Smart Right-Wing Politics: Marketing Fear

   August 12th Flash Mob, Nordstrom’s Robbery in LA

Smart Right-Wing Politics: Marketing Fear

When Crime Rates are Falling

It works for gun shops, gunmakers, gun clubs (especially the NRA) and rightwing politicians. Crime moves from a secondary or tertiary issue to at or near the top. The effects of criminal activity dominate film and television, primarily because they are so visual. Of late, flash mob robberies – which impact people far from hotbeds normally associated with criminality – have been particularly jarring to Americans who believe “it just doesn’t happen here.” Yet FBI statistics show a reduction in major crime, from murder to car thefts, for the first half of 2023. It is a continuation of statistical declines in violent crimes over the past few years, starting with 2017. But showing the same FBI that Donald Trump wants to defund, as being a successful policing organization, does not play to the based. So fabricating criminal statistics, or simply making claims crime is getting worse is now a MAGA mandate. With cameras everywhere, there is tons of “evidence.”

This notion of getting tough on crime is a perpetual political football, whether it is against a more permissive and less monetarily based system of bail or a move to have rapid executions for mass killers following their trials (a Pence favorite). I guess the fact that a sizeable proportion of such killers actually intend to be killed by cops in the process… but still become famous… is not relevant to Mr Pence and his followers. The three strikes laws are slowly being repealed almost everywhere. That promised deterrent result just doesn’t happen, but crowded and dangerous prisons produce better “criminally educated” former inmates, vastly more gang recruitment, the serious impairment of released felons ever to make a livable wage and the lingering anger of having been place in an environment of constant violent. Most felons do return to society, and so many of us simply forget that reality. Getting it wrong on crime is very expensive.

Los Angeles is fairly typical, even as a very “blue” and liberal city. As Libor Jany, writing for the October 15th Los Angeles Times notes: “Citywide, violent crime has declined nearly 7% compared with this time last year, with 1,650 fewer incidents reported as of Sept. 30, according to Los Angeles Police Department statistics. And yet, grisly murders and wild police chases still lead nightly TV newscasts.

Social media remain flooded with images of youngsters in hoodies streaming out of high-end fashion stores with arms full of stolen merchandise… Petty thefts are up by roughly 14%, but other property crimes — along with homicides, robberies and rapes — are all down from the same period in 2022.

“The number of people shot, including nonfatal incidents, has also declined nearly 16% citywide since last year. Historically high-crime police divisions such as Newton, 77th Street and Hollenbeck have seen double-digit-percentage declines in the number of shooting victims. Criminologists, police officials and others who study crime caution against reading too much into short-term swings, but the surge in violent crime of recent years has come amid a decades-long downward trend.

“The statistics may indicate the city is getting safer, but [Skipp Townsend, part of a loose network of gang interventionists], who works with 2nd Call, a community based organization that serves formerly incarcerated people seeking to reintegrate back into society, said he sees ‘a lot of propaganda’ on his social media feed about how it’s getting worse… ‘People been doing smash and grabs, there were just no cameras around to capture it,’ he said.

“That so many people think of L.A. as less safe isn’t entirely surprising, he said, considering the city averaged more than 1,000 killings a year in the 1990s — more than three times as many as in recent years. Gang violence is still blamed for much of the bloodshed. But, Townsend said, the general public has a simplistic and outdated view of the dynamics of gang culture. Today’s violence is a far cry from the days of Bloods fighting Crips over drug turf, he said, explaining that gangs have become more fractured by infighting and less hierarchical, their membership constantly changing. And even when a shooting today does involve gang members, he said, it’s just as likely to stem from interpersonal dramas or perceived slights on social media…

“‘Prior to COVID, we were at historic low numbers, and even then people were complaining,’ he said. ‘I think a lot of people have amnesia and forget how many murders a year we used to have.’”

I would like to hear from that “radical right” exactly how we benefit by spending about $40 thousand a year incarcerating a single felon, then releasing the vast majority of felons back into society. From a prudent taxpayer’s perspective or even the point of view of an average American living an average life? Why are we a nation that represents about 4% of the global population but account for about a quarter of Earth’s incarcerated people?

And why, according to the World Population Review, does the United States have the fourth highest murder rate per capita in the world yet unwilling to accept the relationship between murder rates and civilian gun ownership. According to the most recent global Small Arms Survey, the United States is in sole possession of first place with an average of 120.5 guns per hundred residents. The Falkland Islands are a distant second with 62.1 with only 3,000 residents, and Yemen third with 51.8 guns per 100, with a population slightly over 28 million. It does seem as if that right-wing fear of non-existent crime fails to track the real crime issue in America: their precious and misinformed belief that lots of guns somehow prevent crime.

I’m Peter Dekom, and reality is a bitter pill to swallow for those who consistently rely on mythology and conspiracy theories for “alternative facts” that support their mistaken assumptions.