The Crime Scare Industrial Complex (Season 7)

Hello from Atlanta and Burlington, VERMONT, where Hannah just moved! Josie is devastated to lose her and plans on forgiving her for moving…the minute she moves back. Hannah is very cold.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to publish a series of short essays unpacking our thoughts on the role of crime and the criminal legal system in this political moment. There’s a strange mix of déjà vu and something new in the air. On one hand, it frequently feels like we’ve taken a time machine back to the 1990s. In the run up to this year’s elections, candidates from both parties ran ad after ad promising to “crack down on crime” and “put violent criminals behind bars,” and Congress is gearing up to introduce a national crime bill along the lines of the now-infamous Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Kind of mind-warping stuff to be hearing after our decades-long failed experiment with incarceration as a fix for social ills.

But! On the other hand, it seems like we might (finally) be seeing a limit on how far the political weaponization of crime can get you. A handful of candidates – most visibly Zohran Mamdani – managed to survive the now-standard “soft on crime” attacks. It’s too early to say whether this signals a larger political shift on crime and safety, but it’s a real moment of friction in a narrative that has gone unchallenged for a long time. We think it’s worth asking how we got to this crossroads in the first place.

Crime and punishment have been central political issues more often than not in modern American history. In 1964, at the height of the Civil Rights movement, Barry Goldwater ran a campaign focused on urban crime and disorder, invoking the specter of subway crime and protests against police violence (sound familiar?). In response, LBJ pivoted from his War on Poverty to declare a War on Crime, the most lasting legacy of which is the expansion of federal funding for local police. In the early 1970s, Nixon, who ran a presidential campaign laser-focused on crime, announced the War on Drugs, which ushered in much harsher penalties for a wide range of crimes. In 1988, this brand of politics reached what was perhaps its nadir with the Bush campaign’s notorious Willie Horton ad. A few years later, Bill Clinton, during his presidential campaign, made a big show of appearing at the execution of a Black man convicted of killing a white Arkansas police officer and then, once in office, threw his weight behind the 1994 crime bill (penned by none other than future President Biden). The pattern across these decades is pretty clear. A cultural panic about crime, whether grounded in myth or reality, followed by a wave of punitive policy that sticks around long after the panic fades. Rinse and repeat.

For a stretch in the early 2000s, crime took a back seat in national politics, but only because the country’s fear machinery had been redirected toward terrorism and immigration. The framing barely changed. Bush’s War on Terror grew out of the same logic as the War on Crime and the War on Drugs, and Obama’s “felons, not families” line made clear the connection between the criminal legal and immigration enforcement systems. But we’re back in more familiar territory now. Crime is once again being treated as an urgent national crisis, with the pandemic-era spike in violence being weaponized for all sorts of political purposes. The rhetoric and policy proposals coming out of Washington could have been lifted from the sixties, seventies, eighties, or nineties. (Except the ads of yore relied on mugshots, not cursed AI-generated pimps and shoplifters pledging their support for a “pro-criminal” candidate.)

But here’s where things get less predictable. While there was an absolute avalanche of political ads focused on crime during this election cycle, they didn’t always work. And it wasn’t just Zohran who survived these attacks. District attorneys in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington who ran on promises of reform beat challengers accusing them of being too lenient. (That’s the polite way to put it. Some actual quotes include “despicable, uncaring, heartless” and our favorite, “a curse upon this city.”) The same pattern held in the closely-watched Bucks County (PA) sheriff race. While this isn’t the first time that fearmongering about crime failed to have its intended effect, it does seem that the pendulum is swinging at a faster clip than usual. This raises the question of whether the cycle we’ve come to expect is as inevitable as it seems.

We’re also interested in how much the dramatically transformed media landscape has played into this change. Lurid stories about crime can still dominate the news, but the political fragmentation of the news media and our shortened attention spans may mean that these stories have a less enduring cultural impact. A tough-on-crime ad has to fight for space against two dozen other viral things competing for the same thirty seconds of attention. It also seems that fear of crime is increasingly politicized, making it a proxy for other anxieties that can’t be addressed by politicians’ promises to lock more people up. And, finally, sensationalistic crime stories might finally be having a hard time competing with people’s lived realities, in which murder rates are at historic lows and half of American adults have seen firsthand the true function that jails and prisons serve in our society.

We’re using this series to look at these cycles of fear and punishment from a few angles, with a particular eye on how news coverage helps fuel them and how it can interrupt them. A few of the questions we keep coming back to: Why do politicians so often latch onto cultural panics about crime (think, carjacking) instead of other fears that periodically grip the country (think, screentime)? Why do we buy fear-based political messages about crime even though we’re otherwise pretty skeptical of politicians? Why is it so hard to absorb the extremely large and, at this point, obvious body of evidence showing that mass incarceration has created more harm than it has prevented? And when journalists fall into alarmist coverage, is it because we’re carrying the same blind spots as everyone else or because of the incentives that shape newsroom decisions?

Before we go, a few things we’ve read recently:

404 Media continues their excellent reporting on Flock Safety, covering a ruling out of Washington declaring that Flock’s license-plate-scanning images are public record. Open records nerds rejoice: anyone can request the surveillance shots these cameras take of basically every car that exists. The city had already auto-deleted the files after 30 days, so there isn’t much to release right now, but the ruling still cracks open the door on a system that has been operating in near total invisibility while vacuuming up data on millions of people passing through their own neighborhoods.

And another Flock related story: The Atlanta Police Department used a network of thousands of Flock Safety license plate reader cameras to run immigration related searches – at least 15 between March 20 and 24 of 2025 – using keywords like “locate alien” and “ERO assist.” Documents show the department claimed no federal immigration assistance this year, but the Atlanta Community Press Collective tells a different story.

New polling from Gallup shows that for the second year in a row, Americans are less worried (yes you read that right) about crime. Less than half now say it’s a “very” or “extremely” serious problem, and fewer people report being afraid to walk alone at night. Lots more on this in the essays to come.

Lastly: clemency only seems to enter the national conversation a few times a year. We get “pardon season” stories around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the end of gubernatorial and presidential term. The coverage tends to focus on celebrity cases, political allies, or whatever the president is trying to signal at that moment, and the deeper story rarely gets told. That is a shame, because clemency is one of the few tools available to retroactively address unduly long prison sentences. And now, with both Biden and Trump using the pardon power to reward or protect friends and allies, some people are calling for its use to be restricted even further. If you want a quick grounding in how clemency works, how often it gets used, and what better coverage could look like, CJJ has a brief here.