Last Tuesday, San Francisco’s District Attorney, Chesa Boudin, was thumped in a recall election. Political commentary almost universally regarded it as a stark repudiation of progressive approaches to law and order and a harbinger of the electoral bloodbath awaiting Democrats in 2022 more broadly. Even in liberal California, a restive population that’s sick and tired of soaring crime rates, has had it up to here with woke ideas and is sending a message loud and clear, so the story goes.
I’ll return to San Francisco and its crime issues in a moment. But first, here are a couple of interesting graphics.
The first, as you can see, plots Britons’ level of concern over immigration against actual immigration figures. The former peaked in 2015-16, culminating in Britain’s stunning vote in June 2016 to exit the EU. After that vote, which marked a transformative moment in British politics and, eventually, swept to power Boris Johnson, Brexit’s foremost champion, immigration continued to climb. But it ceased to be an issue of paramount concern (even before Covid). The second graphic provides a possible explanation - the pro-Brexit media stopped caring.
Of course, there’s more to the story than this. But it’s undeniably a critical factor. Motivated elites, including politicians and those who control key instruments of media, can decisively shape popular sentiment. On one hand, I’ve found, people can accept this as a basic truth in the abstract. In the age of Donald Trump, Covid disinformation and the Big Lie, liberals are probably more receptive to the idea than ever. But I cannot tell you how many times people have responded defensively when I’ve argued that this or that instance of public opinion results from an orchestrated campaign to manipulate people’s sense of reality. It sounds like conspiratorial thinking. Or because I’m biased and can’t accept that people see the world differently than I do.
Be that as it may, it’s well established by now that it is very easy to distort people’s perceptions of reality. To an unnerving degree what we think we see for ourselves is shaped by how other people influence our perceptions (here’s one classic example).
Which brings us back to the recall election in San Francisco.
Perhaps more than any other issue of social and political import over the past several decades, people’s judgment about crime has been consistently shaped not by the actual data but by the nature of the discourse around it.
As everyone knows, crime has gone up in the United States since the start of the pandemic. Or to be more precise, there has been a notable, though uneven, spike in homicides. Overall, violent crime, including armed robbery and other types of assault, have fluctuated, but not increased nearly as much since 2020. There is some early evidence (there’s always a lag with crime data) that homicide rates might be plateauing or trending down in 2022, but it’s too early to say. And in spite of the rise in homicides since 2019, their rates remain far below their peaks in the 1980s and into the 1990s.
In San Francisco, consistent with national trends, there was a significant increase in homicides in 2020, though the rate was the same in 2021 as it was in 2017 and remains far below the earlier peaks. According to the latest FBI data, overall violent crime in San Francisco is actually down since three years ago, though certain kinds of crime, like car theft, are way up. A friend of mine, who lives in San Francisco and whom I asked about some of this, responded in part that the marked increase in homelessness in the city is creating a perception of generally less safe streets. In addition, Asian voters rejected Boudin overwhelmingly in the recall election, perhaps in part because of an escalation in hate crimes and the belief that Boudin was doing too little to address that.
I bring this up not so much as a defense of Boudin, whom I haven’t followed at all but I gather is not the *best* or most charismatic politician. Rather, what has struck me is that, from the very little I gathered about the recall election and headlines that declared San Francisco a “failed city,” I’d assumed that crime was out of control there. I should have known better. I’m not telling people how safe or not they should feel. And progressive approaches to crime, like eliminating cash bail, reducing incarceration and, much more controversially, “defunding the police,” are always going to face an uphill political climb. But the gap between the narrative of what’s going on in San Francisco on the one hand, and the reality on the other, is pretty striking.
“If it bleeds, it leads” is perhaps the oldest adage in the book about the incentives of news organizations. In particular, local television news feeds its viewers a steady diet of crime stories. And the airwaves are blanketed with crime shows (Law and Order addict here, by the way). In addition, the fact that crime is still far below the high-water marks of the Reagan-Bush years (see what I did there), is arguably of little meaning to people in 2022. We get used to what we get used to, and if our streets are less safe, more dingy seeming and seamy than they were five years ago, it’s asking a lot for people to take the longer view.
Still, I can never get over one particular set of polling data from Gallup. Since the late 1980s, Gallup has been asking people “is there more crime in the U.S. than there was a year ago, or less?” (you’ll need to scroll down). To repeat, this includes a period of time, beginning in the mid-1990s, in which the US witnessed a stunning, long-term decline in violent crime. Perhaps the most striking illustration of this: in 1990, there were over 2,000 murders in New York City. By 2018, the number had dipped below 300 (there were just under 500 in 2021). Though New York’s decline was particularly dramatic, similar trends unfolded across the country.
And yet, in every single year, except 2001 (!!, a story in itself) that Gallup has asked this question, a plurality of all respondents has said that crime has increased. In most years, in fact, an overwhelming majority has answered that way. Crime was already on the descent by the mid-1990s when, in 1996, Gallup reported that by a 71-15 margin, Americans said there was more crime than the year before. As crime continued to plummet into the early 2000s, by margins of forty to sixty points, our compatriots said crime was increasing. When, by the end of the Obama era and the beginning of the Trump presidency, crime was the lowest it had been since the early 1960s, Americans *still* believed, by fifty point margins, that it was getting worse.
In this light, the fact that Americans have answered this question correctly the past two years proves nothing so much as that a broken clock is right twice a day.
Returning to Boudin, it would be a very tough case to make that any of the reforms he’s tried to implement have a meaningful relationship to the patterns of crime in San Fran. In fact, most of the specific reforms he’s championed poll well, even as he became wildly unpopular. Indeed, since crime is up everywhere - in percentage terms, Wyoming has witnessed the biggest increases in the US since 2020, which tells you, among other things, about what you can do with data, if you want to - you’d be hard pressed to draw firm conclusions about what we’ve seen since 2020, other than the fact that the world has generally gone crazy.
But it’s a good bet that constant repetition of certain narratives, and more or less non-stop coverage of violence, keeps Americans continually primed to feel unsafe and mistrustful. This obviously benefits some politicians more than others. It certainly benefits the GOP in general. That doesn’t mean voters are wrong to be frustrated with the state of things right now, including what feels to many like a fundamentally less secure world. But it’s very unlikely they’re going to get the relief from the conditions feeding that insecurity they think a recall of Boudin represents.
As always, excellent points. I found this conversation between Derek Thompson and Ron Brownstein on the SF issue to be enlightening and thought-provoking. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/californias-elections-sent-an-important-message-what-is-it/id1594471023?i=1000565952733