Today, Explained - City Limits: Crime vibes

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

Americans aren’t going downtown like they used to, and a lot of them say it’s because they don’t feel safe there. Today, Explained got the data to untangle crime facts from crime feelings. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette with help from Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Amanda Lewellyn, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Additional help from Patrick Smith and Vivian McCall. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Over the past several weeks, Today Explained has been going downtown. Downtown Seattle. Drug activity, like when spring and summer, you know, when they hang out all night, it's worse. Downtown Chicago. Now it just happens anywhere, any time of day. Morning, night, like it's just way worse. Philadelphia. A lot more violence, more homeless people. And New York City.

I see a lot of people just going and grabbing people's bags, hitting them. It's like they don't care. One through line in all these cities? Crime. The number one barrier that we heard from people was that fear of crime was what was preventing them from going downtown, particularly within the Central Business District itself and on their commutes there. Americans are scared of their downtowns. But should they be?

We're going to find out today in the penultimate episode of our City Limits series. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs? And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino.

Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go downtown. Today explained Sean Ramos' room. We didn't just randomly decide to hit downtown Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City. We went there because we knew we'd have some data.

I'm Hannah Levin. I'm a senior research associate at the Brookings Institution. Hannah's team interviewed small business owners, employers, and residents to figure out why people have been so reluctant to start going downtown again. So I'm part of a team of researchers that is looking at the future of cities through the lens of the health of their downtown business districts. They picked NYC, Philly, Chicago, and Seattle because their downtowns have been particularly slow to recover.

I think our hypothesis was pretty much what most people have been saying, that sort of the changing nature of work with the ability for remote work and flexibility was kind of going to be the main barrier that was preventing downtown recovery. But to their surprise, they didn't hear about remote work. They heard about fear. Nothing's off limits anymore. You have some mentalities who do not believe that. Like, no, not here, downtown. I'm like, yes, right here, it can occur. And it has occurred. People spoke a lot about fears of, you know, random acts of violence downtown, not wanting to go to their work because they didn't feel safe on their way getting there, which is really quite a shift in sort of what we think about

and what we've seen in the history of downtowns, which have relatively been perceived as pretty safe, welcoming for tourists and kind of more exclusive places for office workers. Now these same office workers are sort of saying we don't feel safe going there anymore. So first we started looking at national crime trends, particularly just since 2019, just because this is a post-pandemic phenomenon that we're seeing. And what we see across the country is that between 2019 and 2020, there was a sharp and dramatic increase in murders that occurred nationwide. But when you dive deeper in, and I did a different analysis for this and look at the spatial distribution of where those murders occurred within cities, there wasn't a widespread dispersal

of murders occurring in places that they hadn't previously. So what we saw is an intensification of murders in places that already had that challenge rather than a widespread dispersal across cities. That was between 2019 and 2020. Since then, murders have increased at a slower pace and are starting to kind of level off to where they were. But property crime is increasing significantly across the country, driven primarily by burglaries, car thefts. Auto thefts in Chicago were up 55 percent in 2022 compared to 2021, making Chicago the top city for car thefts and carjackings last year.

And we saw those same trends within our four cities. So we did see that violent crime and property crime were going up. But when you look at downtowns, they account for an incredibly small share of that increase. So what we found was that there was a mismatch between people's perception of where crime occurred and where it was actually occurring. Okay, this feels important. We're seeing certain kinds of crime trending upwards nationally. What did you find in the downtowns you looked at? Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, Nueva York. So let's start with property crimes. So these are things like burglaries, car thefts, etc.

So when we're looking at the four cities and we look at them citywide, we see that property crime is up pretty significantly in all four of the cities. That being said, the share of property crime that is occurring downtown has remained relatively stable or even declined in a few places. So while the raw numbers are up, we are seeing the share remain fairly stable. So what this actually looks like is if you think about Chicago in 2019, about 19% of all citywide property crimes were occurring downtown. In 2022, that number was still 19%. Okay. What about violent crime, which I'm sure has even more of an impact on people's perception of crime? So we're seeing some nuance in the cities here. When we look at

citywide violent crime trends, we see that it is up. The amount that it is up varies by the city. So in Philadelphia, for instance, there's been a 1% increase in violent crime citywide. In New York City, there's been a 26% increase. So that's looking at the citywide level. If we're looking at downtown specifically, we see a similar trend in that the share of violent crimes occurring downtown is either stable or declining. Where the nuance comes in, though, is when you're starting from a relatively low baseline of violent crime occurring downtown, it can almost feel like a much larger trend. So if we take New York City, New York City had the lowest share of violent crime occurring downtown, it can almost feel like a much larger trend. So if we take New York City, New York City had the lowest share of violent crime occurring downtown out of all four of our cities in both 2019 and 2022. So in 2019, 8% of all New York

City violent crime occurred downtown. In 2022, that jumped to 10%. That increase from 8% to 10% isn't actually a huge increase, but it can feel that way because we're starting from such a low baseline. Okay, so it sounds like there is a small but noticeable shift here in violent crime, and it's shifting upwards. Is that what's driving the sort of vibe shift we're seeing in downtowns, at least in New York City, but maybe these other cities we're talking about too. I think that's part of it. But another crucial thing is that people aren't necessarily thinking about citywide statistics when they are thinking about how they want to feel safe.

So it doesn't necessarily matter if the numbers tell us that the share of crime downtown hasn't increased much. People are hearing about people getting shot. People are talking to their friends. They are not feeling safe. And another thing that's important to note is that the crimes that happen downtown, whether they are more statistically rare than crimes that happen in other parts of the city, get outsized media attention, a lot more coverage than crimes that may be occurring more often in neighborhoods that are lower income or historically disinvested. A Center City store left in shambles after a group of teens ransacked the place. Tuesday night, I'm Shari Williams alongside Gray Hall.

The big story on Action News is the ongoing safety concerns in Center City. So what's going on here, Hannah? Why does it feel to people like downtown American cities are more dangerous than they are. Yeah. I think it's because we're coming out of the pandemic and we're seeing the nature of how people use downtown districts shift. So previously, they were pretty much single-use office districts. People come from nine to five and then they leave or they go and get a drink after work and they hang around and frequent the small businesses there. Now people aren't coming into the office as much. There's less activity on the street. There's less foot

traffic and the things that make people feel safe are no longer there. Another thing that we heard reflected in our interviews was often a conflation between fears of crime and homelessness. So a lot of people had noticed an uptick in unsheltered homelessness in the downtown business district, which in some places homelessness has increased sharply, particularly in places like Seattle. In the downtown business district, in some places it hasn't. But across the board, the visibility of unsheltered homelessness has increased in downtown because there's less street activity. There's a lot of people out there with mental health issues, homelessness, and it's a real problem. They need to really do something about it and it's yeah yeah

it's hard to get people to eat in streeteries when there's just like a homeless guy sitting on the van in front of you so people are seeing or noticing more unsheltered people and they are feeling unsafe because of that and we also see that that doesn't necessarily line up with what the statistics tell us which is that people who are experiencing homelessness are more likely to be victims of crime than to perpetrate them. So we have this situation where the perception of crime is up, even though the data doesn't really align with that perception. Is part of what's going on that we're seeing maybe a different kind of crime that's spooking

people, maybe those like mass burglary events in San Francisco. Like a well-organized operation, people sprinted to waiting cars carrying bags full of merchandise from Nordstrom's in Walnut Creek Saturday night. Or, you know, old Asian ladies getting punched in the face just for walking down the sidewalk in New York City. This surveillance footage shows a 71-year-old Asian grandmother violently shoved to the ground, her purse stolen. And these are leading to people feeling more shocked than they previously had by crime they'd gotten used to. Mm-hmm. I think a lot of it has to do with the way that local and national media covers crime and particularly the places that it chooses to cover crime. So I will distinguish between those two examples that you gave slightly and say that I think a lot of the coverage of mass burglaries or even retail theft in pharmacy chains like CVS, a lot of that was covered more heavily than other forms of crime

that maybe we have seen that exists in neighborhood districts forever. So if a crime occurs in the downtown central business district, it's going to get top headline versus if a crime occurs in the downtown central business district, it's going to get top headline versus if a crime occurs in a disinvested neighborhood in the southwest side of Chicago, right? This video has been seen more than 300,000 times. A woman leaving a high-end retailer with

an arm full of clothes and getting away in a waiting car. So I think that it's not necessarily that these crimes are occurring more often. It's just that the media pays more attention to them. And Joe, that woman was right here on this sidewalk. Then she started running. I will distinguish between that point and what you said about acts of Asian hate,

which we have actually seen an uptick for. We didn't crunch those numbers. But when we were talking to people within Chinatowns or that were Asian American, they did speak to a qualitatively different form of fear rooted in that rise of hate since the pandemic. Why is it that downtowns matter so much? Historically and still today, downtowns have been our largest job hubs. They support the entire region and the city. So just from an economic standpoint, downtowns are crucial to the future of cities, as well as from a tax-based standpoint. So the idea that people are afraid to go downtown has serious ramifications, not just for the downtowns and not just for the office towers, but also for people who have jobs and for small businesses that, you know, are often located around those jobs. And another implication here is because downtowns are so critical to the economic health

of a city in a region, we see a lot of focus right now on how to improve and promote downtown recovery, which is great. But on the flip side, we're also seeing a lot of local policymakers responding to the widespread perception that safety is a number one downtown issue. And we're seeing them respond in a way that is often more punitive and ineffective and not actually mirroring the realities of where crime occurs within a city. So what we're seeing is that policymakers are driving policy by responding to perceptions rather than responding to the data. Hannah Love, Brookings. When we're back on Today Explained, how the perception of crime in American cities is affecting American politics. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura.

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Tackling L.A. spike in crime. The candidates who want to be the next mayor are pitching their plans. Philadelphia City Councilman Alan Dahm has some big plans. He announced his resignation. He says he's stepping down to explore the option of running for mayor. Hearing from people in the suburbs telling me, I don't feel safe coming into the city, that's a problem. Paul Vallis, the former CEO of Chicago Schools,

promises to hire 1,800 new officers with a focus on community policing. I can't really think of a mayoral race over the last two years in which crime hasn't been front and center. And not even just mayoral races, but the midterms. Candidates in the suburbs almost all ran on this idea that the cities were going to hell and that Democrats had lost control. In the final two weeks of the campaign, positive ads are out, scorched earth tactics are in. Murders, robberies, assaults, rapes, all up. But what is Governor Tim Walz's response? He pushed to defund our police.

This is false, and there's plenty of evidence. As far as mayoral races go, the first one that caught my eye was the election of Eric Adams, who became mayor of New York. Literally a cop. For 22 years, I wore a bulletproof vest and stood on the street corners and protected children and families in the city of New York. What's funny about him is that he didn't just run on the idea that crime was something that he was going to deal with as mayor that had become a serious problem in New York, but he has continued to run on the issue that crime was something that he was going to deal with as mayor that had become a serious problem in New York. But he has continued to run on the issue that crime is a serious problem in

New York, even as he's been in charge of the city for more than a year now. I mean, he's constantly talking about how bad crime is in New York, despite the fact that as mayor, one of his jobs is sort of to be the chief cheerleader of New York City. And instead, he's out there saying things like he has, quote, never witnessed crime at this level, despite the fact that murders are actually about 80 percent below their 1990 high. So Adams is like for me, he's he's exhibit A in the study of big city mayors running on crime and then continuing to to play off the fact that crime appears to be a major concern for voters. You mentioned that the murder rate was actually much higher in New York City in

the 90s. Was that the last time the perception of crime was this high or maybe even higher? It's hard to say. I mean, I think that for a certain type of suburban voter, there has always been an idea that cities are dangerous places. Donald Trump ran all over this issue. What the hell is going on in Chicago? What the hell is happening there? And this has been an undertone of GOP politicians' whole schtick since really the 1960s. So I don't want to say this is totally new, but I do think it's true that for a certain slice of urban voters who, during the 2000s and 2010s, when American cities were sort of in full stride as part of their millennial rebound, crime receded as a major issue. But I think you're right. The 1990s were the historic peak of this wave of urban violence. And this thing that happened in the 90s was you had this crusading Republican prosecutor

who had previously gotten well-known for going up against the mob, and he ran for office in New York, and that, of course, was Rudy Giuliani. Entire neighborhoods have been turned over to drug gangs now, and that has had an impact on reported crime. He quickly adopts this idea for policing as a method to deal with New York's crime problem that is called broken windows policing. So the idea behind broken windows policing is police have limited resources, right?

And so the perception up to that point had been that police ought to focus their resources on the most serious crimes, murders and robberies and violent assaults and such things. But the idea behind broken windows is that in fact what police should be doing is focusing just as much, if not more, on low-level quality of life offenses. And I'm talking really low level, stuff like panhandling, drunkenness, vendors, drug use, perhaps crimes that don't really actually hurt anybody. I mean, if some guy is urinating in public, we got a problem.

The theory behind broken windows is that they create an environment that feels unsafe and down the road is conducive to more serious types of crimes. You've got to pay attention to somebody urinating on the street. It may be a minor thing, it may be a serious thing, but you cannot ignore it. You have to deal with it. It is against the law to urinate in public. The broken windows theory, which was outlined by these criminologists

in a 1982 article in The Atlantic, takes as one of its central anecdotes a study that was done in the 60s of a car. This car was put with its hood up in a couple of neighborhoods, one in Palo Alto in California and the other one in the Bronx. And the author of the study looked at how long it took for vandals to strip the car for parts. And he observed that it happened faster in this sort of rundown neighborhood of the Bronx than it happened in Palo Alto. But he then observed that when he smashed the windshield of the car in Palo Alto with a sledgehammer, people subsequently considered it fair game to strip. Huh. So the broken windows of the eponymous article and subsequent policing strategy actually refers to a literal broken window of a car that was broken in Palo Alto in 1969.

Did this broken window policing strategy actually work? Does it deserve some credit? I think sociologists who have studied the issue would conclude that broken windows may have had some effect on New York's declining crime rates. But it would be wrong to attribute the big decline in crime to broken windows theory. And we should also note here that these broken windows policing strategies were sort of in the same family as stop and frisk, which obviously became quite controversial in New York City. The judge found the search is unconstitutional. Police stopped 4.4 million million people from 2004 to mid-2012, 87% of them black or Latino. Just 12% were charged with crimes. So what do you do? I mean, you're talking essentially about a vibe. You're not talking about actual crime data. You're talking about how people feel about crime, which is unpredictable,

and maybe based on a few cases that get outsized attention. How do cities deal with that? I think that the reason that people have begun to feel that cities are unsafe is not rocket science. Yes, there was a surge in crime connected to the pandemic. But at the same time, the rise in crime is outpaced by the perception that cities are going down the drain. And to counter that perception, you need a strategy that's not just about policing. The reason people feel that cities have gone down the drain is because city neighborhoods feel empty. And this is a really old idea. I mean, Jane Jacobs talks about this in The Death and Life of Great American Cities,

which was written in 1961. Safety on the streets by surveillance and mutual policing of one another sounds grim, but in real life, it is not grim. What contributes to a feeling and perhaps a reality of safety in public is not the presence of policemen, but the kind of informal network of what she called eyes on the street, which is just to say various neighborhood actors, whether they are merchants who have a shop or a bus driver who takes his coffee break here, or a neighbor who is looking out after a kid playing on the sidewalk. The safety of the street works best, most casually, and with least frequent taint of hostility or suspicion, precisely where people are using and most enjoying the city streets voluntarily.

And if those people aren't there, and they're not there right now in a lot of American downtowns, which have been emptied out by the pandemic and stayed empty, then yes, people are going to feel unsafe, whether that's the reality or not. You know, what's going to make people feel safe in a big public space? Is it the presence of like a cruiser with its siren on, like lights flashing parked at the corner? Probably not. Maybe police officers on patrol, on foot. Maybe even better than that would be some sort of way closing streets to cars, giving people places to socially distance and maybe have a little place to play.

And this is something you saw in a bunch of cities, but I think that New York has really kept at it in some places. One of the big ones is in Jackson Heights, and they have this big avenue that they've converted on a semi-permanent basis into becoming just a place that's free from cars. And it's a place where you go and you see kids learning to ride bikes and moms pushing strollers and delivery guys pushing carts. And it's just become this really beautiful example of what a city street could be if it weren't just used for cars. And that's the kind of thing that I think city neighborhoods need to look at if they're going to retain their vitality going forward. Henry Grabar is a staff writer for Slate. Our program today was produced by Miles Bryan. We were edited by Matthew Collette with help from Jolie Myers. We were fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Amanda Llewellyn. And we were mixed by Paul Robert Mounsey. And no one helped Paul.

Thanks to Vivian McCall and Patrick Smith for helping us hit downtown Seattle and Chicago, respectively. And on the show tomorrow, we are going back to Chicago on Today Explained because they've got a big mayoral election Tuesday. And the number one issue is crime....