Are Americans worried about crime — or order?

Nobody seems too concerned with people crossing the US-Mexico border here at San Ysidro. Why might that be? (Picture by Wikipedia user Phil Konstantin, CC BY-SA 3.0.)

According to FBI statistics, crime is falling dramatically in America. In fact, violent crime is down by half since its peak when I was a kid, in 1993. And yet, more Americans say crime in their area is increasing every year. There are a variety of explanations proposed for this — people increasingly living in isolation from their neighbors, lurid local TV news reports, bad-faith assertions from dishonest politicians — but I want to propose another one. Maybe people aren’t worried about crime in our country so much as order.

Order here is a nebulous term, but it connotes the idea that society functions in predictable, understandable ways, according to both law and custom. Order generally requires everyone in the society to follow the same rules, enforced by societal disapproval. Look at how cutting in line at a highway merge can trigger road rage: you aren’t the victim of a crime yet feel an urge to “teach that guy a lesson” vigilante-style to punish the other driver’s apparent disregard for the rules of society. Or look how outsized the panic and outrage was about an apparent spike in shoplifting — a low-value, non-violent crime — despite the fact that even the retail industry subsequently admitted their claims were overblown.

Crime itself is a kind of disorder, but there’s also disorder without crime. On a local level, homelessness is a violation of order, but it usually isn’t by itself a crime. It might be associated with crime, but even then we’re mostly talking minor crimes like trespassing in a closed park to find a place to sleep or public urination. Very few crimes associated with a homeless encampment would constitute a serious safety threat. But the violation of public order inherent in homelessness offends people, and, lacking a better term, they call it “crime.”

Or look on the national level, where many Americans express a deep worry about illegal immigration. Now, nativist sentiment in America is nothing new, and there are many valid opinions and analyses of what is needed to fix America’s jerry-rigged immigration system. But immigration hawks keep focusing on one kind of immigrant — those coming across America’s southern border with Mexico, the method used by about half of all undocumented immigrants. (The rest enter the country via legal means, like tourist or education visas, then overstay them.)

The fact that the Trump-era chant “Build the wall!” caught on is telling. A border wall only deters one kind of illegal immigration, but it’s the kind that’s a threat to the sense of order, and so people foam at the mouth about “illegal border crossers” when they live thousands of miles from Mexico and can’t demonstrate that the immigrants have done them any harm.

Much of the credit given to then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani for the fall in crime rates in 1990s New York was based on the public’s approval of his “broken windows” policing. Later analysis showed that the methods didn’t do much to reduce crime — crime everywhere in the country was falling at the same time — but I suspect that people were actually responding more to visible restorations of order (e.g., cracking down on turnstile jumping) than the actual measurable decrease in what the FBI statistics capture as crime.

I want to be clear that order is a legitimate policy goal. It’s great when everybody follows the rules! But it’s a mistake to treat disorder and crime as the same thing; they overlap, but they’re different beasts.

Promoting order requires different policy choices and enforcement mechanisms from fighting crime. When you treat violations of order as harshly as you enforce major crimes you get a situation like the one where two NYPD officers ended up killing Eric Garner because he was suspected of selling loose cigarettes. Don’t restrain him like he’s a deranged serial killer reaching for his machete — just give the guy a citation and tell him to move along!

If there’s a homeless encampment in a park, it’s better to build transitional housing instead of spending police time clearing the residents out every few months. If the problem is illegal entry to the country, make legal entry easier and the rules more predictable instead of fortifying a thousand miles of desert. If the problem is broken windows, pay to have the damn windows fixed rather than stopping and frisking random Black teens in the name of “law enforcement.”

Elected leaders should be sensitive to this. If the real worry is order, find an appropriate way to promote it and make it clear that’s how it’s being treated. Likewise, citizens should be clear about wanting order; they should not be shy about asking for it by name instead of conflating it with “crime.”