Honest question, is there any evidence that Republican politicians are more effective at fighting crime? Or are you just saying that’s the public’s perception?
Democrat politicians sometimes bend over backwards to make themselves seem ineffective at fighting crime or sympathetic to criminals, while Republicans rarely if ever do. Prosecutors are sometimes an elected position, so it is plausibly relevant.
We need to do better than prison for drug addiction and delusional mental illness. Need to make a statewide facility to provide tented area for drug addicts to be removed from cities and suburbs. They can leave the facility after they have recovered from drug addiction or severe delusional mental illness.
> We need to do better than prison for drug addiction and delusional mental illness. Need to make a statewide facility to provide tented area for drug addicts to be removed from cities and suburbs.
That’s exactly like a prison, but probably with unconstitutionally poor conditions by design, not better than a prison, and probably unconstitutional mechanisms for sending people into them as well.
Better than prison (demonstrated, repeatedly) for dealing with addiction and related crime is funding community treatment for substance use disorders, with studies consistently showing both crime reductions and criminal justice cost savings of several multiples of the marginal funding devoted to drug treatment.
But “tough on crime” via greater criminalization makes an easier political soundbite, even if its manifestly worse at actually dealing with crime.
typically they're asking to actually lock people up with high cash bails and non lenient sentences. keeping the criminals off the streets does work even if the bycatch injustice can be intolerable.
> keeping the criminals off the streets does work [citation needed]
One of the primary features of incarceration is that the crime has already been committed. A person is described as a criminal because they've already committed a crime, not because they are likely to do so again in the future.
Yes, jailing folks for doing crimes is likely to keep them from committing crimes out on the streets, and also to intimidate would-be criminals from committing crimes lest they are imprisoned for them. But if you keep imprisoning every kind of criminal, you're just creating job openings for more criminals out there, and plenty of folks willing to fill those voids. You've also got all the problems with prisons bursting at the seams. I don't believe that mass incarceration is really beneficial, overall, for the morale of a populace. You wind up with ugly stuff like organized crime and drug cartels operating with impunity from behind bars, too: great recruiting grounds.
Note Kamala Harris was a prosecutor. Joe Biden started his 2020 campaign at a firehouse in Pennsylvania so he's definitely a champion of first responders who has said he would "refund the police."
If the crime is something like wage-theft (were businesses don't pay workers for hours worked) or attempting to overthrow the government, then no, but if the crime is feeding the homeless or seeking an abortion after being raped, then yes.
IMHO not only that, there is even historical precedent of what is unfolding before our eyes.
The mechanics:
1) while states (or countries) may differ in what they call a crime and in how they decide upon codifying it, how to police crime is almost always decided on the local level.
2) An overwhelming number of cities is run by democrats (or left-of-center parties in western countries)
3) often on such a long timescale that the GOP (or right-of-center parties) has significantly scaled down operations or even stopped nominating candidates altogether. NYC and CA come to mind.
4) While the right certainly has its weak-spots with its clerics (say, smearing some government responsibilities as „socialist“ while a sane mind could call them conservative as well or … just sane) the left certainly has issues with their clerics. Specifically in this case: smearing enforcing the law as racist (while a sane mind would call public safety a social welfare which disproportionately benefits the poorest).
The historical precedent:
It was the American city which, ruled by democrats for decades, became synonymous with crime in culture, evidenced by countless songs, TV-series and movies (or anti-american propaganda by the soviets) of the 1970s and 1980s).
Crime became so unbearable, American city dwellers started voting another party for the first time in decades (NYC and LA come to mind), spawning a political shift into other western countries as well (London, Milan, Marseille, Hamburg, Frankfurt etc).
The “racist” smearing happened back then (in the US it was search and frisk ridiculed as racist despite most performing officers being of the same ethnicity; in Europe its people like Scholz with “racist” skeletons in their closet from their days in local government).
But unlike racism what actually did happen was that people felt safe enough that they moved back into cities effectively ending decades of urban sprawl and starting the great renaissance of urban centers.
And I want to point out that voting GOP (or conservative in other countries) nationally wont fix crime locally. Rather treating our civic duties to actually engage in local elections.
Urban voters, while often overarching on (inter-) national democracy issues are making a mockery of their own governance standards locally when the mayorship effectively gets decided by whom the democrats (SF, PS, SPD, SPÖ, Labour, …) nominate.
