Crime and Self-Promotion
A smorgasbord post
Terrified Washingtonians. Source: National Park Service
Normally my posts here are essays/analyses on a single topic. Today I’m going to slack off and present a bit of a smorgasbord. First, a discussion of how we talk about crime. Then some links for free subscribers who want to read my inequality series. Finally some notes on the state of the Stack.
Crime: Facts, feelings, and hearing
The Trump administration has a clear view of the state of the nation 7 months into Trump’s presidency. The economy, it says, is wonderful, with surging growth and no inflation, while big cities are crime-ridden hellscapes where nobody dares to go out.
The data, of course, don’t support any of this. Growth is slowing, possibly to “stall speed,” while inflation is accelerating. Urban crime, however, has been plunging, and in general our cities are safer than they’ve been since the 1960s, or maybe ever.
The administration’s response has been to attack the data and the people who report it. Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the BLS released a disappointing jobs report, and is trying to install someone completely unqualified (who may be a deranged QAnon type) to replace her. Stephen Miller has declared that “crime stats in big blue cities are fake,” that true crime levels are “orders of magnitude higher.”
And now this:
What do we actually know? The invaluable Jeff Asher has looked into DC crime data. He finds that the numbers on robberies and assaults may be somewhat flaky. As he says, “data reporting issues happen all the time with crime data.” But the plunges in murders and carjackings are undoubtedly real.
Still, many Democrats have been reluctant to challenge MAGA lies about crime. Actual crime is way down, but people, they argue, feel that crime is up, and denying their feelings will backfire politically.
Well, I don’t know about the politics, but the claim about public perceptions is fundamentally wrong. People don’t feel that crime is up; they’ve heard that it’s up, which isn’t the same thing.
I’ve written before about Gallup’s very revealing polling on crime. Last fall 56 percent of Americans said that crime is an extremely or very serious problem in the United States. But only 14 percent said that it was extremely or very serious where they live.
We can also look at how people behave. OpenTable provides data on the change in seated restaurant reservations in Washington from a year earlier (a resource some of us looked at a lot during the pandemic.) Here’s what it looks like in recent months:
Source: OpenTable
If DC was experiencing a runaway crime wave until Trump moved in, why were so many people going out to dinner? On the other hand, it seems as if having men in body armor stomping around tourist areas may scare some people, although OpenTable warns us that August comparisons may be distorted by Restaurant Week in 2024.
Again, God knows about the politics. Suburban and small-town residents who believe that we have a national crime crisis, not from personal experience but because Fox News says that blue cities are dangerous hellscapes, may well just get angry when presented with contrary evidence. But let’s not mistake what they say about crime as an indication of anything real.
Freeing inequality
I’ve been making my primers on inequality free at the Stone Center site. The list is now complete:
Why did the rich pull away from the rest?
The importance of worker power
Oligarchs and the rise of mega-fortunes
State of the stack
When I was getting ready to leave the Times, some friends and colleagues warned that I might be giving up my ability to reach a large audience. I threw myself into this newsletter partly to build a constituency while people still remembered who I was, although it also turns out that I have a lot to write about.
So far, so good. I now have 420K subscribers, adding several hundred each day. Still a far cry from Heather Cox Richardson’s 2.5 million, but she’s a national treasure, and I’m deeply honored to get mail from people saying that I’m the second thing they read in the morning, after HCR.
Substack also has bestseller lists based on paid subscriptions. Here’s the current top 15 in U.S. politics:
I get some comments to the effect that Substack gives bad people a platform, even that it’s a “Nazi site.” But for now Substack is the best way to reach large numbers of people who want more than they get from legacy media. Would HCR or Robert Reich be posting to a Nazi site? Of the top 10 politics sites, two are right-wing, but 8 are center-left or never-Trumper.
I’m very aware that this site could be enshittified at some point; most things are. If I see that happening, I’ll bail.
But for now I have a platform, and am trying to make the most of it.
MUSICAL CODA
The crime in DC has risen and sharply, all on Capital Hill and the White House. But we’re not to see those stats.
Also a "national treasure!" We really missed your writing when we had to bail on the NYT - so glad to see you here. thank you!