What Will Kansas City Learn From Chicago Crime Wave Politics?!?

On this beautiful Easter morning we are blessed with insight, data, research and remarkably nuanced perspective from one of the foremost criminologists working in the Kansas City.

Dr. Ernest Evans has been a longtime friend of the blog and today he shares remarkable insight on historic crime trends and how they apply to elections on our hometown and across the nation. 

Here's the word . . .  

The Potency of the Crime Issue: Lessons from Recent Elections in KCMO and Chicago

      The US has been in the midst of a major crime surge since the last few months of 2019.  According to FBI statistics, homicides in the US declined 6% in the first six months of 2019, but they rose 6% in the last six months of 2019.  In 2020 the US witnessed a record-breaking 30% increase in the number of homicides—the previous one year record was a 13% increase in 1968.  In 2021 homicides increased another 5%;  we do not have final figures for 2022 but it appears that homicide totals declined slightly in that year—but the number of homicides in 2022 was still well above the totals in 2019.

    With such a large increase in violence in recent years it is not surprising that polls and focus groups show that crime is one of the most important issues to American voters.  The recent mayor's election in Kansas City, Missouri showed the potency of the crime issue.  In that race the incumbent mayor, Quinton Lucas, defeated Clay Chastain by a margin of 81.5% to 18.5%.  On the surface, that looks like a landslide, but it must be remembered that in the 2019 primary election for mayor Clay Chastain got a little less than one percent of the vote.

    Clearly, a lot of voters used Chastain's candidacy as an opportunity for a "protest vote" against Mayor Lucas.  And, surveys have indicated that one of the things voters are most unhappy with Mayor Lucas about is the city's crime situation.  Lucas was elected in 2019 on a pledge to get homicides below 100 a year.  He has not fulfilled this pledge:  In 2019 there were 151 homicides, in 2020 there were 179, in 2021 there were 157 and in 2022 there were 169.  So far in 2023 there have been 45 homicides compared to 36 at this time in 2022.

    In fairness to Mayor Lucas the national crime surge that I mentioned at the beginning of this article was just beginning when he took office.   The ongoing national crime surge in a national phenomenon, there is only a limited amount states and localities can do to lower their crime rates.  Still, there are clearly a lot of people in KCMO who are unhappy with the way the mayor is handling the crime issue.

     Now, before all of my Republican friends start gleefully contemplating the big gains that they hope the crime surge will yield for them in elections in the near future; the recent mayor's race in Chicago imposes a note of caution about the electoral impact of the crime issue.  Polls showed that in the Chicago election crime was the big issue.  And, early polls indicated that Paul Vallas, who was running on a law and order platform, was the likely winner.  But in the end, progressive Democrat Brandon Johnson won the election.

    If crime was the big issue, how did Johnson win?  The answer, I think, is that Vallas ran the sort of campaign that would have been effective in the 1970's and 1980's but which is not effective today.  Specifically, Vallas put a lot of emphasis on sending people to jail.  The "lock 'em up and throw away the key" slogan was effective in the 1970's and 1980's but it is a lot less effective today.  We have had a huge growth in our prison population since 1980:  In 1980 we had half a million people in prison—now we have over two million.  Right now, the US has a higher percentage of its population in prison than the Soviet Union did under Communism and South Africa did under apartheid.  Yet this "lock "em up" strategy did not prevent the massive homicide increase in the US in 2020.

    The declining electoral appeal of the "lock 'em up" strategy made many voters in Chicago sympathetic to Johnson's approach to crime—which emphasized community policing, more resources for mental health, and more programs for at risk youth.  Plus, in the course of the campaign Johnson disavowed his earlier support for the "Defund the Police" movement.

    In sum, what the elections in these two cities show is that crime is an issue very much on the minds of the voters, but growing sophistication on the part of the electorate on what does and does not work in fighting crime means that this issue is electorally effective only if the proper sort of solutions are offered.

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