The Crime Rate

One of the most successful political tools employed by MAGA bigots is fear–fear of dark-skinned people, and especially fear of crime (which, of course, they attribute to those dark-skinned folks). When I venture into suburban areas, I frequently encounter people who express shock that I actually live in my city’s core. Aren’t I afraid? Can I walk the streets? Implicit in those inquiries are two assumptions–a frequently voiced belief that downtown areas are crime-ridden, and a more masked belief that “those people” who populate city centers are criminals.

Facts, apparently, are irrelevant. In a recent column, our Chief of Police noted that crime in downtown Indianapolis represents all of six percent of all crime in our city–a statistic that accounts for my complete lack of wariness when I walk (yes, walk) to the grocery, the dentist, the bank…

My city isn’t the only urban area that is safe.

It turns out that, despite the racist rhetoric of Trump and his enablers, American cities are not hell-holes. (At least they weren’t until ICE was loosed upon them.) As The Atlantic has recently reported, America is currently experiencing a remarkable improvement in public safety. Moreover, that improvement has occurred despite a police-staffing crisis. “In August, the FBI released its final data for 2024, which showed that America’s violent-crime rate fell to its lowest level since 1969, led by a nearly 15 percent decrease in homicide—the steepest annual drop ever recorded.”

Preliminary 2025 numbers look even better. The crime analyst Jeff Asher has concluded that the national murder rate through October 2025 fell by almost 20 percent—and all other major crimes declined as well. The post-pandemic crime wave has receded, and then some. According to Asher’s analysis, Detroit, San Francisco, Chicago, Newark, and a handful of other big cities recorded their lowest murder rates since the 1950s and ’60s. “

According to Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton who studies urban violence, America’s cities are as safe as they’ve ever been in the history of the country.

What is puzzling is that this low point in violent crime has accompanied a downturn in police employment–there were 6 percent fewer officers at the beginning of 2025 than at the beginning of 2020, according to a survey by the Police Executive Research Forum, thanks to retirements and departures.

There are many plausible explanations for the recent crime downturn: sharper policing strategy, more police overtime, low unemployment, the lure of digital life, the post-pandemic return to normalcy. Each of these surely played a role. But only one theory can match the decline in its scope and scale: that the massive, post-pandemic investment in local governments deployed during the Biden administration, particularly through the American Rescue Plan Act, delivered a huge boost to the infrastructure and services of American communities—including those that suffered most from violent crime. That spending may be responsible for our current pax urbana.

As a researcher at the University of Chicago put it,  ARPA sent billions of dollars to local governments to use as they saw fit. It turned out that “Investing in education, police, librarians, community centers, social workers, local nonprofits. Local-government employment rolls increased almost perfectly inverse to the crime rate.”

The article described the turn-around in Baltimore, a city that had experienced high crime rates for years, and noted that the approach used in Baltimore was only one “of scores of alternative public-safety ideas that were funded through ARPA.”

Cook County, home of Chicago and the nation’s second-largest county, put roughly $36 million into efforts such as Healing Hurt People Chicago, a trauma-recovery program for crime victims. Mecklenburg County, home of Charlotte, North Carolina, used ARPA to fund a “youth peace summit” and advertise a gun-lock-distribution program. Some ARPA money also bolstered police and sheriff’s departments directly.

The article emphasizes that the monies local governments directed explicitly to crime reduction represented a small percentage of ARPA funds supporting other uses, like summer jobs for teens, blight reduction, and green spaces.  The largest category of ARPA spending was in “government operations”—funding local services and putting people back to work.

It turns out that when local governments have sufficient funding to support more extensive local infrastructures, crime declines. As one mayor put it, “There are so many factors that influence those crime statistics—parademic-response time, jobs programs, conflict-resolution techniques at violence-interrupter organizations, investments in neighborhood conditions. A thousand fathers for that victory of crime reduction.”

The last of ARPA grants will be gone this year. (Many have already been cut by the Trump administration.) We’ll soon see what really works to reduce crime–unleashing the ICE Gestapo on urban people of color, or adequately funding local governments.

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It’s The Structure, Stupid!

James Carville famously coined “It’s the economy, stupid!” reminding Bill Clinton to focus on economic issues. Unfortunately, given the civic illiteracy of most Americans, an exhortation to focus on the nation’s structural flaws would be met with confusion rather than recognition.

In my Law and Public Policy classes, I emphasized those underappreciated structural issues–the effect of such things as the Electoral College, gerrymandering and the filibuster on democratic deliberation and policy formation. This essay from Lincoln Square may mean that recognition of our underlying problem is spreading.

The essay calls for an honest evaluation of the incentives and disincentives built into our governing structures, and recognition of the fact that economic and social stress will reveal both the strengths and weakness of those structures.

Not all of those problems are governmental. The essay begins by describing distortions of our current information environment–distortions to which I frequently allude.

In the United States, stress is filtered through an information environment that does not clarify reality but actively distorts it. A significant share of Americans consume content labeled “news” that does not perform the function of news. Rather than explaining policy, demystifying institutions, or holding power accountable, this content is engineered to provoke emotional arousal—disgust, resentment, fear, and a sense of embattled identity. Fox News is the clearest and most consequential example, not because it is merely biased or provocative, but because it pioneered a durable model: partisan infotainment optimized for outrage, monetized confusion, and political alignment.

The effect is not simply misinformation. It is misdirection.

As the essay quite accurately notes, this misdirection is amplified by social media.

Of course, it isn’t only the Wild West of the Internet. As the essay reminds us, America has a history of excluding entire populations from our social contract–pairing a rhetoric of democracy with a practice of authoritarianism.

And governmental design decisions compound over time. Constitutional mechanisms were built to restrain the “passions of the masses”–aka democracy. So we have a Senate where equal power is exercised by  states with dramatically unequal populations, a House of Representatives that has kept 435 members despite the quadrupling of the population, gerrymandering that allows representatives to choose their voters… And a Supreme Court, “always undemocratic by design” that has become an “active amplifier of minority rule, weakening democracy’s capacity for self-defense.”

As the essay quite accurately notes, these are not incidental flaws. 

The Electoral College sits at the center of this architecture. Its defenders invoke balance and federalism, but its operational effect is to concentrate political attention on a handful of “swing states.” The very existence of swing states is evidence of democratic distortion. National policy—on climate, trade, war, and public health—is effectively decided by a narrow slice of voters in seven or eight states. Politicians are not incentivized to ask what is best for the country as a whole; they are incentivized to ask what will move a few thousand persuadable voters just enough to reach 51 percent.

And then there’s an imperial Presidency that has steadily accumulated power and a Congress “weakened by polarization and perverse incentives” that “no longer serves as an effective counterweight.” The Presidency has morphed into an executive office increasingly resembling an elected monarchy. (We the People may say “No kings,” but we’re a bit late to the dance….)

The essay goes on to document the real-world consequences of these structural flaws.

We like to believe that America is “Number One,” but compared to other democratic countries, “Americans live shorter lives, experience higher rates of preventable mortality, and endure greater levels of violence. Inequality is extreme enough that life expectancy can differ by more than a decade—and in some cases approaching two—within the same metropolitan area.” We  spend more per capita on healthcare than any other advanced democracy but produce worse outcomes– a “result of a value-extractive system that inserts intermediaries to capture profit, rationing care by price, complexity, and employment status. 

Education, childcare, and family policy follow the same logic. In peer democracies, these are treated as civic infrastructure. In the United States, they are treated as private burdens or market opportunities. Higher education is prohibitively expensive. Childcare costs rival housing. Paid family leave is not guaranteed. These choices shape long-term social cohesion—and political behavior.

Desperation is fertile ground for demagoguery.

In a paragraph that truly “says it all,” the author writes that what matters is how societies are designed: “how resources are allocated, who controls those allocations, and whose lives are deprioritized when scarcity is treated as inevitable.”

If and when we emerge from our Trumpian nightmare, we must correct the systemic flaws that got us here. It won’t be easy.

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No Right Without A Remedy

One of the lessons one learns in law school is that there cannot be a right if there is no available remedy.

When you think about it, that makes sense. If I have a right to do X, and you prevent me from doing X, I should be able to sue you. if there is no way to punish you for interfering with my ability to do X, the “right” is non-existent–a fiction.

Which brings me to the Minneapolis murder of Renee Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross.

A recent essay in the New York Times was co-authored by two giants of the constitutional legal community, Erwin Chemerinsky and Burt Neuborne. In that essay, they addressed the question whether Good’s family has a remedy–whether they can even bring a lawsuit against an ICE officer who shot an unarmed mother of three, muttered “Fucking bitch,” and walked away.

Had Good been shot by a state or local officer, there would be no question. For 150 years, a law known as “Section 1983” has permitted suits against those acting “under color of state law.” The Civil Rights Act of 1871 expressly made it a crime for state or local officers to violate a person’s rights. As the authors note, that act also allows “civil suits for monetary damages or injunctive relief against any state or local employees who, in the course of their work, violate the Constitution or federal laws.”

If a city adopts an ordinance that violates the First Amendment, a citizen can sue the city under Section 1983. If a police officer uses excessive force, which the Supreme Court has held violates the Fourth Amendment, the victim can sue the officer under Section 1983. Section 1983 suits account for a significant part of the workload of federal courts.

When I was Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, we routinely brought cases under Section 1983. (A related federal statute that is equally important allows the recovery of legal fees if such a lawsuit is successful–without such a provision, only wealthy people could afford to vindicate their rights.)

Section 1983 only applies to officials acting under the authority of state law. The Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd was sued under that section. But the ICE officer who killed Renee Good is a federal employee–he cannot be sued under Section 1983. And it turns out that there is no federal law authorizing suits against federal officials who violate a citizen’s constitutional rights.

In light of this, in 1971, the Supreme Court came up with a fix of its own: allowing people whose constitutional rights have been violated to sue for monetary damages without needing a federal statute.

In that case, the Court said the plaintiff could sue directly under the Fourth Amendment–and for a decade the court followed that precedent.

But after 1980, the court sharply shifted course. Not once since then has it allowed Bivens suits (as they came to be known) to go forward. In case after case, the court has precluded people whose rights have been violated from suing even when they suffered great injuries….

The Supreme Court repeatedly has said that if Congress wants to authorize such suits, it can enact a law, similar to Section 1983, that allows suits against federal officers who violate the Constitution. Such a law is important to ensure that those whose rights are violated can receive a remedy, including compensation for their injuries. Civil liability is also a crucial way of deterring wrongdoing.

There is no credible argument for continuing this state of affairs. Passage of a law mirroring Section 1983, but for federal officials, would simply level the playing field. There is no reason to exempt federal lawbreakers from rules that apply to their state and local counterparts–no reason to protect federal actors who knowingly violate the constitutional rights of citizens. (It’s important to note that a right to bring suit isn’t a right to win such lawsuits–there are legal and factual defenses available that protect officials against ill-founded accusations.)

As the law now stands, Jonathan Ross may escape liability for an action that would clearly be illegal if he was employed by  local or state police. The absence of a remedy for Good’s family is the absence of a right–in this case, a right not to be murdered by an agent of the federal government. (And it was murder, as anyone who viewed the multiple videos available could clearly see.)

The essay concludes with a call for a “Renee Good Act” that would close this gaping loophole. I can think of few things more appropriate than passing such a law and naming it after Good.

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Epistemic Breakdown

Epistemic breakdown is a fancy way of saying “destruction of a shared reality.” As a recent essay pointed out, that destruction is politically useful.

We’ve just seen an example in the administration’s propaganda about the murder of Renee Good. “Don’t believe your lying eyes”– believe the “revised” reality we offer instead. But that example is a small part of a sustained assault.

If–like so many Americans–you’ve found the administration’s attacks on science and education mystifying, the essay offers a frightening and detailed explanation.

If you can convince a large segment of the population that experts cannot be trusted, institutions are corrupt, objective truth doesn’t exist, and loyalty matters more than evidence, then power no longer depends on performance or results. It depends on identity and obedience.

Science, especially, has characteristics that the author notes are fatal to authoritarian politics: it produces falsifiable claims that can be tested, and if found to be wrong, require us to update our beliefs. Science is also institutionally distributed. No single leader controls it. Like most scholarship, it requires peer review and subsequent replication. And–importantly–research undermines what the essay calls “charismatic authority.” Scholars and data don’t demand loyalty.

Authoritarian movements cannot survive in an environment where people accept that some claims are simply false, expertise matters, and reality constrains power. So science isn’t debated, it’s delegitimized.

Anti-vaccine rhetoric is particularly effective because vaccines sit at the intersection of government authority, personal autonomy, fear of harm, complex science, and immediate bodily stakes. That makes them ideal for narrative manipulation.

Anti-vax rhetoric accomplishes several things simultaneously: it reframes public health as tyranny, converts inconvenience into persecution, turns expertise into elitism, casts personal feeling as equal to evidence, and creates an “us versus them” moral divide.

Once that framing is accepted, any future policy can be painted the same way: climate action, election integrity, court decisions, civil rights protections.

The essay makes a further point that is hard to believe, given the sheer incompetence and lunacy on display in this administration: the author claims that the lies are often “deliberately obvious.” The objective is a demonstration of loyalty; those who accept the blatant lies prove their loyalty. Those who reject or dispute them self-identify as outsiders, as people who cannot be trusted. As the author points out, this is a tactic used in cults and authoritarian regimes. “The lie becomes a bonding ritual, not a claim about reality.”

When propaganda and lies are understood in this way, it becomes clear why “fact-checking” doesn’t work.

The endless cycle of “Trump said X, but actually Y” doesn’t expose the strategy, it amplifies it. Every fact-check is free publicity. Every debunking is another news cycle. The lie has already done its work by the time anyone “corrects” it.

From a power perspective, this strategy delivers a base that cannot be peeled away by evidence, immunity from scandal or failure, a permanent grievance engine, justification for extraordinary measures, and a population conditioned to accept coercion “in defense of freedom.”

It also creates an enemy class: scientists, journalists, doctors, judges, educators. Once labeled as corrupt, they can be ignored, sidelined, or purged.

The essay provides a long list of the way the strategy has been–and is being–employed, and it will look very familiar to those of us who have been blindsided by assertions that are self-evidently bonkers: vaccines don’t work, elections have been rigged, public schools are indoctrinating our children, etc. etc.

Historians are just beginning to trace the way in which the Right has developed and pursued  this strategy over the past 50 years. (The essay includes a timeline, and it names names.) It didn’t start as a coherent plan, but it developed into one over time. As the timeline shows, the destruction of Americans’ shared reality wasn’t random or accidental–it was built systematically “by specific people making specific moves at specific times, each building on what came before.”

The author breaks the history down into segments: the blueprint, the think-tank infrastructure, the merging of religion and politics, the building of the political machine, and so on. You really need to click through and read the lengthy essay in its entirety–it explains what the author calls the “parallel reality structure” we now inhabit–built by a stolen Supreme Court and nurtured by constant norm destruction, media capture, and Project 2025.

When courts enable rather than restrain, legislatures normalize rather than confront, executives reward loyalty over law, media profits from distortion, and capital hedges instead of resists, elite-led correction becomes structurally improbable.

For U.S. democracy to survive, enough ordinary Americans need to make authoritarianism too costly.

I know it’s long, but read the whole thing.

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ICE Barbie Says We Need Papers

Several years ago, when our older grandson was ten or eleven, my husband took him to New York, where he was most impressed by the museum at Ellis Island–especially the exhibit that explained the difference between America and many of the countries immigrants were leaving: in those repressive regimes, people could be stopped on the streets and required to produce their “papers.” 

In America, such tactics were scorned. We were a free people.

That grandson is now thirty-six, and the Trump administration is waging war on the  America celebrated in that exhibit. As the Daily Beast (among other outlets) has reported, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has defended the ICE agents who are stopping people on the streets and demanding that Americans prove their citizenship. When Noem was asked if she  supported allowing federal agents to violate people’s Fourth Amendment rights–they are asking Americans for papers without reasonable suspicion–she responded that “Every single action that our ICE officers take is according to the law and following protocols that we have used for years. They are doing everything correctly.”

Noem evidently slept through her high school government class…

Nor is this throwback to “bad” countries an anomaly. There are increasing  parallels with those “unAmerican” regimes. 

Lincoln Square recently compared remarks from a 1980 speech by Iran’s Khomeni with pronouncements from our increasingly fascist regime. 

Khomeini: Iran should not just be an Islamic republic but a clerical republic. The clergy should be the ruling strata…

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.): “I am a Bible‑believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.’”

Khomeini: Revolution should come about in all the universities throughout Iran, so that the professors who are in contact with the East or the West will be purged, and so that the universities may become healthy places for the study of higher Islamic teachings.

Steve Bannon: “I’ve told President Trump … we have to go into these elite institutions, cut out all the money. That’s a bitch slap, right? They’ll start paying attention.”

Khomeini: The false teachings of the former regime should be abruptly stopped in universities throughout Iran because all the misery of the Iranian society during the reign of this father and son was due to these false teachings.

President Donald Trump: “For many years, tuition costs at colleges and universities have been exploding … while academics have been obsessed with indoctrinating America’s youth. The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left, and we will do that.”

Khomeini: If we had a proper set-up in our universities, we would have never had a university-educated intelligentsia who during Iran’s most critical period are engaged in conflict and schism among themselves and are cut off from the people and are so negligent of what happens to the people, as though they do not live in Iran [shouts of “God is great!”].

Vice President J.D. Vance: “I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”

Khomeini: Most of the deadly blows which have been delivered to this society have been due to the majority of these university-educated intellectuals who have always regarded — and still regard — themselves as being great and have always said things — and still continue to say things — which only their other intellectual friends can understand, regardless of whether the people understand them or not.

Trump: “When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.”

These parallels are especially ironic, given Trump’s sudden concern for Iranian protesters while encouraging his ICE thugs to violently attack protesters in America.

Add to that the administration’s increasing use of Nazi slogans . As the Guardian has reported, recent posts from the Labor department have included a video using the phrase: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.” a retread of the Nazi slogan: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (“one people, one realm, one leader”). Trump’s labor department has also published artwork that depicts only white male workers. “Its posts frequently cite “Americanism”, decry “globalism” and tout misleading claims that all US job gains under Trump have gone to “native born” Americans.”

They’ve gone way beyond dog whistles. As someone has told us “When people tell you who they are, believe them.”

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