As an opinion writer I try not to lean too heavily on my experience as mayor. On the one hand, that experience informs some of my views and it’s one reason I’ve been able to write this blog for so many years. But on the other hand, readers can justifiably quickly tire of a guy reminiscing about the old days 20 years ago when he ran things.
So, I try to be both circumspect in referring back to my time in office and also honest about the things I messed up on.
One of the things I mishandled, at least in a political sense, was crime.
In my time in office, which was 2003 to 2011, crime in Madison, while it varied from year to year, was generally stable or trending down. And yet I was dogged by the perception that it was rampant. So, I fought back with facts, quoting statistics right and left and comparing Madison to other cities our size.
One time I got a letter from a woman in Minneapolis accusing me of putting her daughter, who was a UW-Madison student, in terrible danger in my lawless city. So, I looked up the crime stats for the Twin Cities and shot back a letter making the case that her daughter was a heck of a lot safer in our town than she would be back home. I was like that when it came to crime: somewhat defensive, you might say.
My view was a Chamber of Commerce kind of perspective. I saw it as my job to present my city for what it truly was: among the safest cities in America.
But here’s the problem with that. Madison was, in fact, safe overall, but there were parts of the city that weren’t. Most notably that included parts of the southwest side, including the Meadowood Neighborhood. That was a quiet, leafy middle class area that was seeing increased property crime, drug dealing and even some shootings. And it didn’t help that there was an overlay of race, with the neighborhood being mostly white and the accused being mostly Black.
Tensions exploded one hot August night when there was a drug-related murder in that neighborhood. A week or so later I showed up at a pre-scheduled neighborhood meeting at St. Maria Goretti Catholic Church. The packed cafeteria was stifling in the August heat as I sat there and let the neighbors take out their frustrations on me, a liberal who lived in a virtually crime free neighborhood on the near west side.
I learned a hard lesson. Just because crime was down in the city overall, my pointing that out didn’t help these folks. They heard my (accurate) defense of Madison’s overall safety as deafness to what was going on in their neighborhood. They were right.
I bring this up now because the latest national crime statistics are out and they’re dangerous for Kamala Harris and other Democrats. They’re dangerous because they’re so good. They show that murder is down by over 11%, the biggest year-to-year decline since 1960. And violent crime overall is down by 3%.
There will be a natural inclination for Harris and others to quote these statistics and to try to take credit for crime reduction while Donald Trump and his party will make false claims about out of control lawlessness and “American carnage.” And, predictably, there will be an overlay of race in those charges too.
But here’s the thing. People worry about crime all the time, regardless of what the statistics tell us. In part that’s due to the fact that crime is over-reported, especially on television news shows. But in part it’s a justified concern because of conditions in their immediate neighborhood. All crime is local.
There’s simply no percentage in trying to argue that crime isn’t an issue. You can have all the numbers in the world on your side and still you come off as tone deaf and callous toward what people are feeling. And to talk about the “root causes” of crime, as Democrats are wont to do, just makes things worse because it sounds as if they have no sense of urgency about the problem.
Even more challenging, Trump wants to link crime to immigration. Again, statistically he’s wrong about that. Immigrants, especially undocumented migrants, actually commit fewer crimes than American citizens. But again that’s a big picture statistic. There will always be the gruesome anecdotes and, as a rule, stories are more impactful than numbers.
So this explains why Harris went down to the border last week to talk tough on immigration and it explains why she’s talking about how tough she was as a prosecutor. She needs to do that to at least blunt the immigration/crime issue that works so well for Trump. If this election is a referendum on immigration, she loses. If she can take some of the sting out of that for Trump and refocus the election on reproductive rights, she’ll win.
Liberals may not like this, but it’s the right thing to do politically. I just want Harris to win and Trump to lose.
So, the Democrats’ message needs to be clear: Crime is bad. We’re against it. And we’ll do all that we can to stop the bad guys. If that offends your liberal sensibilities, well, would you rather have four more years of Donald Trump?
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
