This cartoon is by me and Becky Hawkins.
From an article by Sara Libby in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Trump and other members of his administration, while often using false or misleading statistics, have cited rampant crime as the justification for deploying federalized troops within U.S. cities.
But these cities share another commonality: They’re led by Black mayors.
Critics don’t think that’s a coincidence. Trump’s focus on Washington D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, New York and Oakland is part of a larger pattern in which the president has suggested cities with majority-Black populations, or those led by Black leaders, are hotbeds of crime and corruption and symbols of American decline.
Right-wing fear and hatred of American cities is a theme Becky and I have explored before – see here and here.
It’s no surprise that Trump’s authoritarian attack on cities is rooted in racism. Trump has always relied on racism in his political demagoguery, going back to at least 1989, when he bought full-page ads in several New York newspapers calling for the Central Park 5 to be executed. (Trump’s ad didn’t explicitly name the Central Park 5 – five Black teenage boys falsely convicted of raping a woman in Central Park – but in context that’s clearly what the ad was about.) Then he rose to political prominence as the face of the “birther” conspiracy theory, suggesting Barack Obama isn’t actually an American. More recently, Trump campaigned successfully for re-election by slandering immigrants with hateful lies about Haitians stealing and eating housepets.
(That was, of course, far from a comprehensive list.)
In a better world, Trump would have been permanently shunned from public life for his over the top racism. Instead, he’s found a welcoming audience for his racism on the right, and their support for racism has been crucial to Trump’s rise to power. In a 2022 study in the journal American Politics Research, James Piazza and Natalia Van Doren summed up some of the research:
Several studies demonstrate that these racist and xenophobic utterances and policies were key to garnering the support of Trump’s electoral base. For example, Schaffner et al., 2016 found that racist and sexist attitudes were the most important predictors of voter support for Trump in 2016, eclipsing economic grievances and mistrust of politics and politicians. Trump’s explicitly bigoted appeals were a particularly crucial aspect of his popularity with less educated White voters in the 2016 race (Glick et al., 2002). Sides et al. (2019) demonstrate that Trump supporters in 2016 were animated by racism against African Americans, Islamophobia, anti-immigrant xenophobia and a fear of “demographic displacement” by non-White individuals. In a longitudinal study comparing the attitudes and voting behaviors of a cohort of respondents in 2011 and 2016, Mason et al. (2021) found that respondents who expressed racist and xenophobic attitudes in 2011 were significantly more likely to have voted for Trump in 2016, but not other Republicans running for office.
These findings are consistent with research in other democracies showing that xenophobia – particularly anti-immigrant attitudes – drive electoral support for extreme right populist political parties.
In their own study, they found that
…individuals who approve of former President Trump are more likely to endorse political violence, and to positively assess the events and participants of the January 6 event. We also find that Trump approvers are motivated by racial animus and mistrust and hatred towards immigrants and foreigners, and that these attitudes, in part, may make them more accepting of political violence.
This is the sort of comic that makes me both grateful to have a collaborator like Becky, and green with envy for her ability to draw city architecture so well. Just look at those windows and awnings in panel two! Or all the storefront details in panel one! Aaargh!
While working on drawing panel four, Becky texted me “Fuck you for putting that muscular Trump poster in the script. :-p And you’re welcome.”
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
PANEL 1
A white man wearing a baseball cap looks around nervously as he walks on a city sidewalk. Behind him, we can see storefronts and pedestrians. All the people are brown-skinned, enjoying their day, including an adorable family with a toddler riding on her mom’s shoulders.
PANEL 2
A residential city neighborhood. The same white man presses against a wall, trying not to be seen, as he watches a little girl playing hopscotch, while another girl sits on a stoop reading a book. Nearby, a middle-aged woman waters some potted plants on a low wall. Again, the white guy is the only white person in the panel.
PANEL 3
The white guy peers out from behind a tree at a piragua cart, where the piragua vender is smiling as he talks to a customer. In the background, we see a man walking a three-legged pitbull, and a couple of people playing basketball. Again, everyone but the white guy is a person of color.
PANEL 4
We see the white guy in a professional-looking podcast studio, clenching a fist and talking intently into the microphone.
WHITE GUY: I’ve been to the city, and it was full of, uh, crime.
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken fat” is bygone cartoonists’ lingo for unimportant details snuck into the art.
PANEL 2 – The woman’s bathrobe and turban in p2 are modeled after one of Barbara Howard’s outfits in the season two finale of the TV show Abbott Elementary.
PANEL 3 -A tree by the piragua cart has #avanine carved into the trunk. Avanine is a portmanteau of Ava and Janine, used by the small but enthusiastic number of Abbott Elementary fans who think that the plucky teacher and chaotic principal should date. The piragua guy looks like Lin Manuel Miranda as “Piragua Guy” in the movie version of In The Heights.
PANEL 4 – A poster on the wall shows an extremely muscular shirtless Donald Trump in a royal crown and wrestling belt, carrying a scepter with a carved American eagle head on top. Another poster shows a cartoon narwhal saying “If EDUCATION Makes People SMART, Why Are Most Educated People LIBERAL?” And a paper taped to the wall says “SCHEDULE. 10am: Anger. 11am: Pissed. Noon: Fury. 1pm: Lunch. 2pm: Wrath.”
TIL what piragua is.
I live quite near Chicago. Most homicides and violent crimes are black people robbed, assaulted or killed by black people. If anything crime is worse than the statistics cited because a lot of violent crime isn’t called in to the cops (other than homicides) because people know that the police department is so understaffed that the cops won’t come in time to do anything about it. If Gov. Pritzker really thought black lives mattered Trump wouldn’t be threatening to send the National Guard into Chicago because Pritzker would have already done so. But he’s a blowhard who is more worried about setting himself up as far left as he can for a Presidental run than he is about actually effectively running Illinois. He’s a billionaire who once ripped the toilets out of a home he owned so that he could declare it uninhabitable and get a big cut on his property taxes.
If you want to see statistics on Chicago crime go to https://www.heyjackass.com
It’s true that no statistic can perfectly count all crime. (Although you’re mistaken to imply that our only source of statistics is crimes reported to cops.) This is one reason people pay so much attention to the homicide rate; criminologists believe that homicide is the least underreported crime, and so homicides trends are especially likely to be accurate.
I feel there are better sources out there than “heyjackass.com,” which looks intended to inflame.
But even that page – if you scroll allllll the way to the bottom – shows that the raw numbers of homicides in Chicago has been plummeting for four years. The homicide rate in Chicago (which isn’t shown on heyjackass*) now is the lowest it’s been in a decade. This summer’s homicide numbers are the lowest since 1965. “And overall violent crime remains near its lowest point in more than four decades.”
When the trends are moving strongly in the right direction isn’t the time to shake things up and have people who aren’t even remotely trained for policing take over. The national guard is not trained to be police, and using the military to police civilians is dangerous and antidemocratic.
By your own logic, Ron, if crime numbers are plummeting and there are fewer murders (which, you correctly point out, most often have Black victims) every year, and Republicans start screaming that major change is needed – that must mean that Republicans don’t think Black lives matter. I think that’s stupid logic, but it’s what you’d say if you were consistent.
*Although the page design is so jumbled and unclear, it might be that they do cover homicide rates, rather than just raw numbers, and I just didn’t find it.
I tend to agree with this, although there are going to be some unreported homicides (I think we’re both aware of the euphemistic use of “missing” in the context of sex workers), homicides are probably one of the better metrics to follow.
And they’ve been bad. Like… Egregiously bad. Your mileage changes based on where you are, but it’s been generally bad everywhere since 2020.
And yes: Obviously those rates are getting better. But I think that the current rhetoric is a lagging indicator. The impression, I think, from Republicans is that:
1) The last five years have been some of the most violent in their lifetimes (which is objectively true).
2) That Democrats either aren’t taking the problem seriously or are actively fomenting some of it (Which isn’t necessarily true, your mileage may vary, but Democrats have been putting out some very strange messaging on crime and it isn’t hard to find some ugly examples).
3) So now that they’re in power, they need to do something about it.
The good news is that you’re right: homicide rates have been decreasing for a couple years now, and they’re actually historically low right now. But I don’t know that nine months of relative peace offsets five years of record-setting violence. These aren’t moustache twirling villains who hate black people. They don’t feel safe. They have good reason to feel that way, and you aren’t going to guilt them out of that.
I actually think what happened here was similar to what happened to Obama around deportations. Democrats messaged themselves out of a win. They didn’t want the optics of being tough on crime for political reasons, so they quietly did a lot of good things, and Republicans are eating their lunch.
RON: If you don’t want the national guard taking over policing Chicago, you think Black lives don’t matter.
AMP: That’s stupid logic, but by that stupid logic, people wanting the national guard policing Chicago are the ones who think Black lives don’t matter.
CORSO: Amp, stop trying to guilt the right-wingers.
??? How young are these people? Per FBI crime statistics, the violent crime rate in Chicago (used as an example since was discussed above) in 2020, which was the recent peak, was similar to that in about 2013. So unless all Republicans are under 22, no time in the last five years is the highest violent crime rate in their lifetimes.
I can’t remember a time in my politically conscious lifetime (which dates to ~1980is) when Republicans haven’t claimed that crime is at an all-time high. They’ve been lying during the vast majority of those years.
*12. Math, what’s that? (Rolls eyes at self.)
@Jacqueline: It’s just part of the global right wing narrative, to terrorise people with ‘CRIME CRIME’. Unfortunately most people think of crime, not in terms of statistics, but in terms of fragmented, personalised narratives – not what happens to them, but what they heard happening to a particular person – it’s very easy to do this. Even in Switzerland, literally the safest country in the world, ‘crime’ is a major part of the political discourse and a major selling point for right wing parties.
It’s an emotional thing. We read about, say, a young mother who was violently attacked, and we have an emotional surge. Reading about statistics doesn’t tamper that emotional surge even if we fully believe the statistics.
We’ll leave aside the question of whether the Chicago PD is or is not more understaffed/underfunded now than in the past for the moment (even if I think they’re doing the money dance.) Be that as it may, I don’t think that’s the reason why people don’t report crimes, though it may be a reason.
Probably more commonly, people don’t report crimes because they know the police will not be helpful or courteous and are afraid the police will just look for ways to harass the victims or witnesses who reported the crime. It’s not an irrational fear. Think of the number of people who have been shot or arrested after they reported a crime or made a request for other reasons (e.g. safety check or mental health crisis).
They may also fear that the police will act against the criminal in a disproportionate manner. The man who reported George Floyd for passing an allegedly counterfeit bill has expressed remorse for his action. If I thought that the police might kill someone, guilty or not, if I reported a crime I might hesitate (spoiler alert: I have been in that situation. I did not report.)
Chicago’s PD is notoriously racist. I strongly suspect that fear of their action is more often the cause of underreporting than fear of their inaction. (Although I suppose the same people who are most likely to get attacked by the police are also the least likely to have crimes they report be taken seriously, so there’s probably an element of under-reporting because reporting would be futile.) That would only get worse if the National Guard invaded the city: if you can’t trust the police in general, how much less can you trust them if they’re backed by people with tanks and an explicit agenda to crush all resistance to the right?
All of which, means that crime will go up if the National Guard invades. Because anyone contemplating a crime will know that their risk of being caught or a crime being reported is lower due to people’s fear of being harmed if they report a crime and will be more likely to feel they can act with impunity.
So Pritzker is doing his best to protect the lives of his constituents, Black or not.
Amp: I was responding to the comic, not the conversation. Do you really think it’s more likely that Republicans are suddenly seeing happy black people and think they need to send cops in to break that up, or do you think it’s more likely that they’re responding to the crime numbers from the last five years?
Dianne: There’s a whole lot of possible responses to that.
First is that I said “some of the most” not “the most”, although for some people, and for a lot of people in some places “the most” will still be true. The link I supplied looked at the national numbers over the last 50 years, and I said that your mileage may vary.
Second is that I don’t think you’re correct, and I’d like to see your source. I just looked and yes, there was a spike in the mid 2010’s, but it pales in comparison to the last five years. I think this might have even beat out the larger spike from the early 90’s.
Third is that even if it were true, or even close, I think you’re missing the forest for the trees: Even if individual counties didn’t see the worst rates in 50 years, that doesn’t make the last five years good. I’m sure that people were having discussions about the homicide rates in Chicago in 2013 too.
Jacqueline: Well, we’ve hit record peaks twice in that time… In the early 90’s and in the early 20’s. Also, I think that Americans have been frog-boiled into accepting what is really an unacceptable amount of violence. If the homicide rate of the average American city were transplanted into any Canadian city, we would be freaking the fuck out. The homicide rate in Chicago in 2024 was 21 per 100,000 (573 / 2,638,000) that rate for the city with the highest homicide rate in Canada in 2024 (Saskatoon) was 5.7 per 100,000 (15 / 266,000). The second worst was Winnipeg at 4.9 per 100,000 (41 / 843,000 And they’re having conversations in Saskatoon and Winnipeg.
You know what? You’re right. I reread the source and realized I had misread the years. So I’m going to withdraw that particular claim.
I went and played with CDC Wonder instead to see if I was completely wrong or just using a bad source. It gives the numbers by year and region and, due to data constraints, the data are more limited than I’d like. But it probably hasn’t been manipulated yet, so I prefer it to the FBI statistics right now, unless someone can document that they haven’t been altered for political reasons in the past 9 months.
In any case, the rate of homicides (deaths due to assault) did indeed go up between 2018 and 2020. It peaked in 2021 and then started to go down. (Note that it was already going up in 2018 and 2019, during “tough on crime” Trump’s term and down during “soft on crime” Biden’s term. Not necessarily related, but does make one wonder if competence and lack of favoritism might be more important than public chest banging.) It’s also notable that the numbers consistently show higher rates of death from assault in the south than other regions and the lowest rates in the northeast. I’m going to link, but not sure it’ll actually work since it’s a results page for a query, not a static page. CDC stats.
Well, that didn’t work. The source is wonder.cdc.gov, Underlying cause of death database, single race categories data, by year and census region, for deaths due to assault. (Every other parameter is “all categories”.) If you don’t get the same thing as I did, we can sort out who made the mistake (if not both of us).
Hey Dianne,
Despite the current discourse, I don’t think that the federal government has a whole lot of control over what goes into a crime rate, and I’m not going to go through the exercise in blame-gaming who was responsible for the increase in rates… While some places were better than others, and I have an inkling as to why that might be, it’s an incredibly complicated topic, and I just don’t have the time to give it justice.
What my point is is that regardless of who’s fault it was, it existed, and was very bad. And while it’s obviously getting better, I think there’s still a whole lot of people feeling insecure about their safety, and Democrats seem to have ceded the argument. Republicans feel like it’s their job to keep their families safe because even though everyone is basically on board and taking steps in the right direction, Democrats seem caught by their own messaging and don’t want to be seen as tough on crime, because they’ve spent years equating being tough on crime with racism.
Looking at longer term trends (in a separate database that only goes through 2020), it looks like there was a decrease in deaths due to assault up to 2015-2016 when the rate mysteriously started drifting upwards with a serious spike in 2020. There was also an arguable drift up 2001-2008 and down in 2009-2015, but not sure whether that’s a significant difference, statistically or practically, or not.
You’re online waaaaay too much if you think this generalization is true. Kamala Harris’ stump speech included boasting her record as a prosecutor who went after “predators, fraudsters and cheaters.” Biden proposed, again and again, a plan for the federal government to fund hiring 100,000 more cops. (He also talked about the decline in crime under his administration a lot, as any politician would, although – as you said – he might not deserve the credit). Tina Kotek, Oregon’s governor, has been going after drug possession and wants to increase the number of cops. Josh Shapiro, one of the likely 2028 Dem candidates for President, runs on being tough on crime. Gavin Newsom (also likely 2028 contender) has been eager to sign tough on crime bills and talk about tough on crime – although his actual polices have been back and forth, because he’s also quietly trying to save money and doesn’t want to build new prisons, but that’s not what his public messaging says.
(There are many other Dem presidential contenders who have similar tough-on-crime messaging, but this comment is too long already, so I’ll hope you can take my word on that.)
Details inevitably vary over time and from politician to politician. But in general, Dems are desperate to paint themselves as tough on crime.
There’s absolutely no way for people to feel secure if Democrats follow the advice that they shouldn’t talk about falling crime rates because that’s insensitive to frightened voters. Why would anyone feel secure if the only message they ever hear is that crime rates are soaring and the next time they step out their front door they’ll probably be shot?
Republicans want people to live in fear forever; your argument implies Democrats should surrender to that framing. I think that’s a terrible idea. Democrats have been doing a lot of surrendering to GOP framing of crime and immigration, but it hasn’t produced the wins centrists keep promising.
By the way, which Democrats of national significance have ever said this?
The reported violent crime rate since the early 1990’s Find more statistics at Statista
Even if there is more underreporting now (and it is unclear to me why that should be the case), we are nowhere near peak crime.
Violent crime is not the only crime reported to police. Car theft and arson are consistently reported to police; not because the victim expects the police to catch the criminal, but to document the crime for insurance. There are not nearly as many uninsured cars on the streets as there once were. (On the other hand, a higher percentage of suburbanites own cars.)
The tremendously under-reported crimes are domestic violence and sexual assault. The crimes that are reported more and more, that are making people feel like we live in a scarier and more violent country, are mass shootings. I mean that when 4 teenagers die in a mass shooting on the other side of the country, it’s headline news for days. If there were 10 different incidents of violent date rape around here, the young adult victims might report the crimes to local cops (or not.) And if 4 of the victims later died of their injuries, it wouldn’t be BIG SCARY NEWS. I might not notice if I wasn’t paying close attention to local news. Even though 10 criminals within 50 miles should be scarier than 1 criminal on the other side of the country.
Non-violent financial crimes such as banking fraud or wage theft are tremendously important, and they are more likely to wreck a person’s life the crimes they count in this kind of index. But they can’t realistically say what city the bank fraud happened in. And they hardly ever count it as “crime” when they are comparing crime rates from one year to the next.
It’s just as likely that crime will go down if the National Guard invades, because people will be scared that federal thugs will beat or kill them if they dare to break the law. Or even if they don’t.
My guess – and it’s only a guess – is that there will be a short-term drop in crime, because people do get cautious when something is new, then it will return to ordinary levels.
I think the primary desire of vulnerable people in cities with National Guard deployment will be to avoid attracting attention. Therefore, they are less likely to report crimes against themselves. Especially those whose existence is considered a crime and who are at risk of being hauled off to a concentration camp. They are basically certain to not be willing to contact the police. If a person contemplating committing a crime knows that there is effectively zero chance of their being caught or punished for that crime, what’s to prevent them from doing so?
I’m not talking just about violent crimes here. Consider someone, say, refusing to pay for someone’s work or after delivery of a product. If challenged, they can just shrug and say, “So what are you going to do, call the police?” (This is obviously already a problem for people without legal status and will only get worse.) Or domestic violence. It’s hard enough for a victim of domestic violence to report it, but add in that the victim will be deported or imprisoned if they report and the chances go to nil. So you’re depending on people’s internal morals alone to keep crime down.
BTW, I tried to confirm or refute my hypothesis by looking at crime data in Nazi Germany. The answer seems to be “who knows?” The Nazis claimed dramatic decreases in crime, but the scholarship seems to say that the statistics are unreliable for various reasons and that conclusions are difficult to draw.
It’s not Nazi Germany, but statistics on crime rates in South Africa under apartheid, which are generally considered reliable, do show an interesting picture of what urban crime in a multiethnic society under a militarised, racist, marginally democratic regime looks like.
Watcher, could you say more about that? What do they show?
Google exists. It’s not my job to educate you.
If this siteis reliable, the homicide rate in South Africa dropped rapidly after the end of apartheid. Wiki says something similar.
Amp:
For the record: Kamala was different. Harris wasn’t running tough on crime, she was running tough on Trump, because political prosecutions were in vogue at the time. The rest of them are just being good politicians, reacting to current discourse. It’s funny… Because the politicians you’ve listed are basically interchangeable with the characters in your comic: You’re right. Crime rates are at the lowest they’ve been in a very long time, but even Democrats are saying that more has to be done. Are they all sick of seeing happy black people? People, normal people, not just racist Republicans, are concerned about crime, their concerns are based on the reality of the last five years, and politicians reacting to that is not illegitimate. The response to crime has always been a lagging indicator.
Yeah… But ask yourself why that is. Why is it that the Democrats have to try to paint themselves as tough on crime, when it’s the Republican’s default position? I think the answer is obvious: There have been some very high-profile examples of Democrats going out of their way to enable or endorse crime over the last few years. From support (or at least complacency) towards riots, to sanctuary cities, to the defund rhetoric. It’s not enough to cherry-pick a couple of times when Democrats were good or Republicans were bad on the issue, no one is really confused with which party is more consistently opposed to crime. I’m not saying Democrats should throw up their hands and give up, I’m saying that every now and again they do, and people over time have built up that impression of them.
I think this is kind of like telling a depressed person not to be sad. I don’t think this is something that you can message your way out of, and a couple months of peace isn’t going to make them feel safe when they’ve been living in fear for years. This is something that’s going to take time. I feel that as opposed to actually making a bad situation good, Democrats are more concerned with making a bad situation baseline tolerable. It feels like as opposed to seriously tackling these issues, Democrats are more interested in getting them out of the news cycle because Republicans eat their lunch on the topic.
And I’m going to point out again:
Honestly, I’m not sure that Americans should feel secure. Is an individual likely to be the victim of a violent crime on any given day of the week? No. But that’s really cold comfort to the ones that are.
Oh this is fun! I just found a highly reliable source on a U.S. Government website indicating that there was zero crime in the entire country during both the Obama and Biden administrations, but that crime suddenly skyrocketed to an all-time high the moment Trump took office. I’m not going to link to my highly reliable source, because Google exists.
Once upon a time, a state attorney general could make a career of going after predators, fraudsters, and cheaters. It was big business, by which I mean securities fraud and racketeers and payday loan companies. That chain of dentist offices that defrauded Medicaid and also lied to parents about whether their kids needed braces.
We should remember fraud when we talk about “crime.” It’s not street crime, it’s not always a specific fear like violence or inappropriate pooping, but it does so much damage. And when the government directs resources from OSHA to ICE, or make people afraid to report it when their landlord cheats them out of a month’s rent, you get more fraud instead of less.
@beth: Please check this out. https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/06/problem-with-educate-me/ Apologies if you don’t consider this an authoritative source.
Watcher: But, you’re the one who entered this space and commented. You don’t have any moral duty to respond to every follow up question, of course. But I’m not sure what is accomplished by starting out with a very general statement and then refusing to elaborate.
Being against police corruption is not the same as being for crime. We deserve a police force that we can actually trust to help situations in general, interested of too often making them dramatically worse.
Going into a little more detail about the distinctions David mentioned. In a sanctuary city, when an undocumented immigrant is accused of a violating a state law (theft or assault or murder or whatever) they are prosecuted. Maybe they are convicted and imprisoned. Maybe they are acquitted and the cops go looking for the person that really committed the crime. Without Sanctuary, you have an accusation of theft or murder, and there is no trial. The accused person is declared illegal, detained, and deported. (If there’s a hearing, it’s about visa status, not about whether the person committed the crime.) Nobody bothers to go looking for the real criminal.
That’s in addition to the more obvious problems with wanting undocumented immigrants to feel safe coming forwards as witnesses.
It’s a reasonable point, but the national guard is not a reasonable or useful response. Nor is Chicago unique or even the highest risk city in the US. Chicago is a big city and so has a high total number of murders, but St Louis and 11 other cities (most in red states) had a higher homicide rate than Chicago in 2024.
Even if the rest of the country had Canada levels of violence, the national guard would not help. The South African experience shows that authoritarian regimes tend towards higher rates of violence. What is needed is better policing (note, not more, better), lower poverty, and immigrants. New York City in the 1970s was a true mess, with crime rates that would make modern USians shudder. How did it end? Immigrants moved in. Immigrants who had better things to do than smoke crack and have gang wars. Today NYC doesn’t even make the top 20 in terms of homicide rate. Yet another way that the current administration is increasing the risk of homicide and crime in general.
Taking these in order:
1. It was the Republicans that condoned and supported the Jan 6th riots, not the Democrats. It was a Republican who brought a rifle to a demo and started shooting people. It was a Republican who ran over a peaceful protestor. Shall I continue? I can.
2. As has already been pointed out, a sanctuary city offers sanctuary from ICE. Nothing else. Any immigrant accused of a crime in a sanctuary city will be investigated and, if appropriate, arrested and tried. Again, immigrants are less likely than native borns in the US to commit crimes, but of course some do. They are prosecuted.
3. Defund is not only about reducing police budgets, bloated as they are. It’s also about finding out where the police are being deployed inappropriately or sub-optimally and reassigning those roles to more appropriate professionals (e.g. social workers, mediators). It’s also about looking at the structure of police departments and finding areas where the bureaucracy is hindering rather than helping or where there is redundant functions that could be consolidated (sort of like DOGE, but actually trying to improve efficiency, not just looting). It’s also about removing people from the police force who are not appropriate for the job, whether they are racist, corrupt, or just incompetent, leaving the rest to be able to work more effectively and not have to fight their own system. In short, if done right, “defund” movements help the police.
That being said, the oligarchs have been encouraging people to believe that Democrats are “soft on crime” and have been spending a lot of money to make that message the one that dominates the media, social or traditional. So it’s not surprising a lot of people believe it, just unfortunate because in fact it’s the Republicans who are soft on crime. Consider their nomination and continued support of a convicted felon, willingness to condone and encourage corruption within the government, willingness to support riots, etc.
” You don’t have any moral duty to respond to every follow up question, of course.”
Thank you
At the time? As opposed to now? What political prosecutions do you see as having occurred under Biden? Prosecution for civil crimes do not count unless the person was clearly innocent (e.g. Kilmar Garcia).
Dianne,
1) Exactly the opposite: If the rest of the country had “Canada-levels” of violence, you’d be safe. The Canadian homicide rate is less than half the American rate.
2) I’m not getting prescriptive. I have theories on why things are the way they are, but that’s a huge conversation, and very complicated. My point is that the rates are what they are, and the reactions to them are reasonable.
Pure whataboutism. At the point of the January 6th Riots, we’d just gotten over the summer of fiery but mostly peaceful race riots. Six square blocks of a city had been in open revolt against America. Those riots were larger, longer, more destructive, and more deadly. There is no objective standard by which you could say J6 was worse. But that’s not really the point… You can stand there with your talking points, but while we can quibble about datapoints, people associate the DNC with being softer on crime because they are, and no one is legitimately confused by this.
I can’t let this go, because it’s a perfect demonstration: Anyone in America without the proper documentation to be in America is guilty of contravening 8 US Code Subsection 1325. Every single one of them has committed a crime and they are criminals. There is literally a class of crime that you are so comfortable with that you don’t even think of it as criminal. Sure, that’s not violent crime, but people, normal people, outside your bubble, see things like this and it adds to the perception that Democrats are unserious about crime.
I mean, I understand the point you’re trying to make… But you do know that the movement was called “defund the police”, right? And that there were no shortage of people, including elected officials willing to go in front of microphones and say very counterproductive things?
I mean… That’s your definition, not the definition. The definition from Wikipedia is: “A political trial is a criminal case wherein the defendant is tried for reasons considered politically motivated—that is, those with varying degrees of opposition to government policy—in order to effectively silence or discredit them.”
Kamala was running on pure spite at that point, she was literally saying out loud that if she was elected, she would make sure her political opponents were prosecuted. And I think there were a lot of prosecutions pre 2024, some stuck, some didn’t, in a concerted attempt to either make Trump ineligible to run again, or put a lead anchor around him so he wouldn’t.
More importantly: Even if you disagree with my definition or characterization, and even if you think that Trump did it worse (which I would agree with), I think you have to admit that there’s a difference between Harris and the governors in tone and scope… The governors aren’t talking about cleaning up fraud right now, everyone is talking about violent crime.
‘
Cool. We’ll go with that one. Now, provide some examples of Democrats conducting political trials against their opponents or withdraw the statement.
Provide quotes. And evidence that she said it.
Here are a few examples of Trumpthreatening political opponents or committing acts of retribution. Just so you know what going after political opponents looks like.
Mostly peaceful protests. There was some violence, such as when Rittenhouse shot up a protest or when whoever it was deliberately ran over a protestor and there were some random shootings, but that’s pretty much Tuesday in the US.
The Jan 6th rioters, in contrast, went in yelling “hang Pence”, killed a police officer, and only failed to take Congress hostage because an extremely brave police officer lured them away. So how is this whataboutism? It seems to me to be a perfect example of violent racists attacking and attempting to overthrow civil society.
Also, the Jan 6th rioters’ were rioting in an attempt to overthrow the results of the relatively free and fair election that had just occurred. This is not some wild accusation on my part: It’s what they themselves said was their motive. They intended to commit murder in order to overthrow the election. They were stopped by bravery and good luck. The BLM protests were about preventing further deaths due to police violence. The Jan 6th riots were about overthrowing democracy.
A number of the people who soft on crime Donnie pardoned for their attempted treason are back in prison on further violent charges. Guess white men are just violent, huh?
Sure. So are you, if you’ve ever gone over the speed limit. That wouldn’t justify violating your due process rights, or subjecting you to unusual, disproportionate, ahistorical punishments.
Look, I’m sorry, but speeding isn’t even a misdemeanor. There’s a difference between a felony crime, a misdemeanor, and a moving violation. If you aren’t aware of that, I don’t have it in me to help you.
That’s because rich people have cars and speed. Even so, it’s definitely illegal. So people who speed are criminals.
Out of curiosity, would you personally visit the US right now, if you had time, money, etc? Canadians have been detained by ICE. Some have died in custody.
@Corso If speeding were upgraded to a felony tomorrow, would an allegation of speeding be enough to justify jailing you without access to legal representation? If you say it doesn’t, are you being soft on crime?
After all, speeding is dangerous! It can get people hurt or killed. Unlike say, overstaying a visa.
I’m going to do this as an exercise in having the discourse, but we are very far away from where we started and this is all very irrelevant to the point I made, which you didn’t really interact with. I’m done after this.
The obvious example would be New York v. Trump brought by Attorney General Letitia James. Donald Trump was charged with fraud for overstating his property values in loan applications from several banks, the banks did their own valuations, and the loans were fully paid. This was the first time ever that part of the code had been used to prosecute someone for that fact pattern, James managed to increase misdemeanors to felonies, and the optics on it were so bad that the governor at the time, Cuomo, came out and told the New York business community that they didn’t have anything to worry about, and their similar actions would not be prosecuted. And for the record: He was right, and despite a whole lot of people pointing out that internal valuations were more a form or art than a science and this should probably effect about half of the New York business scene, New York hasn’t charged anyone else in the five years since.
It’s things like this that signal that you aren’t serious… There were week long riots, whole neighborhoods burned, 2 billion dollars in insurance claims were filed, dozens of people died, and a 6 city block chunk of Seattle declared themselves an independent state. I think the death toll in CHAZ alone was more than J6 and Rittenhouse combined. How many home invasions? How many people on the streets got assaulted? How many people were raped? But they chanted “Hang Pence”?! Ok.
Nevermind the optics of the actual action, what matters, really matters, is the experience of the victims. The people who lived through the violence. Do you think that anyone from Seattle felt physically unsafe the day after January 6th? How many people in Seattle do you think felt physically unsafe for weeks after the riots?
You can’t be serious about this. Trump was charged with various charges, arraigned by a grand jury, and convicted by a jury of his peers. He was present when his lawyers chose the jurors. He was sentenced to no time whatsoever despite 27 convictions because of political interference. There was nothing political about the charges except for the judges’ extreme leniency with this hardened criminal. If that’s the best you can do for a “political trial” then you have no case whatsoever.
Can you provide evidence of this or are you, like most Republicans, going to just assert it and assume that’s enough to get everyone to accept it as The Truth? It works for Trump, but he doesn’t have Barry’s readers to deal with.
You tell me. Again, with data. Also, how many people have the Jan 6th rioters raped or assaulted? I couldn’t find a recent list, but this one is from late January and shows that within a month the pardoned criminals were back committing violent crimes, using child pornography, and assaulting police officers. Within one month. How many more violent crimes have they committed since then?
If anyone wants a somewhat more accurate depiction of what happened in Portland (as an example) during the Floyd protests, this article isn’t bad. Yes, there were provocations by the protestors. But the violence was mostly the police and federal agents. Also note that the federal agents made the situation worse, not better. If, that is, the desire was to calm the protests. If it was to maximize chaos and convince mainstream US that “they” were dangerous, then the federal agents were somewhat effective.
Speeding actually can be a misdemeanor. The exact rules vary from state to state, and even city to city, so there’s no one-size-fits-all rule. In North Carolina, for example, speeding is a misdemeanor if you’re 15mph or more over the speed limit. Like driving 70 on a highway where the speed limit is 55mph – something that a huge portion of drivers do routinely.
In ordinary parlance, committing a misdemeanor isn’t what people mean when they’re talking about “criminals.” Violating 8 U.S. Code § 1325 is almost always a misdemeanor. Like driving 70 in a 55mph zone.
Also, contrary to your claim, aboout half of undocumented immigrants in the U.S.. haven’t contravened 8 U.S. Code § 1325. (People who overstayed a visa haven’t violated it, for example.)
Finally, the government has on multiple occasions canceled legal visas of people in the US, in order to arrest them. I guess technically you could claim that they were violating the law, but it’s obviously both unjust and in bad faith to change someone’s status from legal to illegal – sometimes without even telling them – solely so you can arrest them. Here’s one of countless examples:
Gov. Greg Abbott pardons Daniel Perry, veteran who killed police brutality protester in 2020
If a Democrat did that, you’d be howling that this proves that Democrats are soft on crime. But a Republican did it, so you’ll say bringing it up is just “whataboutism.”
Not to mention the apparent exchange of money for pardons under Trump:
In other words, not only was he freed from prison, he also got to keep the millions he stole from the US government (through tax evasion).
Also, people are pardoned for being prominent Trump supporters:
And:
There are many more examples at the above two links. (Hey, do you see how I’m consistently supporting my claims with links? Please do the same.)
This is you giving yourself permission to be intellectually dishonest. Any example you can find of Democrats being soft on crime is valid; all counterexamples are invalid. What this boils down to is that you’ve predismissed any evidence or example that doesn’t fit with what you already want to believe.
I’m not sure if you’re partisan enough to believe this, or don’t have the right case in mind, but Trump’s sentence in the real estate case was so egregious that it was overturned on appeal by a panel of Obama appointed New York judges.
I mean…. If you were actually interested, you could Google it. I also don’t know what you think you’re accomplishing.
CHAZ:
June 7 – An unnamed man shot a carjacker, the carjacker died.
June 20 – Horace Lorenzo Anderson Jr.(19) was shot and killed
June 20 – DeJuan Young (33) was shot and killed
June 21 – An unnamed boy (17) was shot in the arm and lived.
June 23 – An unnamed man (30) was shot and lived.
June 23 – Antonio Mays Jr. (16) was shot and killed.
June 23 – Robert West (14) was shot and survived.
Rittenhouse:
-Joseph Rosenbaum (36) was shot and killed.
-Anthony Huber (26) was shot and killed.
-Gaige Grosskreutz (26) was shot and survived.
J6:
-Ashli Babbitt (35) shot and killed.
And this is without getting into the moral implications. I suspect I know how you feel about Rittenhouse, but there’s a difference between the shootings of Rosenbaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz and the shootings of Anderson, Young, Mays, and West.
Nah, that wasn’t great either. But I don’t think you want to get into the pardons dick measuring contest either, you’ll lose. I’m old enough to remember Bill Clinton’s pardon scandals too.
I think we need to take a step back: Your comic was about people wanting to deal with violent crime. I was talking about violent crimes, specifically homicides. I said that people were afraid of violent crimes. And you’ve brought up corruption. I’m not going to defend that, but I also don’t know what point you’re trying to make. Did I miss the hue and cry for people to get harder on fraud? Is that what Shapiro is running on?
I’m not going to put words in your mouth, but if you can’t make the argument that Democrats are tough on crime without resorting to including non-violent fraud and corruption crimes, I think that makes my point.
Absolutely not. What I mean when I say that it’s not enough to cherry-pick a couple of times when Democrats were good or Republicans were bad on the issue, no one is really confused with which party is more consistently opposed to crime, is that nothing in life is ever so cleanly delineated that 100% of the time your tribe is good at everything, or that your opponents are always wrong. You’ve listed some perfectly valid examples of Republicans sucking, but I don’t know what you’re trying to prove. Public perception has been that Republicans (and Conservatives generally) are tougher on crime my entire life, there are reasons for that, and you aren’t going to combat that perception by anecdote.
Are you operating under the assumption that everyone in the country agrees with you, and that those of us who say otherwise are, what, just saying stuff we don’t believe?
That’s what this seems to imply, but I might be misunderstanding – hence me asking you this question.
@Corso. Randomly Googled a name in the middle of your list: DeJuan Young. He was not killed, contrary to what you posted. To be honest, this does not fill me with confidence that you’re writing in good faith.
, she was running tough on Trump, because political prosecutions were in vogue at the time. The rest of them are just being good politicians, reacting to current
Political prosecutions here include trying to overthrow the results of an election, according to @Corso, apparently
@David: corso doesn’t write in good faith. He regurgitates right wing talking points and is continually shocked that nobody here is convinced.
Please try to limit comments to talking about the subject matter, not making other posters the subject.
Nope, I win. I looked through the list and Biden’s pardons weren’t of people convicted of treason or violence against the government. Can you honestly not see the difference between pardoning someone convicted of possessing marijuana after marijuana was decriminalized and pardoning someone who tried to violently overthrow the government?
As noted elsewhere, your list has issues. The second person on it was shot during a fight that was unrelated to the protest. The organizers of the protest immediately issued a statement condemning the violence. Robert West and Antonio Mays appear to have been shot by an unknown person, not sure if an arrest was made or not from the news I’ve found. It probably didn’t help that the paramedics refused to enter the area at first–not were kept from, but refused to.
Not mentioned in your list: Nicolas Fuentes deliberate and clearly political assault with a motor vehicle. I wonder why it didn’t make the list of political violence at CHOP? Odd, that.
I’m going to take this as an admission that you know that Donnie is guilty and was duly convicted in a non-politically motivated trial. Note that one of the charges Donnie was convicted of was is sexual assault, a violent crime.
Again, would you, personally, visit the US right now, knowing that you faced the risk of being detained and sent to a notorious torture prison in El Salvador or a concentration camp with no protection against hurricanes in Florida? It’s happened to other Canadians.
To clarify, Trump was found liable for sexual abuse in a civil case, not a criminal case. (IIRC, it was past the statue of limitations for being brought to criminal court.)
That’s horrible, of course, and indicates that his character is not only bad but criminal. But it’s not one of the felony crimes he’s been found guilty of.
(Unless there’s another case you meant.)
@Ampersand: Clarification accepted. Trump escaped the criminal charge, probably through the statue of limitations, although I don’t know for sure, but the description of what he did is quite disturbing and violent.
That’s a weird interpretation of my comic. But that aside, you specifically said that nonviolent crime counted (when you could hold it against Democrats).
So when you need nonviolent crime to make your case, then nonviolent crime matters; but if someone points out Republicans supporting nonviolent crime, then you say nonviolent crime doesn’t count.
By the way, if we want to be serious about reducing homicide in the US, then gun control needs to be part of the plan – something virtually 100% of elected Republicans oppose.
I never brought up non-violent crime, I responded to comments talking about it. Which was my mistake: I allowed people to successfully derail the conversation. You still haven’t responded to the main thrust of my argument:
People aren’t walking around outside, seeing the happy black people playing, and taking to the air complaining that their neighborhoods were full of crime. Their neighborhoods were objectively full of crime, and they don’t feel secure yet.
You asked earlier “Are you operating under the assumption that everyone in the country agrees with you, and that those of us who say otherwise are, what, just saying stuff we don’t believe?” And the answer is: Not all of you, but some of you, some of the time, yes.
Your comic demonizes an entire class of people, which you yourself admit includes Democrats, who just want to feel safe again, with a healthy dose of race-baiting. Frankly, I don’t believe that you believe that your comic is an accurate depiction of the situation.
And if you do, I’d love for you to actually say so, because I’ve noticed that a lot of the things that I say, that I think you do agree with, you just ignore, and instead respond to tangential trivia where you think my argument is weak. I can’t recall a conversation where you full-throatedly condone the positions I argue against.
You could start here. Do you think the position I’ve argued in this comment is wrong? Do you actually think that the hue and cry from people is more accurately depicted as racism than a legitimate insecurity over what’s happened over the last five years?
Here you go. Yet another example of convicted felon Donnie’s soft-on-crime policies. This one reducing enforcement of laws against human trafficking and child exploitation. Not surprising given what’s in the Epstein files, but pretty blatant.
Irrelevant who brought it up. You said a non-violent crime is “a perfect demonstration” of your point, and then when other people brought up non-violent crime you said only violent crime is relevant.
Your argument has been all over the place from the start. Early on you were claiming that Democrats “don’t want to be seen as tough on crime, because they’ve spent years equating being tough on crime with racism,” a genuinely ridiculous claim you seem to have now dropped. (Thanks, if so.)
But your main argument, on rereading this thread, is one I’m frankly sick of, so sick of that I tend not to reply to it anymore. That argument is reading a four-panel satire as if it were intended to be read as a news report of literal events.
You’ve been commenting on this blog for years, so I know for a fact that this isn’t the first time you’ve ever seen a political cartoon. That you still don’t understand that they’re not intended as literal news reports is bewildering.
Where did I say that? (I’m not being disingenuous, I say a lot of things I don’t remember.) Did I specifically say that this cartoon was intended to refer to them?
The only people “demonized” in my cartoon are right-wing thought leaders (a podcaster, in the cartoon, but I think it’s fair to read him as referring to the entire class of right-wingers who professionally tell other right-wingers what to think, a pack that includes pundits, podcasters, and politicians).
(Although honestly, far from demonizing this dude, I think the comic gives him much more credit for sincerity than I suspect most right-wing thought leaders deserve.)
So why depict him as so sincere? Because obviously that’s not how it works, which is what makes the comic funny. In the real world, I think most or all of these people have spent time living in cities and and are giving extremely selective accounts of life in the city to support their political agenda and/or preexisting beliefs.
The intended message of this comic is: The right-wing depiction of cities as crime-ridden hellholes is wrong, and it’s shot through with racism.
There’s also a secondary message, which is: Life in cities like NYC isn’t the crime-ridden hellhole conservatives describe.
(I’m not intending to say that racism is the only thing behind their slandering cities. My policartoons are short and generally contain only one or two thoughts; they’re not intended to be comprehensive.)
I think racism is a large part of it. And I think your “insecurity over what’s happened over the last five years” holds no water, because this is what right-wingers have said about cities my entire life, without regard to the crime rate.
The level of hue and cry from Republicans, led by their thought leaders, over crime is in my anecdotal experience far more associated with what party the Mayor is than anything else. (NYC was not more dangerous under de Blasio (sp?) than Giuliani (sp?), but conservatives sure seemed to believe it was).
At no point in the last five years, unless a person is very young, did anyone in NYC (or nearly any other US city) experience one of the most violent crime filled years of their lives.
In terms of the lived experience of daily life in NYC, the difference between 4 homicides per 100,000 (2017) and 6 per 100,000 (2021, and also 1961) is completely imperceptible. It’s real, and it’s a difference that matters (because each additional victim is a tragedy) but it can only be detected by statistical analysis. Individual New Yorkers weren’t substantially more likely to be murdered in NYC in 2021 than 2017.
When I lived in Harlem, the NYC homicide rate was 27 per 100,000 – very near the highest level ever. And I suspect it was higher in Harlem. But Harlem wasn’t the blasted crime-ridden hellscape that conservatives (then as now) said it was. Crime was a real, serious thing. But seeing family outings and kids playing ball and buying treats from street venders were much more everyday occurrences, for most people. That’s what this cartoon shows – that no matter how much conservatives screech about cities being crime-ridden hellholes, that’s not what living in a city is like – and I stand by that 100%.
Here’s where I agree with you: U.S. homicide rates are far higher than Americans should accept. (And that was also true in 2021 – in terms of US vs Canada comparisons, the difference between 2017 and 2021 is trivial.) But that’s not a city problem specifically – many towns have higher murder rates than NYC.
And this is certainly an important issue, and one worth discussing (and maybe doing a comic about). But it’s not what this comic is about.
One more thought: I do think that things other than racism also contribute to making people feel more insecure, and one major factor is the increase in homelessness, specifically the increase in visibly homeless people.
(Not that people’s response to the homeless is free of racism, but it’s not only racism.)
The vast majority of homeless people are not committing violent crimes. But a lot of people are afraid they are, and that fear does bleed into their subjective perception of crime rates.
But the right-wing slandering of cities as crime-filled hellholes began long before the recent rise in homelessness.
One last thing re political trials: This is politically motivated (attempt at) prosecution. Donnie went after James for no reason other than that she successfully prosecuted a case against him. Which she did based on the evidence and despite, not because of, his being a political figure. What Donnie is doing is retribution based on political beliefs and actions. What James did was her job as attorney general and an act demonstrating that no one is above the law. She was undermined by the judges’ decisions to let Donnie off, but she did her job and did it well and without favoritism. Now she is being harassed for that–by Republicans. How surprising.
Regarding how violent Black Lives Matter demos were, on the whole they were FAR less violent per capita than January 6th. January 6th was just one demonstration; there were over 9000 BLM demonstrations in the US in 2020 alone.
The highly respected research group Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED) gathered the data:
Despite how peaceful they were, Police were measurably more aggressive towards BLM demonstrations than other demonstrations.
I think this is a fig leaf. It’s higher brow I’ll give you, but similar to what people say they’re “just asking questions”, when everyone know exactly what they’re inferring. The point of a political cartoon is to offer commentary on a current political issue or event by using symbolism, caricature, exaggeration, and irony to persuade the audience to think about the subject. But it can’t be entirely divorced from reality. What’s the nugget of truth here? What’s the exaggeration? What’s the symbolism? What is it that you’re trying to say? What are the questions that you’re “just asking”?
You’ve answered that:
And this is what I’ve been responding to: They aren’t wrong. Up until about 6 months ago, for the last five years, America has been wracked by some of the most violent years in living memory, and even if things returned to normal, your normal isn’t good. Being concerned about that isn’t illegitimate, it’s an eyes-open recognition of reality. And I think attributing it to racism, even if some of the people expressing concern are racist is a tactic to try to mitigate against the objective reality of the rates. These concerns aren’t new, and they’ve generally tracked with the levels of violence as a lagging indicator. What are they supposed to do? Not be concerned when homicide rates double or triple in their backyards?
You referred to Democrat governors who are running as tough on crime, are they not Democrats? Who are they responding to? Are they ignoring all the Democrats in their states, and reacting solely to Republicans, or do Democrats not have those concerns too? Maybe I’m wrong. Do you really think that the current concern over crime isn’t being articulated by working class Democrats? Do you actually believe that this is only a Republican concern?
Do you know what’s interesting about that graph? I don’t think there’s been a point in New York history where the homicide rate hasn’t been higher than Toronto’s, which I can only find official sources for starting in the 80’s, but they’ve never reached 2.5 per 100,000. In 1990, where the New York rate was about 40 per 100,000, Toronto’s was 1.29. This is what I meant when I said you’ve been frog-boiled into accepting an unacceptable level of violence: Your entire life the rate has been bad. The Republicans were right. You just think it’s OK, because it’s what you live in.
Right spelling on both. And sure: This is a huge problem with America, generally, and has been for a very long time. Look at this poll from Gallup, done earlier this year: Scroll down near the bottom to “Americans’ Satisfaction With U.S., by Party ID” And it’s very obvious: Whether someone is “satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time” is entirely dependent your party ID, and the party ID of the President, there isn’t even a swing when the house or senate flips.
I just don’t know what you think that proves. Again… The rates are what they are. If Republicans don’t have the principles to score own-goals, or think that their team is doing the best job possible, that’s on them. Are you saying that Democrats weren’t talking about crime while de Blasio was in? I wasn’t there, but I have a hard time believing that. And if they weren’t, Why weren’t they? It was a problem.
Kids are still playing in Ukraine despite it being an active warzone, but I wouldn’t take kids there to play. I think you’ve been fortunate, despite living in a rough neighborhood it doesn’t sound like the violence has effected you. Or you haven’t noticed it. Or you’ve gotten used to it. But it has effected other people. I’ve had exactly one experience with New York city, I visited friends that I play an online game with. I’ll never go back. During the day was OK, but at night… The sirens, all the time, I don’t know how anyone sleeps. And I’d gone my entire life without hearing a gunshot outside of a range until I spent my first night in Queens. We heard the next day that that was a homicide, a 17 year old kid was killed in a drug deal gone bad. the bullet lodged in a window frame on a brown brick about a block away. Maybe I won the lottery, I don’t know. But I don’t think I’m special.
” I don’t think there’s been a point in New York history where the homicide rate hasn’t been higher than Toronto’s, which I can only find official sources for starting in the 80’s, but they’ve never reached 2.5 per 100,000. In 1990, where the New York rate was about 40 per 100,000, Toronto’s was 1.29. ”
Interesting comparison! Clearly America has a lot to learn from Toronto. I assume Toronto’s low crime rates are due to the Canadian national regularly guard being sent in, and other policies that Corso approves of.
(And yes I know there’s no such thing as a Canadian national guard).
Complete tangent… And I say this fully cognizant that no one in BLM is likely to value my advice, but I think you do the movement a massive disservice by lumping the riots in with the protests in order to argue that the riots weren’t that bad per capita.
Republicans wanted to tie the violence to the movement in order to create cognitive dissonance, they wanted to discredit the movement by highlighting the riots. I don’t know why you’d accept that framing? from an outsider looking in, it’s bizarre… It’s almost like you want to credit the riots and say that they weren’t so bad because per capita, they were relatively peaceful.
People died. People were hurt. People lost their cars, homes, jobs, and businesses. People spent nights in terror peeking out windows. I don’t know what those people are supposed to glean from the data point that most of the BLM activities were peaceful. It’s just going to come off tinny. Distance your mission from that. Marginalize the rioters.
@Corso: Given the context of BLM, as a movement that formed largely in response to police overreach, if the movement had taken your advice and spent a lot of its bandwidth condemning riots and calling for a robust police response to riots, it would have made their core message incoherent. And despite what you say it wouldn’t have led to all these fair-minded Republicans who hate racism but are upset about riots rushing in to support BLM – they will never support BLM because they benefit from a militarised racialised police force. It’s easy for them to say “I just dislike the riots” but really they see incidents like the George Floyd murder as an acceptable price to pay for keeping the racial balance of power where it is – tilted towards white people.
And as an aside, I see you are trying to claim the “outsider looking in authority” but you need to know you are not the only non-American in this conversation. I think what you view as the objective, at-a-distance, dispassionate perspective is simply the view of a bulk standard, off-the-rack law and order conservative who happens to not be American.
I’ve lived in NYC for 10+ years and currently live two blocks from a hospital. Never had difficulty with sirens keeping me awake. I’m going to put this one down to “it’s all in what you get used to.” Toronto’s a lot more spread out, so presumably you’re less likely to hear sirens on any given day/street there.
I’ve actually never heard gunshots in NYC. So, yeah, I think you got unlucky. Of course, in a city of 8 million, even at a rate of 5/100,000, the chances of something happening on any given day are fairly high.
My first impression of Toronto was actually, “Oh, hello Chicago”. It’s like every other midwest city I’ve ever seen, with one exception: fewer guns. Almost like that’s what makes the difference between the murder rate in Chicago and in Toronto, not the size of the police force or the violence with which the police act. In fact, Toronto’s police force seems to be less than half of the size of Chicago’s, for similar sized cities. So, defund the police, get a homicide rate of 1.25/100,000?
I love Toronto! Great city, fun to walk around.
Brief anecdotal comment (I may respond more substantially another day, too much work today): When I lived in NYC, sirens didn’t disturb my sleep nearly as often as truck deliveries to all the little stores. They often went in through metal doors in the sidewalk which could be opened (with a loud metallic bang) to the basement of the stores, where stock was stored. And in the case of bodegas, the deliveries felt like they happened every night, although probably that wasn’t the case.
I loved living in a neighborhood which had both stores and residential on the same block (sometimes in the same buildings). But truck delivery noise was a downside. Still, I learned to sleep through it.
Yeah, I thought Toronto was a nice city. I like Chicago too. And New York. Actually, the only city I’ve been in that I really didn’t like was Orlando, and I’m not sure that counts as a city.
Same, I really like most cities I’ve been in. My exception: I didn’t like Houston much, mainly because the area I was in was really poorly designed for pedestrians.
It’s anecdata, but I have never heard a gunshot in New York City despite visiting many times, and nobody I know has ever seen or experienced a shooting there.
Conversely I know two people who witnessed a shooting in Toronto.
I have no doubt that Toronto is much less violent than NYC, it just really shows how much individual experience can distort statistics.
Like, the worst crime I ever experienced in my life was in New Zealand, of all places. But that doesn’t mean that New Zealand is actually more dangerous than New York or Atlanta, even though that’s my personal experience.
https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/why-i-was-part-of-the-neoreactionary
A description of how locally bad the BLM riots were, and how people on the left didn’t want to hear about it.
The sirens, all the time, I don’t know how anyone sleeps.
I live in a town of 10,000 people in the Midwest, and there are sirens all the time. Sometimes police, sometimes the fire department, sometimes ambulances. As others have told you here, you get used to them and they don’t disturb my sleep. I heard fewer when I was in Chicago a couple of weekends ago.
What does disturb my sleep are Real Americans gunning their engines, peeling out, blasting Nouveau Country and heavy metal through external speakers on their Harleys — it has to be loud enough for them to hear it over their engines. I hear that electric vehicle manufacturers are providing options for loudspeakers to blast the the landscape with motor-revving noise that EVs don’t produce natively.
We have crime here too, including violent crime. The countryside has always been a violent place. But if Trump and MAGA are so concerned about urban crime, why not send the troops to GOP-run cities with higher crime rates than the blue cities Trump is targeting? Why aren’t their mayors and governors begging him to save them?
I lived in NYC (the West Village and then Harlem) for about 10 years from the mid-80s to the mid-90s. I never once heard a gunshot, though I did see a dude running through a crowded Times Square subway station with a gun in his hand. It was a white guy chasing a kid who’d stolen his newspaper.
When I moved into my house in Portland (in 1997), I heard gunshots nightly. I haven’t heard a gunshot in my neighborhood since about 2000.
I heard multiple gunshots every day when I owned a home in Clatskanie, OR (a rural town) in the late teens.
I guess I was in the most danger in Clatskanie, huh? Maybe we should deploy the National Guard there.
My experience in no way matches the fears of conservatives.
I will admit, however, to finding the sounds of Harlem at night to be very soothing. I loved the sounds of traffic and distant sirens and the occasional screech of tires and the yowling of cats in heat.
But then, my wife doesn’t understand how I can go to sleep listening to punk rock and other energetic music.
Different sounds for different folks.
I wanted to reply to a couple of things, but I don’t want to go back and forth forever, so I think this is going to be my final reply to Corso in this thread, barring something really unexpected being said.
This is only true if they’re quite young. For the majority of Americans, the years from approximately 1970 to 2000 had MUCH more violent crime than anything we’ve seen recently. And our lived experience of increasing crime between 2017 to 2019 – when the increase in crime you’re talking about took place (at least in NYC) – were too small to be perceived. They’re only perceptible through statistical measures.
You’ve been told both these things in this discussion, and you’ve ignored them, and just go on making your completely nonsensical claim that crime was extraordinarily high in the last five years.
Going back to the NYC homicides example – an example I’m returning to because I have the numbers on hand, since that tab is still open :-p – in the last five years, the highest homicide rate was 2021’s 6 per 100,000. That was the highest rate since… 2011. The previous time it was that low was 1961. Every year from 1961 to 2011 – the entire lifetime of a 70 year old – had higher homicide rates than 2021.
Clearly, you’ve decided as a matter of ideology that the last five years had an extraordinary high rate of violent crime. But, factually, they did not – not by US standards.
(The last five years did have an incredibly high rate of violent crime compared to Canada – but that’s nothing special about the last five years. As you pointed out, it’s been like that for many decades. The US’s high crime rate compared to other wealthy countries is outside the scope of this comic strip.)
But I really wanted to talk about this:
You seem to not be making any distinction between people claiming that violent crime is a serious problem (true) or politicians saying they want to be tough on crime (which they say a lot, in both parties) – and calling cities crime-ridden hellholes (false), and claiming that crime rates are extraordinarily high (false). I am in no way contradicting myself by saying crime is a serious problem, but cities aren’t crime-ridden hellholes.
Here’s a few examples of conservatives talking about cities and talking about crime rates:
This isn’t even close to a comprehensive list of such quotes from high-up conservatives. And this is certainly not the rhetoric the Democratic governors I mentioned use when talking about crime and city life. If you honestly can’t tell the difference between some of the things conservatives say vs simple “tough on crime” rhetoric, then I don’t know what to say.
I wonder – is the problem that I didn’t make the character’s dialog in panel four extreme enough? If the dialog in panel four had been “I’ve been to the city, and it’s a hellhole! It’s full of, uh, crime!” would you have gotten my intent better?
That’s fair, I’ll make this my last as well, unless something particularly interesting gets said as well.
I’m not ignoring when you say these things, they just doesn’t really interact with my point, and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say. My point was that the last five years were bad, and that the response to them was reasonable. In support of that, I said a couple of different ways that the homicide rates were some of the worst people had experienced. I don’t think that’s really responded to by saying that only people under 25 couldn’t remember worse, or that they were merely the worst they’d been in 20 years. This is what I meant when I say you have a tendency to ignore the point and focus on the Trivia.
On New York specifically… I never focused on a city, I responded to people who did. I was usually more than happy to do that and follow along with people who wanted to focus on a city because my points generally functioned within them, but if you happen to find a city that was better than the average, that doesn’t disprove my point – The national average in 2021 was over 10 per 100,000. If it was 6 in New York, then imagine all the places that had to be higher to get that average. Pick one of those and focus on the people who lived there.
On the quote section… I don’t think the response and rhetoric to the violence is being driven top-down on this, I think it’s bottom-up, and a lot of what legislators are saying is indicative of what their constituents are telling them. Except Trump, Trump just says a lot of shit. But there were a couple that brought up new issues:
Only because you specifically asked. Two decades, certainly, five… There are probably crimes for which this is technically true, but this hits me as either incorrect or egregiously cherry picked.
This is a completely different topic, but Fentanyl changed the game. If you include overdose deaths, he’s right and it isn’t even close. Something like three times more people die to overdose than homicide. and it’s getting worse, even this year.
Sorry, but I can’t believe you thought posting that was a good idea. In 2025, sure, carjackings are lower. But again… Security is a lagging indicator. In 2019 there were 150 carjackings in DC. In 2020, there were 360. In 2021 There were 424, in 2022 there were 484, and in 2023 there were 957. 3 a day, 130 per 100,000. I can’t blame people for noticing a 600% increase in a class of violent crime. I’m sorry, no. That seems reasonable.
From the same source: Philidelphia rose from 224 carjackings in 2019 to 1,311 in 2022. In Chicago, carjackings rose from 603 in 2019 to 1,852 in 2021.
No, because the problem wasn’t the specific rhetoric, it was the nature of the response to the stimulus. An ad-libbed version of “we have to do something about crime” in response to someone walking through a peaceful neighborhood of black people playing is going to be on a spectrum of being bad almost regardless of what is actually being said. If that was actually what was happening, I would agree with you. But it’s not, so I don’t. The comic I wouldn’t have an issue with would instead of a montage of happy black people, have a three panel montage of a carjacking, a home invasion, and a murder, and then the fourth panel where the person was saying an ad-libbed version “we have to do something about crime”. In that case, almost regardless of what was actually being said, that’s probably on a spectrum of being reasonable.
The near-irrelevancy of the exact rhetoric used is exactly why I made the point about Democrats – You might not like the rhetoric of the Republicans, but they’re responding to the same stimulus in a roughly parallel manner.
Again: My point was that people weren’t strolling through perfectly normal neighborhoods, seeing black people happily going about their lives, and deciding that something had to be done about it. My point was that the last five years were particularly bad. We focused on homicides because I think we all agreed that it was a generally good indicator, but there’s so much more baked into the current feeling of insecurity. We touched on overdose deaths and carjackings, but also assaults, rapes, home invasions, and arsons, your exact mileage may vary based on where you lived, but overall, everything got worse for a couple of years, and that, compounded with a sensational media and covid lockdowns led people to a point of deep insecurity. They don’t feel safe. It’s not unreasonable for them to feel that way. It’s cheap to dismiss their response as racism.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to get in on the “last post unless” thing, but I found this article about Camden and wanted to add it for the information. Camden is a notoriously high crime city*. Last summer, it had no murders for the first time in decades. How did this happen? Not the national guard or massive expansion of the police force, but rather community engagement and smarter use of technology.
It would not be unreasonable, IMHO, to be concerned about the crime rate in some of the more dangerous cities. But here and, if I understand correctly, in Baltimore, we have examples of what works to lower crime. Why not follow these examples rather than the “tough on crime” stuff that sounds good but, as far as I know, isn’t evidence based?
*I’ve been to Camden. It looked pretty much like the pictures in the comic, except for more trash and burned out houses. Even in the highest crime areas, most people are just living their lives.