RALEIGH – Judging by his campaign statements and first debate performance, Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory believes that crime will be an important issue in the governor’s race this year. I would welcome such a development, given that protecting citizens from crime is the first and foremost responsibility of government. But the more I look at the crime data, the more I wonder whether McCrory should really welcome the return of crime as a key voting issue for North Carolinians.
Certainly the crime issue used to matter a great deal in state politics. It played in a role in competitive gubernatorial elections in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1994, former Gov. Jim Hunt called a special legislative session to address major public concerns about it. And the costs of combating crime, most importantly a dramatic increase in state prison capacity, have been a significant factor in political debate about state spending priorities.
But the fact of the matter is that, for years now, crime has barely moved the needle for the majority of state voters. Most pollsters don’t even include “crime” as an option when asking a closed-end question about major issues facing North Carolina, and few respondents volunteer crime as a voting issue for them.
The changing political valence of the crime issue is good news, for the most part. It reflects a large, relatively steady drop in the crime rate since the early 1990s, a product of such factors as improved policing techniques, tougher sentencing, and longer prison terms for violent and repeat offenders, as well as demographic changes. Much like welfare, which voters also see as less important after the passage of state and federal reforms in the mid-1990s, crime lost its political saliency because voters tend to focus on growing and seemingly intractable problems, not on shrinking and seemingly solvable ones.
Unfortunately, as in the welfare case, the public isn’t seeing the whole picture. Cash assistance may now be time-limited and harder to obtain, but the largest elements of the welfare state – Medicaid and other in-kind public assistance – have continued to grow. With respect to crime, although the rates of reported crime and victimization have fallen markedly, they are still significantly higher than they were a generation or two ago. We are far less safe than we should and could be.
That’s why I welcome McCrory’s attempts to shift some political attention to the crime issue. However, McCrory is running for governor as the mayor of the one of North Carolina’s most dangerous cities. While the crime rate in the Charlotte area has fallen, including an impressive 7 percent drop in the violent-crime rate last year, the long-term decline only mirrors the state and national trends, if that. It doesn’t appear to reflect any improvement compared to Raleigh, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and other cities.
It’s true that using city-based data to make comparisons across jurisdictions can be unfair to some communities, including Charlotte, because of such issues as city vs. county data reporting and the effects of annexation. But county-level comparisons are subject to fewer quibbles, and they don’t exactly make Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s recent performance look like a compelling local story to communicate to voters statewide.
From 1997 to 2006, North Carolina’s index of reported crimes fell by 17 percent, to about 4,649 offenses per 100,000 residents. In the major urban areas where a disproportionate amount of North Carolina’s crime occurs, the improvement over the past decade was even stronger, about a 23 percent drop on average. The largest drops in crime were 40 percent in Wake County and 37 percent in Durham County. The core counties of the Triad also had higher-than-average drops, 23 percent in Guilford and 26 percent in Forsyth.
But Mecklenburg’s decline was only 19 percent, worse than average. And in 2006, Mecklenburg’s index of 7,664 remained the highest among North Carolina’s urban counties. It was a shocking 130 percent higher than Wake’s 3,327, the state’s lowest urban crime rate.
As mayor, McCrory exercises limited control over law enforcement in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. The police chief reports to the entire city council, and the sheriff is popularly elected (at least in theory). McCrory is not personally to blame for my home county’s persistent crime problem, which reflects both public policies and long-term socioeconomic conditions. But based on these figures, neither can he easily run statewide as the man who would fight crime in Greensboro, Raleigh, or Wilmington the way he did in Charlotte. The risk is that voters might end up suggesting he go back home and redouble his efforts there.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.