Our moral obligation to prevent crime
Bleeding heart liberals should be really upset about murder
We’re taking The Argument to San Francisco! On May 13, Kelsey Piper and Jerusalem Demsas are debating a question that feels unavoidable right now: Is AI actually changing how science gets done, or are we in the middle of a very expensive illusion? Jerusalem is bullish; Kelsey is skeptical.
And you won’t just be watching. You’ll get to join in on the argument, too.
Join us May 13 at The Chapel from 7 to 10 p.m. Come argue with us! RSVP here.
Welcome back to The Argument’s poll series, where we survey Americans on the issues everyone’s fighting about. Our full crosstabs are available below the paywall at the end of this post. Our last surveys have asked about the economy, gender issues, ICE, education and parenting, the lingering politics of COVID-19, immigration, AI, and free speech. The Argument’s full methodology can be read here.
Crime is a social justice issue.
In a typical year, low-income Americans are almost twice as likely to be assaulted as wealthy Americans; The “highest vulnerability” counties — the most poor, disabled, and marginalized ones — had 4.4 times the homicide rates as the least vulnerable counties in 2020. Property crime disproportionately affects poor people, both because they disproportionately live in poor neighborhoods and because having your package stolen is a minor inconvenience if you’re rich and a potentially catastrophic one if you’re poor.
If you own a car, the nearest pharmacy to you being shut down amid a spike in retail theft is only a minor inconvenience;1 if you are disabled, poor, or otherwise do not have a car, it can be life-altering.
I have always considered it an important liberal principle that we are accountable not just for what we do, but for what we enable by failing to condemn it or prevent it: I notice liberals and progressives tend to take this for granted when it comes to foreign policy but often fail to think about what it means at home. It means that passively allowing high homicide rates makes our government complicit in the murders of hundreds of its residents.
Whether liberals’ apathy toward crime grew from taking the path of least resistance amid criticisms of the police, a mistaken belief that it is more progressive not to enforce the law, or a tragically wrongheaded idea that a different approach to violence reduction would work better, it did emerge, and it did become commonplace. That did not need to happen, and it must never happen again.
The process of adequately addressing violence involves hiring cops, making rival and often dysfunctional government departments work together, and approaching people believed to be at high risk of committing violent acts to make it very clear that they will be caught and sent to jail if they shoot at people — or even just illegally carry a gun. Baltimore has massively improved its murder clearance rates from around 40% in 2020 to 68% in 2024 — of course that significantly changes the calculus for would-be murderers.
This is delivering an essential public service to communities that are economically, politically, and socially marginalized. Failing to provide those communities with the service of policing is abandoning our fellow Americans to horrible deaths — just as surely as a refusal to provide them with medical care would be, just as surely as a refusal to provide them with any food would be.
In The Argument‘s most recent poll, fielded April 20 to 23, 2026, we asked 1,516 registered voters about crime and public safety issues. The poll revealed that many Americans who disapprove of Trump are still unwilling to cross the aisle and vote for Democrats. How much could differing views on crime explain that reluctance?
A plurality in our poll “believe that neither society, courts, nor the criminal justice system as a whole deal with criminals harshly enough,” wrote my colleague Lakshya Jain, The Argument‘s director of political data. Only 15% of voters said they think the courts are too harsh; 43% said they’re not harsh enough.
Lakshya looked into the Republican voters who disapproved of Trump but leaned toward voting for Republicans in 2026 and found that this group of voters prefers Republicans 47% to 1% on crime, one of the most lopsided margins I’ve ever seen in a poll. (The other half said they trust neither party or were unsure.)
Matt Yglesias has observed that Democrats are the “party of people with humane instincts.” They are less trusted than Republicans on any issue that involves the use of violence while being more trusted on issues like health care and (historically) education, where it’s an advantage to be perceived as caring and compassionate.
If you ask “Do we deal with criminals harshly enough?” voters are never going to trust Democrats to be the side saying “deal more harshly.” And, predictably, in our poll on that question, Trump voters were far more likely than Harris voters, 62% versus 27%, to say that society doesn’t deal with criminals harshly enough.
But I actually think that the principled liberal position on crime and public order does not require a departure from the general Democratic ethos of being humane, compassionate, and concerned for the marginalized. And, indeed, I think taking that ethos seriously requires preventing crime as much as it requires providing education and health care.
The liberal case for taking public safety seriously
A logical consequence of being serious about the lives and experiences of others is being really serious about protecting them from violence.
In 2019 to 2021, Baltimore averaged about 336 homicides a year. Over 80% of the victims were Black men. One analysis found that, by age 24, the average Black man in Baltimore would have lost three friends or family members to homicide.
In 2025, the city recorded 133 homicides.
If we were able to replicate today’s public safety environment in 2019, I think it’s a fair estimate that about 600 people would be alive in Baltimore who are instead dead because we failed to adequately address violence. And that’s in one city.
The Council on Criminal Justice’s survey of 35 cities found an average 21% drop in homicides in 2025. Across the whole country, about 12,000 fewer people were murdered in 2024 and 2025 than in 2020 and 2021.
Not all of that difference is driven by policy decisions. Some cities that have seen huge crime declines have adopted policy approaches similar to Baltimore’s, but crime seems to be falling everywhere.
For a while, it appeared to just be receding from the 2020 spike, but it has kept falling past the previous baseline. Without claiming that policy is driving the whole decline, it’s worth careful study of the policies in cities seeing faster-than-national decline — and worth keeping in mind the overwhelming moral urgency of sustaining these declines.
There’s a decent road map coming together for Democrats on addressing crime. I’ve seen people increasingly discussing the impressive success of fare gates in San Francisco and targeted violence reduction programs in Philadelphia and Baltimore. And our polling found that voters have lots of liberal beliefs about crime, including that poverty is among its main drivers and that better education and job training are good ways to address its root causes. They just also expect the criminal justice system to actually deliver public safety. With violence in fact dropping, there’s reason to be optimistic.
But while we have a plan for addressing crime — focused violence reduction programs, improved enforcement, more police on the street — and tools like fare gates to address vandalism, my prediction is that trust will take much longer to grow than homicides take to fall. And part of that is because of a failure to articulate that this matters, to talk about it with the same moral gravity that we bring to conversations about other preventable deaths of institutional neglect.
Rich people choose to live in neighborhoods where the streetlights are not smashed and vandalized, where trash is not dumped in heaps in the highway median to blow around on the road endangering cars, where people do not scream threats at them or throw junk at them as they cross the street.
But there do not need to be any neighborhoods where this is true. A safe, clean environment should not be a privilege for the ultra-wealthy; it is the basic obligation of our society to provide it to everybody.
Whenever someone argues about taking crime seriously, someone else will do white collar or wage theft whataboutism. We should, of course, go after fraudsters, thieving employers, and white collar criminals, but we will not achieve a safe, clean environment by only going after fraudsters, thieving employers, and white collar criminals. We will have to enforce the laws against illegal dumping, vandalism, theft, and random mistreatment of strangers on the street.
In doing so, we create for poor and marginalized Americans the America that rich Americans already live in — one where their built environment is safe for children to play in, one where they can order packages to their home and not expect them to be stolen, one where they do not need to fear violence.2
I found it kind of odd, reading through our poll results, how many voters combined views that are seemingly contradictory. For instance, 54% of voters who favored the death penalty for “serious crimes” agreed that “crime is mostly caused by poverty or desperation.” And 72% of such voters believed more job training and education would be effective at reducing crime.
Most people think both that society should be harsher on criminals and also that felons should be eligible for welfare either immediately or after a period of time! But having thought about it more, I think this grab bag of views only seems to contradict itself because it contains the views currently associated with two different political coalitions.
Violent crime, destruction, and theft are bad. They wrong people and constitute an injustice, and a society cannot be fair, free, or humane while people’s lives are sculpted around avoiding crime victimization.
That doesn’t mean we have to adopt some view where criminals are irredeemable monsters unlike everyone else — in fact, criminals are mostly people who change their behavior in response to incentives like the rest of us. And we owe it to them, among others, to create incentives to lead safe lives instead of violent ones.
Recommended reading:
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Every time I bring this up, some people point out that we don’t know for sure that these closures had to do with the spike in retail theft! The retail lobby has an agenda, and CEOs would rather blame closures on theft than on business decisions. And yet, I remain convinced that the fact that the Walgreens near me had several full-time uniformed security officers after a bunch of incidents is related to the fact that it subsequently was unprofitable and shut down. Research suggests that, indeed, high levels of property crime are related to higher levels of business failure and mobility. A one-standard-deviation increase in property crime in an area reduces business visits by 12%, and robberies raise prices.
Actually, I’ll go further: Because I am a bleeding-heart, humanitarian liberal, I feel strongly that we should, in fact, be tough on crime even when it’s committed in prisons. Our prisons are violent places. They don’t have to be, and Democrats should work to make them less so — as part of a general belief that people deserve not to be victims of crime, including people who are themselves in prison.
Unfortunately, the way that America has typically gotten “tougher on crime” has involved increasing sentence lengths rather than murder clearance rates, and making our prisons violent torture dungeons with rotten food rather than safe, well-provisioned rehabilitative centers.
We absolutely need to make our policing system much more reliable — people who commit violent crimes and theft should know the probability they’ll be caught is extremely high rather than minuscule.
But in our tack back to common sense after the excesses of the defund movement, we can’t forget the core humanitarian impulses behind that reformist energy. We need to make our police more professional and trustworthy, and our prisons much, much more humane, or our pursuit of justice will just become more violence.
The core problem that afflicted, and continues to afflict some liberal and leftist tastemakers is an insistence that we should tolerate disorder. When people talk about crime, it isn't crime per se -- it's felt and perceived disorder, and they want less of it. Cities are perceived as more dangerous than suburbs because disorder is more visible there, and recently the standard left-liberal response was to flash up a chart showing rural and suburban towns with higher per-capita crime rates. It completely misses what people actually care about. It's about the explicit experience of public space.
So the aim should not be to reduce crime. It should be to reduce disorder. Crime is a narrow formalization of a broader phenomenon, and optimizing on the formalization while the phenomenon gets worse is how you get falling homicide rates coupled with net lower public transit ridership.
"Victimless crime" was and is a category error. If we choose to formally tolerate open drug use, obvious addiction, and untreated psychosis on the streets, then we generate plenty of victims who now reorganize their daily lives around the legalized disorder. And disproportionately, those victims are poor people who can't move away from it.