.
They wanted police officers to be guardians and not warriors until mass and school shootings demanded that they be trained and equipped as warriors. Progressives railed against the federal government giving cops surplus equipment, like the armored cars police use to rescue mass shooting victims from harm. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 25,000 police employees left their jobs, and now major law enforcement agencies are down hundreds of officers.
From Third Way’s Memo: Explaining Crime
“This says: “The criminal is the victim. The victim is an afterthought.”
- Justice-involved
- Carceration
- Incarcerated people
- Involuntary confinement
“People deserve to feel safe where they live, work, and go to school, and we can’t defend the progress we’ve made on criminal justice reform or hope to make more unless we acknowledge that reality in plain terms.”
I’ll add some of my own objectionable terms:
Criminals are “clients,” people to be served rather than supervised or held accountable. So the criminal who raped and physically assaulted your daughter is a client?
“Justice involved people,” rather than criminal offenders.
“There’s proof that social programs work.” That’s factually incorrect. The totality of well-done and replicated data suggests that it’s incredibly hard to change offenders through programs.
“Second chances for offenders.” Many criminals are arrested multiple times. It would be more accurate to say we’re giving them a 25th chance based on their criminal histories.
“We often hear that we need a social-problems approach to crime.” Yet the best available evidence, including hundreds of rigorous evaluations reviewed by the National Academies of Sciences, finds that proactive policing remains the most consistently effective strategy for reducing crime. Programs like violence interrupters may show promise but are far from proven, and rehabilitation efforts have generally produced limited reductions in recidivism.
“Crime victims have no business making or influencing crime policy, ” a statement from a member of the ACLU while on federal property. If you are not supportive of crime victims, you have no heart. If you’re not aware of the agendas of crime victims, you have no head.
And what’s truly startling is that most or all of the above terms or philosophies were embraced (and enforced) by the US Department of Justice and federal agencies during Democratic administrations.
There were multiple articles stating that President Biden’s advisors were furious at progressives for their insistence on moving far to the left on crime. According to the ACLU, candidate Biden pledged to cut the prison population in half. But when 66 percent of the male incarcerated population is serving their terms for a violent crime, and when considering criminal history, it would push that percentage much higher. Biden was essentially advocating for the release of hundreds of thousands of violent criminals who have the highest rates of recidivism, per the US Sentencing Commission, just to get elected. And this was from a person who used to be an advocate for tougher sanctions on criminals?
Democrats Are Soft On Crime?
With President Trump’s efforts to reduce crime in Washington, D.C., there are multiple articles in major publications warning Democrats not to fall into a trap where they seem insensitive to the plight of crime victims and those concerned about crime, which is most Americans.
Per Gallup, we are near record increases in fear of crime nationally. About 65 percent of D.C. residents told The Washington Post that crime was a “very” or “extremely” serious problem last year, even as violence declined. Per Axios, “As armed National Guard troops patrol the nation’s capital, a majority of Americans now see handling crime as a relative strength for President Trump, according to a new AP-NORC poll.
“McWilliams’ views reflect the thinking of a lot of Democrats, according to a recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. It finds that while most disapprove of how Trump is handling the issue, a large majority, 68%, see crime as a “major problem” in large cities.”
With these numbers, are progressives once again seen as clueless about something that impacts so many Americans?
Conclusions
One could make a case that most Americans are victims of crime yearly, based on the National Crime Victimization Survey or Gallup data, especially if you include digital offenses. If you think that your bank account being raided isn’t a real crime with real psychological impacts, then you are mistaken.
However, the vast majority of what’s written about crime in terms of long-form articles (that dominate Google or ChatGPT searches or media articles) mostly comes from progressive sources. The majority of journalists or criminologists lean left.
Progressive sources dominate the crime discussion based on tens of millions of dollars from liberal foundations. There are few non-partisan sources on crime. Beyond USDOJ materials, Pew, Gallup, and a couple of other organizations, finding non-partisan sources on crime is challenging. They even have a national effort to get their message out to reporters. Nothing like this is happening on the conservative side.
Reporters endlessly cite progressive foundations funding reviews of reported crime statistics (the vast majority of crime isn’t reported to law enforcement), yet ignore the USDOJ’s much more accurate National Crime Victimization Survey, citing record increases in rates of violent crime in their latest reports. Is it because candidate Trump embraced the National Crime Victimization Survey findings of increased crime? If candidate Biden or Harris cited the survey, would the results be different?
Crime is not simply a matter of being pro or anti cop or being in favor of or dismissive of the impact of rehabilitation programs or being pro or anti-victim. It’s more about what the literature has to say. I’m often envious of medicine, physics, or economics, which have a wealth of data at their disposal, while many crime or justice questions remain unsolved due to a lack of funding.
I’ve been in the justice system for decades at high levels, and there are more similarities than not to the system I entered many years ago. We simply haven’t progressed very far because the crime discussion is based on ideologies and politics rather than an abundance of data.
On balance, much of the strongest, replicated research (i.e., fear of crime, data on rehabilitation or criminal recidivism, research on law enforcement, etc.) tends to align more closely with ideas often associated with conservative approaches to crime. Yes, that’s my opinion, and reasonable people may see it differently.
Discussing crime requires moderates and pragmatists, as well as those dedicated to fair assessments of the literature. People on both sides of politics can be (and often are) more interested in groupthink than in objective analysis.
The data strongly suggests that most Americans, regardless of demographics, support law enforcement and want cops in their communities, yet many progressives remain unconvinced, and many see law enforcement practices as an impediment (see the recent remarks of Baltimore’s and Chicago’s mayors downplaying the role of cops versus embracing social programs).
If we want a fair and productive discussion on crime and justice that works in the long run, and if we want citizen support, be careful with your statements; independents outnumber both conservatives and liberals. Support more dollars for research. Find criminologists and reporters who are dedicated to facts rather than ideology. Support victims of crime. Hold criminals accountable.
Care for your fellow human being. An earlier article on this site using USDOJ data documented that only 13 percent of rapes and sexual assaults are reported to law enforcement in urban areas, and most of those go unsolved or are not prosecuted.
Crime and safety are human rights issues. It’s time that progressives understand this.
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