“Horrible crimes. Murder. Gang attacks against our police. Child sex crimes. And a nursing student brutally murdered on her college campus.”
That’s the kind of speech Republican convention-goers in Milwaukee made Tuesday, after an ominous video — narrated by a deep voice that sounds like it’s straight out of a 2000 action movie trailer — depicts a dystopian version of Joe Biden’s America.
The theme of the second night of the Republican National Convention was “Make America Safe Again” and the list of speakers repeatedly criticized Biden’s record on crime and immigration: retired police officer Randy Sutton said there was a “war on the police”. Iowa Attorney General Brenna Byrd said Biden “treats police like criminals and criminals like victims.” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz declared that “your family is less safe, your children are less safe, the country is less safe,” as a result of a Biden presidency.
But Republican speakers’ rhetoric about out-of-control crime was out of touch with reality.
While crime did indeed increase during the pandemic, recent data show that crime is declining nationwide. According to the FBIMurders fell by 26 percent and robberies by 18 percent in the first three months of 2024 compared to the same period last year. That didn’t stop Republican speakers all night from bringing up heinous crimes and drug overdoses to paint an image of lawlessness and disorder.
So why are Republicans pushing forward with their “Make America Safe Again” messaging despite data that shows America is already getting safer? The answer is simple: Most Americans believe crime is getting worse, so that’s not a particularly hard message to sell.
The convention made it clear that Republicans are running another law-and-order campaign, relying on racist tropes and dog whistles to instill fear among voters. Their insistence that cities are crime-ridden, however, is not just a way to instill fear among voters; It’s also a window into how they’ll approach public safety legislation if Donald Trump wins in November.
What does the Republican approach to crime look like?
Since the pandemic, conservative backlash has grown toward progressive criminal justice reform, including reduced sentencing. While some Democrats have joined Republicans in passing tough-on-crime legislation in the past year, Republicans have gotten tougher and more extreme in their response to the 2020 crime spike.
Louisiana, for example, is a pass Many punitive measures That included harsher sentences and reduced parole eligibility for various crimes, and even allowed 17-year-olds to be tried as adults rather than in the juvenile justice system.
Republican politicians have also been outspoken critics of progressive district attorneys who have taken a soft approach to enforcing petty crimes. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s second Trump administration blueprint, called on the Justice Department Force local DAs to apply Laws that the federal government sees fit — including extreme right-wing policies — are left up to local prosecutors, as has long been the practice.
A Trump victory would encourage Republicans to roll back criminal justice reforms that, in recent decades, have reduced the prison population and reduced penalties for petty crimes. The result could be a renewed and more confined era of mass incarceration.
The GOP’s focus on crime may not work
Surveys have shown that Americans always think the crime rate is getting worse, even when the opposite is true, but there is a limit to how successful a law-and-order campaign can be. Recently, Republican messaging hasn’t necessarily paid electoral dividends.
For example, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, the 2022 midterms showed that Republicans’ fear-mongering rhetoric on crime Doesn’t seem to resonate with voters. Republicans have spent millions of dollars on campaign ads focusing on crime and public safety, but according to exit polls conducted by Vera Action, the lobbying group aligned with the Vera Institute of Justice, while voters were concerned about crime, they didn’t necessarily believe in more punitive policies.
Still, there’s a reason Republicans are focusing their rhetoric on crime: Democrats are on the defensive on the issue, even though the data is in their favor.
Instead of pursuing progressive changes to the criminal justice system, many Democrats, fearing voter sentiment around crime, have reversed course and pushed for tougher enforcement. That’s what happened in New York, for example, where the Democratic governor Sent by the National Guard Subway Patrol, and Oregon, where Lawmakers criminalized drugs After voters decriminalize them in 2020.
If the second night of the Republican convention is any indication, the GOP’s old law-and-order campaign playbook isn’t likely to go away anytime soon, despite falling crime rates.
