| | | | |  | | By Brakkton Booker | With help from Rishika Dugyala, Jesse Naranjo and Teresa Wiltz
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Washington Metropolitan Police officers investigate a shooting at Potomac Avenue Metro Station, in Southeast Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023. | POLITICO illustration/Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo | What up, Recast family! Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is released from the hospital after receiving treatment for a concussion following a fall last week, and the FBI releases updated hate crime statistics. They’re sobering. And it’s Equal Pay Day! First we focus on Democrats' incoherent messaging on crime. In the era of divided government, a bill receiving overwhelming bipartisan support is typically hailed by Democrats and Republicans alike as a major legislative achievement. But only one party is gloating. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, flanked by his members of his caucus, nearly all of whom were white, boasted: “We’re sending a message to every city, every county, every state that no longer will Washington be soft on crime. No longer are we defunding the police. No longer are we softening sentences.”
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Twitter | This victory lap came after the Senate’s resounding 81-14 vote, with 14 Senate Democrats joining the GOP-led effort to nullify Washington, D.C. 's proposed overhaul of its municipal criminal code last week. President Joe Biden vowed to sign the bill, blocking D.C.’s law from being enacted, citing the proposal’s call to lower penalties for crimes such as carjacking.
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Critics like Cliff Albright, the executive director of the Black Voters Matter Fund, said it is a “disgrace” that the president and congressional Democrats are abandoning their previous positions championing D.C. statehood and autonomy.
“It’s obvious hypocrisy that you have people everyday that are talking about attacks on democracy, everyday talking about Jan. 6,” Albright said. “You can’t talk about attacks on democracy and then vote overwhelmingly [for a bill] that is by definition one of the largest attacks on the notions of democracy that we have in this country.” This all hits at perceptions of Democrats’ political vulnerability on the issue of crime. Crime, of course, has been used by Republicans in at least the three previous election cycles, with mixed results. It’s an old playbook. During the 1988 presidential election, George H.W. Bush famously used the case of Willie Horton, a Black prisoner who attacked a white couple while on furlough, to paint his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, as soft on crime. But this line of attack now led by an emboldened GOP-led House is appearing to play a bit differently. So the overturning of D.C.’s crime bill law — taken together with Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s failed reelection bid amid criticism of her public safety record and recent protests in Atlanta at a planned police training facility where a protester was killed by law enforcement – all feed a narrative that is landing with some Americans.
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Demonstrators march near Atlanta police during a protest over plans to build a new police training center, Thursday, March 9, 2023, in Atlanta. | Alex Slitz/AP Photo | That narrative, fanned by former President Donald Trump, congressional Republicans and others, says that major urban areas run by Democrats, many with sizable minority populations and elected officials of color, are overrun by criminals. Statistics don’t bear that out, however. Overall violent crime is down slightly, according to the most recent FBI statistics, though murders did increase 4.3 percent. Still, while homicide rates rose significantly during the pandemic, those homicide rates are nowhere near the previous highs in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, according to the Pew Research Center. A POLITICO/Morning Consult survey conducted in the days following November midterms asked registered voters whom they trusted more to handle crime. Forty-six percent of registered voters said congressional Republicans compared to 37 percent who said they trusted congressional Democrats. Sixty percent of Black voters said they trust Democrats more to handle crime. Whatever the statistics say, Republicans are jumping on the perception that crime is out of control. “We’ve lost American cities again, similar to the 1980s and ‘90s,” says Pat McCrory, a Republican who was mayor of Charlotte from 1995 to 2009 and later went on to serve as governor of North Carolina. He says far-left politicians have been pushing the “defund” law enforcement narrative and liberal-leaning district attorneys have stopped prosecuting criminals. “The Democratic Party has been hijacked by people who don't want to enforce the laws on the books,” McCrory tells The Recast, adding that he sees Biden’s support for the overturning of D.C.’s crime law as a course correction for Democrats. Democrats, he says, are in danger of losing suburban voters in upcoming elections. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake disagrees with that assessment, but says the crime issue does present a conundrum for Democrats. | 
Chicago mayoral candidates get ready to debate one another on Jan. 19, 2023. | Pool photo by Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere | “Democrats don't attack Democrats on transgender issues or abortion or immigration or some of the other wedge issues that the Republicans are using,” Lake tells The Recast. “This tends to be one of the ones, particularly in these mayoral races, where you see Republicans attacking Democrats and Democrats attacking Democrats.” She adds, what it ultimately comes down to is messaging. She says the “soft on crime” and “defund the police” narratives can be conveyed and repeated or retweeted or clipped into a sound bite that doesn’t need much nuance or context to convey the point. Most Democrats agree on the need for changes in policing, violence interventions and getting at the root causes of crime, Lake says. But “unfortunately, their message is a nine-second sound bite, our message is 60 seconds.” And those short sound bites are easier to follow than a more nuanced explanation of the issues, she says. While that may be true, Albright of the Black Voters Matter Fund says the way Democrats are ceding this fight on crime and policing will lead to negative outcomes for many communities of color. According to the Pew Research Center, Black adults are consistently more likely than adults of other races to see violent crime as an urgent national problem. So will Democrats unify behind their messaging on crime? As always, we’ll keep tabs on how this all plays out. All the best,
The Recast Team
| | | THE NUMBERS GAME Hate crimes in the United States rose sharply, from 8,120 incidents in 2020 to 9,065 in 2021 – marking a jump of 11.6 percent, according to revised data released by the FBI on Monday. This marks a reversal from just three months ago when officials announced that “all crime statistics, including hate crimes, fell significantly from 2020 to 2021.” The previous data, FBI officials acknowledged at the time, was compiled from an incomplete data set because several large law enforcement agencies had not yet transitioned to the DOJ’s new system prior to its reporting deadline.
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| The updated Supplemental 2021 Hate Crime Statistics indicate hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation or gender identity biases, make up nearly a fifth of all reported hate crime victims. Those who reported being targeted for their religious beliefs were at 14.1 percent. But perhaps unsurprisingly, race-based hate crime reports far outpaced any other category, with nearly two-thirds of reported victims of incidents rooted in race, ancestry or ethnicity bias, according to the report. | 
| By raw numbers, reported hate crimes incidents classified as anti-Black were roughly three times higher than those identified as anti-white incidents. Reported hate crime incidents impacting the Asian and Latino communities in 2021 were 746 and 698, respectively, according to the report. Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a statement that the supplemental report underscores the administration’s commitment to providing a fuller assessment of hate crimes in the U.S. “Hate crimes and the devastation they cause communities have no place in this country,” Gupta said. “The Justice Department is committed to every tool and resource at our disposal to combat bias-motivated violence in all its forms.”
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Jasmine Burems, co-owner of Claudine Field Apothecary farms, speaks as she gives a tour of her farm on Oct. 7, 2022, in Columbia County, N.Y. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images | Is The Weed Equity Program Leaving Women Out? — POLITICO’s Mona Zhang breaks down how a program designed to boost equity in New York’s cannabis market is leaving women behind. Free College Workaround — With the president’s push for free community college going nowhere in Congress, POLITICO’s Bianca Quilantan reports on how some high schoolers — and state officials — are increasingly supporting dual enrollment programs. Biden’s Gun Maneuver — The president is in California today, which will serve as a backdrop to an executive order he plans to sign there aimed at expanding background checks for firearms. POLITICO’s Myah Ward has more.
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| “False Star,” a short story by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, is a delicately poetic yet piercingly observant tale about claims checks. He takes you behind the scenes of the storytelling here. Luther is back! This time as a Netflix movie, “Luther: The Fallen Sun,” a continuation of the acclaimed TV saga, a disgraced detective (played by Idris Elba) escapes prison to find and stop a serial killer.
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