Crime Doesn’t Count
A non-issue?.

mericans don't care about crime anymore. Even after the September 11 attacks muted and refocused campaigns in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City, ordinary crime never emerged as a major issue. While all major party candidates mouthed the same reassuring platitudes about terrorism, law enforcement, a defining left-right wedge issue in nearly every important election from 1960 to 1996, became little more than a cipher.

Indeed, all three loosing candidates, Virginia's Mark Early, New Jersey's Bret Schundler, and New York City's Mark Green, understood crime better than their opponents. Two of the three winning candidates, New York City Mayor-Elect Michael Bloomberg and Virginia Governor-Elect Mark Warner, have never held office much less worked with a police chief or prison warden. Early, on the other hand, built his reputation as a tough-on-crime state legislator and then showed genuine compassion in creating an innovative mentoring program as Virginia's attorney general. As a mayor, likewise, Schundler helped to rebuild a corrupt police department and improved relations between the police and minority communities in Jersey City. Old-school leftist Green, who surprised many by running to the right of Republican Bloomberg, secured the endorsement of legendary former New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton and promised to move NYPD away from the unsustainable, costly, and disruptive strategy of keeping crime down through massive spending on police overtime and street-level drug busts. On the other hand, Bloomberg, Warner, and New Jersey Governor-Elect James McGreevey (who briefly worked as a prosecutor and parole-board official in the early 1980s) did support the sensible center-right consensus on law enforcement. All three spoke in favor of community-police partnerships, continued investments in prison infrastructure, and effective, lengthy sentences for wrongdoers. Still, none equaled his opponents' crime-fighting credentials.

While the last decades' 40-percent across-the-board drop in reported crime shows that the trio of better policing, more prisons, and tough penalties has worked to reduce lawlessness, the United States still has a major criminal-justice problem. Low-income neighborhoods, particularly those with large minority populations, remain far too dangerous. While putting thugs behind bars has made the country safer, public policy verges on negligence when it comes to reintegrating convicts and providing humane environments inside prisons. Ending traditional parole in many states provided a quick-and-dirty way to increase prison sentences without amending individual laws but it also removed the biggest incentives for prisoners to take part in rehabilitation programs and, perhaps as a result, participation in those programs has fallen sharply even as prison populations have swelled. New spending on coercive drug treatment and testing coupled with certain punishment for relapsed addicts would almost certainly achieve a greater marginal reduction in drug use than would increased enforcement spending. Overtly virtue-based mentoring programs and special boarding schools for disadvantaged children offer hope for nipping crime at the bud in places where morals-free Great Society programs failed. In the wake of September 11, police departments and state governments might even want to consider taking community partnerships to the next level and rebuilding 1940s and 1950s civil-defense programs as a prophylactic against future terrorist attacks.

But these ideas don't get mentioned more because the mainstream Left has, in effect, become prisoner to the conservative status quo on crime. Even in the wake of September 11, the academic Left still seethes with hatred for law enforcement but left-of-center politicians have come to an accommodation with the police. Honest, moderate lefties like Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown and Delaware Senator Joseph Biden realize that effective, hard-nosed law enforcement provides an enormous boost to the poor by reducing fear and stimulating inner city economies. Even leftists as dedicated as Hillary Clinton know that soccer moms and dads don't like the idea of seeing drug dealers take over suburban high schools.

Americans have every reason to feel deeply suspicious of new ideas about crime and policing emanating from the left. When the left-wing consensus that economic development would end crime prevailed between the mid-1950s and Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, crime rates tripled. Since Bill Clinton brought the Democrats back to the center on crime, offense rates have fallen by nearly half. But left-wing solutions can still be inane: The Department of Housing and Urban Development sponsored efforts to use magical crystals against crime and stress until newly installed housing secretary Mel Martinez killed the program earlier this year. As a result, savvy left-leaning politicians who want tough-on-crime credentials need to ape their conservative opponents even when that means refusing to allow terminally-ill prison inmates to spend their final days at home, failing to follow-up with mentally-ill released prisoners, funding menacing SWAT teams instead of police athletic leagues, and demanding 20-year adult sentences for screwed up 15-year-old burglars.

The Left, trapped by the manifest failures of its policies on crime, has no credibility when it calls for change of America's law-enforcement policies and indeed, traditional left-wing "solutions" like opening prison doors and creating new entitlement welfare programs would likely drive crime rates through the roof. The crime issue still belongs to conservatives. Making America's continuing crime problem a winning political issue once again will require courage, vision, and plenty of compassion from American conservatives.