Crime: What Do We Do When We Don't Feel Safe?
TOPICS DISCUSSED
Shifting Policies, Data, and Attitudes about Criminal Justice
Outside of Politics: Going to the Mall
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EPISODE RESOURCES
SOTU Review: A Safer America (More to Say)
D.C. Council passes big public safety bill, reversing some reforms (Axios Washington D.C.)
San Francisco ties welfare to drug screening, boosts police powers in stunning tough-on-crime shift (LA Times)
Major crime in New York City subway up last month by almost 50% compared to January 2023 (ABC New York)
Hochul to Deploy National Guard and State Police to Combat NYC Subway Crime (The New York Times)
Oregon governor will sign bill to recriminalize drugs, expand treatment (Oregon Public Broadcasting)
Democrat states and cities reverse liberal crime policies (Axios)
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TRANSCRIPT
Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.
Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers.
Sarah [00:00:10] You're listening to Pantsuit Politics.
Beth [00:00:12] Where we take a different approach to the news.
[00:00:14] Music Interlude.
Sarah [00:00:29] Thank you for joining us. Today, we're going to be talking about crime rates, harm reduction, how blue Democratic cities are taking some approaches that seem more conservative, and how we really want to talk about effectiveness more than anything else. Then Outside of politics, we're going to head to the mall. Guys, we're going to the mall. Come with us.
Beth [00:00:46] If today's conversation about crime is interesting to you, I hope that you might listen to an episode of More to Say that I made last week. I listened to the State of the Union. Last week I pulled out some sentences that really spoke to me. One of them was the president's claim that America is safer now than when he took office. And I wanted to sort of both fact check and context check that. So if you've been on the fence about becoming a premium member or you haven't taken advantage of the two week free trial that you can get on either Patreon or Apple Podcasts subscriptions, this is a great time to do that. That episode goes really nicely with this one.
Sarah [00:01:21] Next up, we're going to talk about the crime rate.
[00:01:23] Music Interlude.
[00:01:34] Beth, we seem to be having a major conversation about crime, drug addiction, law and order across the country. You just did a More to Say on the violent crime rate, following up on some of Joe Biden's claims in the state of the Union. And the interesting part about this conversation is that in the data, the violent crime rate has gone down.
Beth [00:01:55] When President Biden said America is safer now than when he took office. I felt very skeptical about that statement, both in how you would validate it at all and in how he would take any credit for it. And so I wanted to examine it, and I was really surprised to find specifically, between 2022 and 2023, a massive decrease in the murder rate. But all violent crime is trending downward. There are a few cities that are dramatic outliers to these trends, and crime data is notoriously hard, but they are very real trends that are very much at odds with public perception.
Sarah [00:02:30] Yeah. What's so interesting about this is that when you ask people, they don't really care. Even if you tell them the data, they're like, oh, that can't be true. That must be misinformation. Sixty three percent of Americans say crime in the U.S. is very or extremely serious, and that's the highest it's been in decades. And it is true that in some cities there are rising crime rates, but maybe not violent crimes. One of those cities, though, that has an outlier as far as the violent crime rate, is Washington, D.C.. And they are joining another trend, which is these liberal cities reversing themselves with regards to crime policies. You've got a lot of new pushes to fund police, to hire more police. And so in D.C., you have the city council unanimously, with one present vote, passing this major public safety bill. They're raising the penalties for theft and gun crimes. They're bringing back drug free zones. They're creating the new crime of organized retail theft, which I think is a big part of the perception, because you see all these like TikToks and reels of people just coming in and swarming and stealing as like an organized mob. You have empowering officers. They redefined the chokehold. They are allowing the officers to use the body cam footage to write their incident reports, and you've got judges being empowered to jail suspects for longer. And this is in Washington, DC, which is a pretty liberal city.
Beth [00:03:55] Washington, D.C., and Memphis were both major outliers of those trends that we talked about before. I don't quite understand why, and I think understanding why is really important to understanding what to do about it. The cities that are seeing the most encouraging data are using data in their policing approaches. They're not just saying, let's go back to the old way. They're saying, let's reexamine our tools. So I can imagine that in a place like Washington, D.C., where the public is really feeling threatened, there is political pressure to say, well, let's go back to the old way instead of being able to kind of evolve policing techniques. I hope this isn't just a we need to be more of a harsh, punitive environment, but we'll have signs of what we've learned about better policing and more effective public safety measures.
Sarah [00:04:48] It's really been interesting to watch these roll out, because some of them do feel like we want more punishment. We do want more punitive policing in places that you would not suspect. I was really caught off by. San Francisco's new push to screen for drugs anyone receiving county welfare benefits. That's something you would hear out of Alabama or Mississippi, not San Francisco. But Mayor London Breed, who is facing a tough election in November, has done a lot of things. She's weakening the oversight from the police commission. She's allowing them to skip out a lot of the paperwork and do more with body cam footage and drones. And this comes on the heels of Governor Newsom coming in and looking through the Tenderloin district and seeing the open drug use, and sending in California's National Guard and Highway Patrol into these high drug trafficking neighborhoods. I mean, London Breed even came out and said, "I don't think harm reduction reduces the harm."
Beth [00:05:42] Yeah, I think it's hard to know even where to begin with a conversation about San Francisco and drugs-- ever. As an outside observer, it seems to me that in many of these cities, the political pressure happens when the public perceives a shift, when we are seeing things that push to a new status quo, that's when we're ready to take action. But we have for years talked about drug use in San Francisco and open drug use and the attempts to address that drug use just with harm reduction measures. And I think that's the problem. It's not that harm reduction is bad, it's that harm reduction alone is not a strategy. Harm reduction is still on the reactive side, not the proactive side. And that's my problem with a lot of crime measures that are being enacted right now, specifically what we're doing in Kentucky. If you are pouring more money into anything on the side of something bad has already happened. You're not tackling what's causing the bad thing to happen. And I think that that's the situation in San Francisco, right? Harm reduction has replaced most other strategies, and it can't stand alone because it's still reactive.
Sarah [00:06:56] Yeah, there's so much here. And let's define harm reduction really quickly. So harm reduction is instead of arresting people for drug use, there are needle exchanges, there are court redirection, there are-- sometimes I think there's two spots in New York City right now where you can just go and use safely. And this has been rolled out in many, many countries. Canada has a pretty robust harm reduction approach. Portugal is often held up as an example. And I think we kind of did what we always do in America, which is we over-corrected. I think we saw we had this conversation in 2020 that the war on drugs didn't work. It disproportionately targeted black and brown Americans. It didn't actually help our drug addiction. And I also believe that there has been a disproportionate effect of policing on communities of color. Both things can be true. So you have this conversation about race and policing and the war on drugs. You also have the influx of fentanyl into our country, which is it's just blown it up. The Economist had a great piece that was like, look, even what you're saying, let's figure out where this is coming from and try to address that. That's not going to be enough with fentanyl. just going to Mexico or to China and talking to the suppliers of the original chemicals, it's not enough. It's not even touching it.
We're going to have to talk to people who are using it. We're going to have to try to help people get treatment. So you have this accelerant inside the drug crisis. You have this conversation about policing. You have the pandemic. Particularly you look at Oregon, which is now overhauling its Measure 110. It was held up, was a voter backed initiative to decriminalize drugs. And everybody was like, this is it, this is going to be the example, this is the one we're going to look to. And now they're rolling it back. Now they're making possessing a small amount of drugs a misdemeanor crime because it felt like it accelerated the drug use and the overdose deaths. Because again, it was passing in the middle of the pandemic. You had fentanyl, and it got worse because it was built on-- any sort of harm reduction strategy is built on the foundation of being able to direct people to somewhere else to treatment centers, which we don't really have enough of in America. So it's just we don't have enough treatment. We were trying to deal with a pandemic. We were trying to deal with systemic racism and policing. You had these surges in crime, and we're trying to get at this all at once. And so I'm worried that it's blowing up in this way of like, well, none of that worked. Well, it didn't work necessarily in the ways people hoped it would, but we had about 16 different factors at play at the same time.
Beth [00:09:41] When I talk about being on the proactive side, I don't even mean just where is the fentanyl coming from? Because you're right. I don't think with any drug there is a containment strategy at this point in the United States of America. It's kind of like with guns. We're well past containment. We have lots of armed people walking around, which I do think increases that threat level in people's minds. Even people who own guns themselves and who are very vocal defenders of their rights to own guns themselves, I think that all of us knowing how many people are walking around armed everywhere, increases our sense of threat. So we're past containment with that. I'm kind of going back to our conversation about Covid last week, thinking about different stages of tackling a crisis. I think we're past containment with almost all drugs. Doesn't mean we don't do our best, but when we get on the proactive side, we have to look at why does a person use drugs? How does a person get addicted and you can't use drugs anymore. We have to start recognizing category differences. I think Oregon voters principally had in mind psychedelics when they voted to decriminalize.
Sarah [00:10:52] Or marijuana, which is like a different universe.
Beth [00:10:56] And I think Oregon voters who regret the decriminalization of drugs are not talking about psychedelics, even though psychedelics are now going to go back to being illegal, except in certain very highly regulated settings. We aren't serious about an approach to drug use if we aren't triaging, if we aren't saying right now the focus is fentanyl. And that means, yeah, we know people are out there using cocaine, but we've got to get them testing strips so they can know if their cocaine has been laced with fentanyl by a dealer. We have to triage here if we want to make a difference. And I think that's another problem with a lot of these laws. They're really blunt measures. Instead of focusing on do we really want to solve a particular problem?
Sarah [00:11:41] Well, and I just think with crime rates (if we're talking about drugs, if we're talking about theft, if we're talking about violent crime) it's like by the time you figure out what might work, the situation has changed. Like we're using a process that's so slow. Even with Oregon, by the time you have a conversation in 2018 and past something in 2019, and then you have a pandemic on your hands, that's a really difficult situation to assess or triage to begin with, much less than to have legislative responses to it. I think some of this is complicated by some conversations we were having around drug use. I think it is true that mental health is a massive component of drug use. I think it's true, statistically, that someone with a mental health challenge is more likely to be a victim of crime than to perpetuate it, but that doesn't feel true to somebody being attacked on the subway system. New York State Governor Kathy Hochul is sending State troopers and the National Guard into the subway system because the overall crime rate in the city is dropping. But the crime rate in the subway is up like 50%. And she's following up on Eric Adams approach to already sending some additional officers in there last month. It's so complicated because, well, maybe your violent crime rate is down, but you feel like your car is getting broken into every night. And so there's these very complicated interplays between like, well, maybe I don't want to punish people for being addicts, but I really don't want them breaking into my car every night looking for anything they can find, or attacking me on the subway because they're having a mental health experience. It is just such a knotted problem that's hard to detangle.
Beth [00:13:31] And the subway is another place where that status quo dynamic is interesting, because you hear from a lot of New Yorkers that they do not like having the National Guard in the subway tunnels. They do not think it's going to make a difference. I read a piece in the New York Times this morning about the subway, and the sentence that really jumped out at me was the writer was saying in describing an incident of violence on a subway car, this is just like another Tuesday. This level of behavior happens all the time. People taunting each other, words are exchanged. Maybe it looks like it's about to get violent. And this is what jumped out at me. Things that would never be tolerated on an airplane- never would be tolerated on an airplane- began on a subway car, and people barely look up from their phones because that's just the background of what this experience has been for so long. So it's almost like our perceptions are very uneven until you are personally victimized by one of those incidents. It just feels like something you accept as part of a cost of doing business in the city, or living in the city, or using the subway. But then the people for whom it has become very real demand that action. Or people who have kids on the subway all the time. Kathy Hochul has addressed that a lot. Like, if I'm bringing my stroller on the subway, I have a different perception of these events. And again, that makes tackling all this really hard because what problem are we trying to solve, for whom, and why? And what would be effective in solving the problem? All that gets left behind when we're just in the mode of, like, people don't like this and it's scary and we need to do something.
Sarah [00:15:08] It's such an embodied experience. We go to New York City a lot. I go to New York City with my kids a lot, and I have become hyper aware of keeping them way back because of all the pushing in front of trains that's been happening. And then I went to New York City with my two best guy friends who are big guys, and some guy started screaming and I thought, wow, this feels really different when I can just kind of stand behind my two male friends versus when I have three children, that I'm thinking, what am I going to do? And it's just that embodied experience of someone screaming around you. Or even we were in San Francisco last year and just the signs everywhere. Do not leave anything in your car. Do not leave anything in your car. Do not leave anything visible in your car. It just weighs on you. And so, in so many ways in American life, when we have a mismatch between the data reality and the perception, it's like a pickle and I can't quite get to it. This makes perfect sense to me. This makes perfect sense to me that our perceptions are different than sometimes the reality of crime. And it makes sense to me that these politicians are responding and saying, look, this isn't working, or it doesn't feel like it's working either way.
Beth [00:16:20] It's just hard to lead in conversations about crime. I think we get really punitive about crime for the same reason we get really punitive about parenting and what we expect of our school systems. It's what we know. People know about the punitive approach to criminality, and so that's what they expect when things are going off the rails. They think, well, we're not being harsh enough. And if we were just harsher, this would get better. But we have tried all of that and we have seen it be ineffective as well. To me it's more like, how can we get upstream? In Kentucky we have this bill that the Senate has passed that says people have to serve at least 85% of their sentences before they're eligible for parole or early release. I guess that makes everybody feel better. But again, that means we are going to spend a lot more money on the other side of the problem. Instead of preventing the problem, we're going to put all these dollars into incarcerating longer someone for a problem that has already occurred. And that does not make sense when you look at outcomes, but it feels satisfying to a public who thinks, well, if we only punish a little harder, we'll stop seeing this crime.
Sarah [00:17:34] I guess I would put myself in the camp with these progressive mayors like Eric Adams or governors like Kathy Hochul, in that I have gotten more conservative on this issue probably as I've gotten older. And I think the distinction for me is not that I think punitive is the approach. Not that I think we're going to punish people into recovery. I definitely don't believe that. I think there's a couple things for me. And I think you definitely see this in Oregon. We just don't have the social safety net right now to treat people. I have a family member trying to get treatment right now. There are no beds. And so there are people and there are addicts who are safer to themselves and other people in jail than they are on the streets. And I think that's what some of the people in these cities are encountering. And there are people who do not want treatment, even if it was available. And leaving them on the streets is dangerous to themselves and others. And so it's like not punitive, it's just containment. I'm not trying to punish people, but there are people who are dangerous. I think all the time about Brene Brown's, like, "I think everybody's doing the best they can and some people's best is dangerous and they need to be contained."
Even in Oregon the treatment was supposed to be funded by, like, a fine. An addict is not going to pay a $100 fine. They're stealing to feed their addiction, much less paying a fine. And so it's not that I don't see all the ways in which our criminal justice system is sloppy and inefficient and convoluted in so many ways with regards to addiction in particular. But just car theft and retail crime and all these things, I don't see another alternative available to us right now beyond, we have to continue. Because the surges-- and I even include property crime in this. We got a listener email a few months ago from Michelle in California, where she was just talking about like how it feels when things are stolen all the time and that she understands; she believes all these things, that we can't punish people into recovery. We can't punish people into good choices. But she doesn't feel safe. And some people are not safe to others. Maybe it's because I'm rewatching Sopranos, I don't know. But some people are dangerous. They should not be out on the streets. And so it's just hard. It's hard to figure out that balance. I have a lot of sympathy for these mayors. I have a lot of sympathy for people who live in these cities. Even as someone who visits them regularly and loves them, I do want to feel safe on the subway. I do want to feel safe on the streets of New York City, and some people are dangerous. I think that's probably the reality I've kind of come to in my old age.
Beth [00:20:30] I think some people are dangerous, but I'm not really interested in conservative or progressive on crime. I'm interested in effective. Interestingly, in this bill in Kentucky, there is a provision that I support-- even though I think a lot of this bill is terrible-- about creating a restorative justice program for children who are referred into the criminal system. Restorative justice is focused not on we don't punish or we punish a lot, it's we make amends. We find a way in the system to make amends. And we have basically none of that in our criminal justice system right now. We say the way you make amends is by being locked up, but you're not doing anything for society, and you're often not having to grapple with the reality that you've created for other people through your acts. You aren't doing anything to give back. You're just there. And if you are giving back, it's often in a way that is kind of horrifying to the rest of society. When we get into sort of unpaid labor and the conditions that people are asked to work in. So I really love that Kentucky is saying, let's look at restorative justice for younger people. I don't understand why we also wouldn't do it for older people. We have lots of statistics telling us people typically become less dangerous as they age, and I don't know why we wouldn't do it for people who are in their prime to contribute to their communities and to still be parents to their children and to stay engaged.
[00:21:58] To me, it's not, oh, we forgive everyone and we move on. It's still we ask, how do we actually take someone who has gotten into a habit of criminal activity or an addiction to a substance that is wrecking their health and their capacity to function in society? How do we work with this person so that they can truly make amends and then get on a different path? And that's complicated and it's expensive. And even before that, how do we disrupt violent crime? I really loved the San Antonio police chief talking about how a local university came to him with crime data and said, if you will analyze 911 calls, you will see the times of day and the days of the week where the most calls come in. And the police chief said he was really skeptical of this approach, but they started sending police cruisers to these areas for like 10, 15 minutes just to put their lights on and sit in the cars. Not to stop anybody or knock on doors or do anything invasive, but just to sit there with their lights on. And it disrupted violent crime in statistically significant ways. That's the kind of effort that I'm interested in seeing more of versus let's take away discretion from judges, let's make sentences longer, let's do mandatory minimums. All this stuff has failed. Let's do things that we think could be effective in disrupting the conditions that cause people to feel unsafe. I hate to feel unsafe. It's terrible. Being the victim of a crime, even a very small one, makes you feel so violated and it sticks with you. And it's hard to walk around in the world with that sense of threat. I am with you on being completely sympathetic to all of that. I just want to ask, what is an effective way to deal with that threat?
Sarah [00:23:50] I think the question I'm asking is less honestly about the victims than more the perpetrators and the people caught up in the systems. Because I loved that, I thought that was so smart when you talked about that in More to Say. What a smart approach to crime. But the first, I think, difficult question is we had a conversation in 2020 where we said police only hurt. That was the big picture. I know it was more nuanced among the experts, but the big picture conversation in this country was police only hurt. This is a conversation I had inside my house repeatedly with my husband and my oldest son, where I was defending the police and saying I don't think it's that simple. I don't think all cops are bastards. I think it is more complicated than that. You're going to call them. Guess who you're going to call? And that's what we heard from some of these neighborhoods. I'm not saying I don't want police at all. I think, honestly, that conversation is behind some of the rightward shift in communities of color in minority communities that we're seeing in polling. That's my personal opinion. Could be wrong. That's what I think. But I think the harder question that no one has quite answered, for me at least, is what about the people who don't want it? What about the people who don't want treatment? What about the people who have absolutely no interest in restorative justice and would actively harm people if given the choice? Because there are people like that. I hate it. I wish it wasn't true, but it is. And I don't think it's something fundamentally wrong with them. I just don't think our treatment or our approach to dealing with someone like that is quite there. Psychologically, spiritually, I don't know. I don't think it's quite there-- and maybe it's not available. Maybe people age out because it is an affliction of youth. And let's be honest, testosterone, because most of these people are men. And I say that as a mother of three boys who thinks about this a lot. But what do we do? What do you do when someone says, I don't want it? I don't want treatment or I don't have any interest in justice, restorative or otherwise. You let me out, I'll harm someone again. What do we do about those people? And I don't think we have an answer. And I think that's why you see this sort of drift back to, well, we're going to have to depend on some of our old tools because we don't have a better tool at our disposal yet.
Beth [00:26:13] I think a really hard subset of the question that you're asking is, where is a person suffering from addiction or suffering from some kind of mental health crisis, at a point where they no longer have agency to decide what they want or not? And when do we step in and say, (as we do in many contexts) you don't have the capacity to make this decision so we're going to make it for you, and we're going to do it with your best interest in mind. And I don't know how you assess that. I think that's so hard. Everything about dealing with addiction is brutal because here you are saying to someone, please volunteer to feel worse for a while. That's what you have to do. Every time you're trying to break addiction, you're saying you're doing something that at least in temporary bursts makes you feel good. And I am asking you to get rid of that. So not only can you not feel that particular version of good, but also you are going to physically suffer as your body finds a new equilibrium. That is a tremendously difficult ask, and I don't know what happens to a person's agency along the way that allows you to feel comfortable stepping in and making that choice for them. I think it's really hard. I feel that about homelessness as well. There is a psychological heaviness to seeing tents. We don't have a lot of this where I live, but we're seeing more of it and it is psychologically heavy. Again, our status quo is changing and that's hard on us. And you walk by it and you think-- at least I think-- I feel compelled to do something personally here for this human. I wish somebody somewhere would fix it. That's the worst thing about all of this, right? You just as a citizen trying to go about your life, you're like, somebody, somewhere should fix it. And nobody can just wave a wand and fix it. So the psychological heaviness of homelessness is really difficult. What do you do if you truly have a person who says they prefer to live this way? Even assuming you have all the resources available, you have shelters, you have transitional housing, you have affordable housing in your community-- not that any of us are there or any of that, but let's assume we are there.
Sarah [00:28:33] If you have that, please send us an email.
Beth [00:28:36] Yeah, let's assume we are there. There will still be some people, mostly because of trauma and mental health conditions, who will say, I want to live this way. I bring that up because in parallel to your question, I would just say, yeah, there are some people who will do violence no matter what. Yeah, there are some people who have no interest in making amends. There are some people who have no interest in treatment. There are some people who would prefer to live in a tent on the street. I think in all of those groups, we are talking about a very small percentage of the total problem, and I think we can address the total problem in lots of effective ways that never get us to 100%, but that are better than returning to ways that have clearly failed in the past.
Sarah [00:29:29] The New York Times did this incredible piece a few weeks ago about homelessness and the premise of the piece was, we don't let the homeless speak. We think we know what's best for them, but we don't let them tell us what's going on. And they broke it down. It was like a home is not someone's couch. And they talked about people living in someone else's home. A home is not a car. We talked about how many Americans are living in their cars, which is something we're trying to criminalize in the state of Kentucky right now. We talked about a home is not a tent. Home is not a shelter. And they really elevated all these people's voices in reading it. And I thought, man, I would not want to listen to Joe Biden tell me how America's on the mend if I were these people. And Donald Trump would really appeal to me when he would say America is broken because they are living in the brokenness of America, where drug addiction is rampant, where they are preyed on by crime, but also it is a breeding ground. Criminals know where to go in these tent cities. So they are also homeless, but they are criminals and they are preying on other homeless people who are also struggling with addiction. Like I said, it's like this Gordian knot.
Beth [00:30:45] And some of them got there because they served their country, which is another piece of it.
Sarah [00:30:49] Absolutely. And there's no affordable housing anywhere. Paducah, New York City, anywhere. And I keep thinking about it. I keep thinking about the faces in these photos and the voices that were like, it's not working. It's broken. And I think some of what those of us not truly swept up in that system, but seeing the overflow in our lives and feeling the overflow of that brokenness is what's showing up in these statistics. Because in some ways I want to say, well, yeah, we want someone to fix it because that's the government's job, right? That's the most basic government job: safety, law and order. That's the most basic government job. But I think the other uniquely American part of this, and maybe it's because we're reading Democracy in America, is that we don't actually give a lot of power in America to do what you're saying, where we'll say we have to help you against your will. We really lack our individual freedom in this country- a lot. We wanted to free Britney even though we can see on Britney's Instagram that Britney is not well. Because the idea that you would restrict my individual freedom is so [inaudible]. Like, we can't do it. And so I think that's the other part of this. There's just so many pieces where you can see mayors, governors, citizens, all of us struggling with, like, but what do we do? We don't have great drug treatment. We don't have enough drug treatment. We don't have enough affordable housing. But we also don't want tent cities where crime can proliferate. We don't really want more people in prison, but some people belong in person. It's a mess. And I think, honestly, it is a fertile ground for a message like Donald Trump's to say it's a disaster out there, isn't it? But it's not the kind of disaster he's describing. And it's certainly not one that he is qualified to fix. But it is hard to speak to, I think, in authentic ways without sort of sounding like a Pollyanna. Which just reading that New York Times piece, there were parts of the state of Union where I thought if I was one of these people living in a motel, I would be like, shut the hell up. What are you even talking about?
Beth [00:33:10] We don't want to restrict people's freedom until we've decided that they've made a mistake, and then we're very comfortable taking all freedom and dignity away from them and throwing them away forever. And that's what I'm against. And I think we do have to proceed very carefully in respecting people's agency, as they are part of a tent city as they are dealing with addiction. I think it's hard. I probably would go farther than we're going right now in declaring that people have lost their capacity to make these decisions, appointing guardians for them, getting them into systems. But, yes, those systems are rife with abuse. And so it is really, really difficult. I want to say something about what you said about police because I agree that we are suffering from the conversations that I had that I was part of in 2020. I think the worst place we're suffering from that is in people leaving their profession, much like teaching. It's like politics. Every place where we have trained our focus in a really critical way, we have been critical in a way that is largely ineffective as to the system, and we have seen that people have abandoned the system. No one wants to hang around and fix something that society has declared irreversibly broken. And that's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately in trying to assess my levels of critique of different things. How do I say I don't think this really works, or I don't think this is effective, or this seems like the wrong path to me without writing it off forever as broken? Even with this Kentucky bill, I think a lot of it is really objectionable. But I'm trying to say, here are the pieces that I really see some good in, because that to me is the only way forward. But we need people to be police officers and a lot of the cities that are struggling here, a lot of these blue cities are really struggling to recruit and retain police officers. There are patterns in all of this that I think data will help us with. But the way we talk about it is going to have to shift if we want to be able to act on what that data tells us might be useful.
Sarah [00:35:28] And I think that's what I would say. We're in the middle of a presidential year, and this is going to be a matter of concern because a big piece of this, particularly in New York City and San Francisco, some other places, is a surge of migrants. And so it's all caught up in a conversation around immigration. As if we needed another combustible subject to throw on this pile. I do want to be honest with people and authentic and say, like, I see what you're talking about. I don't want to gaslight people who are concerned about crime or even immigration or any of these things. Because I think we did some of that in the middle of the pandemic, probably because of the pandemic. There was some complete disregard for people's concerns around some of the conversations happening in 2020. And I think about that a lot with school closures. We need to own that we got that wrong. We just need to be honest about it. And so I do want to be honest with people and say I see it, I feel it. You're right. But I don't want to lean into an approach that just has a complete absence of care. I understand the appeal of some of Donald Trump's rhetoric, just the complete and total absence of any articulation of care for your fellow citizens. Just this like white hat. As long as the people who you like have the violence at their disposal, then you'll be okay. That's terrifying to me. That's not going to fix anything. And so some of these approaches may be the best place for them to come from is a blue city. The best places to come from a London Breed or Kathy Hochul, who says, "I get it. And we do have to do something about this, but we have to be careful." And not all these approaches are going to be careful. Let's not fool ourselves. Some of them are going to be reactionary.
Beth [00:37:35] Part of the reason I felt skeptical about the state of the Union line is because crime is very localized, and what works to effectively prevent and respond to crime is very localized. So I think it absolutely should come from cities and states. And I think it is really important for the Democratic Party to say loudly on a national scale. So I've said that the effective work happens locally. The messaging work happens nationally for the most part, and I think it is important for Democrats on a national scale to say this matters. And, yes, even as the murder rate has fallen, if your loved one was murdered, you don't care. You don't care about the trend. You care about the awful thing that happened in your life. And of course you do and you should. It's difficult for me to verbalize this blend of reality and perception and data and to respond to it. And I do not envy the policymakers, the mayors, the local leadership, the police chiefs who have to try to do that, to try to say to communities, hey, we see that what we're doing is working, but it is not 100%. And the people who are still victims of crime and the people who are still perpetrating crimes suffer tremendously because we can't get to 100% on this.
Sarah [00:38:46] Well in the spirit of care and hopefulness and not leaning into that cynicism, the thing that I look to-- because some of these solutions are going to be long term generational investments. And I heard a mental health expert speak to the bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Now, this was touted as gun control legislation, but it also invested $10 billion to expand access to mental health services nationwide. Ten billion is going to change things. And I've seen it already in the expansion of like the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If you want to find treatment for a family member, there are much easier ways to do it than there were just five years ago. There are national resources. You're already starting to see this build and trickle out, but it just takes time. You don't put up a rehab facility overnight. You don't increase the bed capacity in your community in a month or two. And I do think that that's happening. I even had a person in my life who teaches social work talk about like the expansion of social workers, that there are places where there's additional training and people are coming into very important professions that will change these things. And I have to put my faith there, that long term some of this investment in building is happening because of the enormous suffering that so many families have experienced, either because of the crime rate or because of the fentanyl epidemic or whatever the case may be. I don't think it's the reality that we ignore things anymore. It's almost that we see so much we're overwhelmed. But I know that there are people out there in our audience doing that good work right now.
Beth [00:40:25] There's so much good work happening. And, for me, the way to approach law, order, crime and punishment is to accept the people and not accept the behaviors. Not accept the problem that we just have to live with this forever. But to accept that we do have to live with the people. We talked when we had our last conversation about immigration, about how many experts say the way to curb illegal immigration is to expand legal immigration. Do not come is not a message that works. People are going to come. People are going to want to immigrate to America. So we have to have a better system for them to do that legally. I think that's true about homelessness. You can say, I don't want to see the tents. Okay, but those people exist. So where do we want them to go? You can say, I don't want this place used for a shelter when it's extremely cold outside. Fine. Where are people going to go to be safe? We have to have an answer to that. We have to accept the people. We don't have to accept all of the problems that come with those people or all of their behaviors. We do have to get to those. But we have to look around at each other and believe that we are capable of addressing these issues and believe that people are capable of redemption, and that programs like mental health services and transitional services work. And I maintain that belief and see lots of evidence to support my continued belief.
Sarah [00:41:47] Well, I always find a lot of hope when you guys message us about a conversation like this, about what you're doing in your lives or what you're doing in your community. So we look forward to hearing from all of you about this very difficult and ongoing conversation in America.
[00:42:01] Music Interlude.
[00:42:11] Beth, I heard you went to the mall this weekend.
Beth [00:42:14] My 13-year-old daughter's violin ensemble played a pop up concert at the mall. They stood in front of what used to be a Sears and played surprisingly good acoustics at. But it meant that my family was hanging out before, while Jane and her peers were warming up.
[00:42:35] And then after for a while, we had such a good time. It was really fun to be at the mall. I'm never at the mall. I'm never at the mall because there are no stores at the mall that are for me anymore. I don't know if that's a function of age or retail trends, but the mall is like Hot Topic and Forever 21 and places that are not for me. But I really enjoyed being there and seeing a diversity of our community that I don't see very often. All ages, lots of different socioeconomic status. I heard some different languages being spoken. I enjoyed just being out and seeing people. I enjoyed walking around with my kids and my husband. We just had a really good time and I thought, man, I kind of miss malls being a bigger part of life than they are now for me.
Sarah [00:43:24] That's so funny. We go to the mall a lot-- I mean, not a lot, I guess a regular amount. I go to the mall because I love Dillard's. I like to try clothes on. I don't want to order everything off the internet. I actually gave up online shopping for lent and have realized that I don't really miss it. I really want to try the pair of pants on. It's just that's the reality of what it means to be me at 42. So I go to Dillard's a lot. We have a Home Goods. We go to Home Goods a lot. We have a couple Mexican restaurants that are based in our mall. We like to go eat there. So we go to the mall semi-regularly, and the kids like to go and hang out with their friends or whatever we used to do in the 90s, walk around the mall. My middle child has done that a couple times recently. But I like it. We need more third places where you can just be especially if it's cold and you can't be outside. We used to go to the mall all the time too because there was a playground at the mall, an indoor playground, so you got to have that when you have a young kid. So it's shifted a lot. They're still way, way more empty spots in our mall than there were when I was growing up. But I don't know if it's because of the size of my town. We don't have as many like shopping centers. We do have one across the street that's like just a strip mall and not necessarily like a mall you can walk around in, but I still feel attached to our mall, it was built the year I was born. So it's as old as I am.
Beth [00:44:45] Well, those places that you mentioned, I also really like to go to a Dillard's and that is where I find clothes that fit my 13 year old better than anywhere else. So we go to Dillard's somewhat frequently. But all of those places are being built in sort of the outdoor mall model where it's not that there's not a common space, it's just you go outside and then into the next place through its own door. And that's sort of what I enjoyed about being in a true indoor mall, that there was just a lot of space to walk around and bump into people that you might know and say hello and see a pop up violin concert or whatever. See the Easter Bunny set up going up. I just feel a longing for more places where I bump into people like that, that aren't the grocery store. I don't know, I guess I'm just hopeful for a mall resurgence.
Sarah [00:45:39] Well, I hear Gen Z likes the mall. This is what I've read in some of my trend emails.
Beth [00:45:44] That's hopeful. That's good.
Sarah [00:45:45] But we also have mall walkers. I was a mall walker for a while when I was pregnant. I would go walk the mall [inaudible] early before all the stores open-- if you have a special mall walker. I do. My dad walks the mall. Listen, nothing wrong with a good mall. There just isn't anything wrong with a good mall.
Beth [00:45:59] We need places to be. It's really fun to get a pretzel at the mall. It's more tangible. I had an experience with Ellen this weekend. So Ellen is my almost nine year old, and she just wants to be on a screen all the time. We're fighting that battle like lots of other parents. Yesterday I was making a big dinner, and Ellen really enjoys cooking with me when I can get her focused on it. So I just was persistent. I kept losing her. She would wander away and 10 minutes or so would go by and I would find her with a screen and I would say, "Hey, I need my sous chef back, come back in." And when we really were into it, at one point, she looked at me and she said, "This is so much more fun than being on my iPad." And I said, "I know because we are built to smell and touch and taste and hear and interact with each other." And I think that's what it was that really called out to me about the mall. It was fun to just be out in a space, physically touching clothes, trying things on (none of that was for me, but for the kids) and eating in a food court instead of getting takeout and taking it home. Whatever. It just made me happy to be among people.
Sarah [00:47:12] We love to be among all of you every week. So thank you for joining us for another episode of Pantsuit Politics. If you found this conversation helpful or interesting, we hope that you'll share it with a friend. And if you want to hear more details about crime rates around the country, make sure and check out this episode of More to Say that she made for our premium community last week. We will be back in your ears on Friday, and until then, keep it nuanced y'all.
[00:47:33] Music Interlude
Sarah: Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.
Beth: Alise Napp is our managing director. Maggie Penton is our director of Community Engagement.
Sarah: Xander Singh is the composer of our theme music with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.
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Executive Producers: Martha Bronitsky. Ali Edwards. Janice Elliott. Sarah Greenup. Julie Haller. Tiffany Hasler. Emily Holladay. Katie Johnson. Katina Zuganelis Kasling. Barry Kaufman. Katherine Vollmer. Laurie LaDow. Lily McClure. Linda Daniel. The Pentons. Tracey Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katie Stigers. Karin True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Villeli. Amy Whited. Emily Helen Olson. Lee Chaix McDonough. Morgan McHugh. Jen Ross. Sabrina Drago. Becca Dorval. Christina Quartararo. Shannon Frawley. Jessica Whitehead. Samantha Chalmers. Crystal Kemp. The Lebo Family. The Adair Family.
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