The Enduring Power of “Tough on Crime”

The Democrats have been searching for an effective alternative for half a century.

During the slow news days at the end of August, there was a minor kerfuffle at the Democratic National Committee meeting in Minnesota. A speaker at the gathering, Insha Rahman of Vera Action, a political advocacy group that seeks to reduce the use of incarceration, unexpectedly became the main character on social media when she warned Democratic officials not to overreact to President Trump’s efforts to focus public attention on “lurid, awful stuff” like migrant crime and carjackings.

In truth, the purpose of Rahman’s remarks was not to suggest that carjackings “don’t matter,” as some headline writers claimed. Instead, she sought to advance new language about crime, encouraging Democrats to embrace the idea that they should be “serious about safety.”

Is “serious about safety” a winning frame for Democrats? Some elected officials seem to think so. Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb recently told the New York Times that if Democrats don’t talk about “how we’ve done the work to reduce crime based on a serious-on-safety approach, we are going to lose.”

Whether “serious about safety” has staying power as political messaging remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that it is a response to an enduring problem for the Democrats. The concept is expressly designed as an alternative to the “tough on crime” sloganeering that has proven enormously potent for Republicans over the past half century or so.

Tough on crime emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as street crime in the United States spiked, along with political bombings and urban unrest. (Depending upon your political perspective, these were either “uprisings” by the voiceless or “riots” by the lawless.)

Against this backdrop, Richard Nixon and other prominent Republicans argued that “something has gone terribly wrong in America” and that the best way to reduce crime and violence was to strengthen enforcement.

Over the next thirty years, give or take, Republicans consistently used public safety to make progress both at the ballot box and in legislative chambers. These were years that featured a pronounced turn toward more punitive lawmaking, including such innovations as mandatory minimums, truth-in-sentencing, and three-strikes-and-you’re-out legislation. Unsurprisingly, these were also years of dramatic growth in the American jail and prison population.

Things began to shift during the 1990s. In the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton worked hard to combat the perception that Democrats were soft on crime. This was soon followed by the 1994 Crime Bill, a sprawling piece of legislation that contained both sticks (funding for police officers and prison construction) and carrots (funding for prevention initiatives and domestic violence programs as well as an assault weapons ban). Given the polarization on Capitol Hill today, it is worth noting that the bill received the votes of dozens of Republicans as well as several prominent progressives, including Bernie Sanders and most of the Congressional Black Caucus.

The Crime Bill helped set the template for the emergence of “smart on crime” as a rallying cry. As the Clinton years went on, a range of policymakers, academics, and nonprofit organizations used technocratic language to advance balanced solutions that contained elements of both punishment and help. Criminal justice professionals were encouraged to use “validated risk assessments” to implement “evidence-based programs,” the results of which could be verified through “randomized controlled trials.”

The language may be dry, but it was also deliberate. The unstated goal was to turn down the temperature on the crime debate, which was often driven by tragedies that inflamed public passions. Often these passions ended up being channeled into legislation, including a profusion of laws named after victims (Kendra’s Law, Megan’s Law, Amber Alert). The dangers of having high-profile incidents drive policymaking were obvious—hard cases make bad law, as the old saying goes.

For at least a few decades, this dynamic seemed to recede, thanks in part to the advocates of smart on crime. The U.S. Department of Justice created an online crime solutions clearinghouse to encourage both research and reform in the criminal justice space. (This website will likely soon be an historical relic, as the Trump Justice Department has ceased ongoing funding for it.) With a concerted push from the federal government, there was a great flowering of data-driven initiatives, starting with policing (e.g., problem-oriented policing, hot spots policing, and community policing) and moving to the rest of the criminal justice system. Other examples include focused deterrence, problem-solving courts, reentry programs, and justice reinvestment.

“Smart on crime” was the kind of slogan that had appeal to a broad range of audiences, including many conservatives. Several smart-on-crime initiatives attracted Republican support, including efforts to promote more humane prison conditions and to develop alternatives to incarceration for selected categories of offenses.

Still, “smart on crime” was mostly a Democratic thing. Kamala Harris used the expression as the title of her 2009 book. And during the Obama administration, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder established a Smart on Crime initiative at the Department of Justice.

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As is often the case, the success of “smart on crime” contained the seeds of its ultimate failure. The embrace of the expression by prominent mainstream Democrats like Holder and Harris meant that the concept would be subject to intense scrutiny by critics on both the left and the right.

On the left, the idea was condemned for being a fundamentally reformist project. Progressives were more interested in transforming (alternatively, defunding or abolishing) the criminal justice system to address the root causes of crime, like poverty and systemic racism.

On the right, smart on crime became a case study of Donald Trump’s instinct for negative polarization—if the Democrats were for it, that meant he had to be against it. In his first term, Trump moved to dismantle much of the Obama administration’s reform agenda. This has only accelerated in his second term, as Trump has canceled numerous criminal justice reform grants made by the Biden administration and called for the elimination of cashless bail.

We have now entered what might be called the “shifty on crime” era. With his declaration of a state of emergency in Washington, D.C., and his threat to send the National Guard to other American cities, President Trump seems to want to shift the world back to an earlier era when drastic measures to curb crime were truly warranted. The Democrats are not wrong to point out that 2025 is not 1995 or 1975.

For their part, many Democrats seem desperate to shift the conversation away from crime. In response to Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Washington D.C., Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries released a statement saying, “The Trump administration has consistently broken the law and violated the Constitution to further the personal and political agenda of a wannabe king. Meanwhile, Donald Trump and cowardly Republicans have done nothing to make life more affordable for everyday Americans.”

But changing the subject will only take the Democrats so far. Some subjects will just not go away. The killing of Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte train, caught on video, offers a case in point. While this horrific crime has mostly been ignored by left-leaning media outlets, it has exploded online, prompting calls for the overhaul of North Carolina’s criminal justice system and a plea for the death penalty from President Trump. This is a good reminder of why “smart on crime” was so appealing—the alternative is often knee-jerk demands for vengeance.

Alas, the days of “smart on crime” are over—each new generation of Democrats understandably wants to mint its own language, not just recycle the words of their predecessors. Thus, the search by Vera Action and others to find effective political rhetoric on public safety.

Of course, political language is only credible to the extent that it is meaningfully connected to popular sentiment and sound underlying policy ideas. And this is where the real challenge lies for Democrats. A recent AP-NORC poll suggests that 81 percent of Americans think that crime is a big problem in American cities. And a 2024 Pew survey found that 61 percent of registered voters said that the criminal justice system in the United States is not tough enough on criminals, while 25 percent said the system treats criminals about right and just 13 percent said it is too tough. “Americans are far more hawkish on crime than a lot of Democrats want to admit,” says CNN data analyst Harry Enten.

This helps explain why New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is making very different noises about crime today than he did four years ago. Even a political performer as deft as Mamdani realizes that he cannot sell “defund the police” to an electorate that is worried about crime and wants to see the government respond.

Until the Democrats can clearly and persuasively demonstrate that they support not just investing in crime prevention but also enforcing the law when needed, there is no magic slogan that will save them from losing the crime debate.

Perhaps the Democrats would be wise to follow the advice of Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a contributor to TLP. “‘Smart-on-crime’ was the lefty alternative and response to the right-wing ‘tough on crime’,” Moskos wrote on X. “It was a bad choice. We could have just gone with being against crime.”

Greg Berman is the co-editor of Vital City and the author of The Nonprofit Crisis: Leadership Through the Culture Wars, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.