"Concerns rising inside White House over surge in
violent crime," CNN tells us. "America's Crime Surge: Why Violence
Is Rising, And Solutions To Fix It," proclaims NPR. "Officials
worry the rise in violent crime portends a bloody summer,"
reports The Washington
Post.
Over
and over this summer we have heard – and will no doubt continue to
hear – the scourge of rising crime is the most urgent issue on
voters' minds. Setting aside the way media coverage itself shape
public opinion, the rising murder rates in urban areas is indeed
very real and its victims disproportionately Black and
Latino.
In
response, like clockwork, Democrats and Democratic Party-aligned
media have allied with conservatives and right-wing media are
rehashing the same tired responses: more police, longer sentences,
and tougher laws. But this time, they assure us it will be
different: it won’t be racist and overly punitive. Instead, in
addition to the return of 1990s Tough On Crime formula. we will get
enough nebulous reforms and anti-bias training that it will somehow
be enlightened and consistent with the demands of Black Lives
Matter.
But
everything we know about the past 50 years tells us this will not
be true. Indeed, if more policing and prisons solved crime, the
United States would be the safest country on Earth, but, of course,
it is not. According to The American Journal of
Medicine, compared to 22
other high-income nations, the United States' gun-related murder
rate is 25 times higher despite imprisoning people at rates 5-10
times what other rich nations do.
So
why do lawmakers and the media always reach for the same so-called
"solutions" when it comes to crime? What are the assumptions that
inform how we respond to an increase in homicides and other violent
crime? How can the wealthiest nation in the world throw billions of
dollars, more police, longer sentences, and tougher prosecutors at
our high murder rates only to continue to wildly outpacing the rest
of the so-called developed world on this, the most urgent of
metrics?
On
this episode, we explore the origins of "crime," what crimes we
consider noteworthy and which are ignored, how property rights and
white supremacy informed the crime we center in our media, how the
crimes of poverty, environmental destruction, wage theft, and
discrimination are relegated to the arena of tort, with its gentle
fines and drawn out lawsuits – while petty theft and drug use
results in long prison sentences. We’ll study how these
bifurcations inform both media accounts of crime and how we respond
with more police, and longer sentences the second we are faced with
so-called crime waves.
Our
guests are Civil Rights Corps' Alec Karakatsanis and sociologist
Tamara K. Nopper.