Adam Goodman
Like Chicago this week, Tampa moves to center stage next week as America seeks to restore the health of America’s cities.
While the myth and the experience of urban America are aligned in intent, they have become wholly divergent in reality.
Across the nation, in cities big and small, housing costs are up … homelessness is on the rise … basic services are under fiscal pressure … and transportation bottlenecks continue to slow mobility in and around the urban core.
Yet it’s crime, the kind that keeps you up at night, that is now capturing everyone’s attention, from unconscionable murder rates and domestic violence to rampant property crime. In fact, it has become so top-of-mind among city dwellers it is no longer a Republican or Democrat issue but an urban one.
That’s because rising crime, a subset of social order, is upsetting the delicate balance between progressivism and existentialism, fueling a realignment of voters driven less by partisanship than personal safety.
How else do you explain why almost every major Chicago candidate running for Mayor, Democrats all, are sprinting toward a more pro-police/public safety platform. In the days after the George Floyd tragedy that would have been reviled as heresy.
Now backing those who wear a badge of heroism is hip again.
In a city where murder has become a numbing statistic, a recent poll reflected both frustration and fear. Forty-four percent of respondents rate crime as the No. 1 issue (the economy/jobs were a distant second at 12%), hardly surprising as 63% of Chicagoans in the same survey say they don’t feel safe (rising to 84% among African Americans).
Sadly, the Windy City is not an outlier but a reflection of the new norm.
While crime is most often viewed through a national prism and assessed through national polling, in reality, it’s almost entirely local. There are over 15,000 local police departments, budgeting is mostly local, and policies — while influenced by the federal and state governments — are determined not by Senators and Congress members but by Mayors and City Council members.
They are the leaders who must decide what to prioritize, what and whom to budget, on everything from hiring and training police to address homelessness, improving our schools, and finding answers to the lack of affordable housing threatening to turn cities into enclaves of the elite versus communes of community.
Which brings us to a City Council election in Tampa where a successful local businessman and first-time candidate, Blake Casper, has thrown down the public safety gauntlet to challenge an incumbent who’s treading the fine line between liberalism and crime recidivism.
Backed by the current and former Mayor, the Sheriff, the police unions and leaders throughout the community, Casper advanced the central argument that a safer city is a better city; that the real measure of America’s ability to replace divisiveness with common purpose is cemented in the melting pot of diversity rooted the birthplace of neighborhoods.
He’s right, as are other leaders across the nation, who understand that freedom is not ensured through trepidation but nourished by fearlessness.
