Creating the Conditions for Violence
To change things up, we are starting with good news. Over the last several months in Louisiana, Governor Jeff Landry spent significant political capital trying to ram through four constitutional amendments, which, amongst other things, would have created statewide “specialty courts”–a move that could have removed cases from local jurisdictions, mirroring efforts across the south to wrest control from majority-Black localities. The remaining amendments would have made it easier to try kids as adults and gutted protections for education funding to facilitate reckless tax cuts. Despite receiving support from Donald Trump Jr. (and 50 Cent), all four Amendments failed. Over 64% of voters rejected the Governor’s prized package, including in deeply conservative parishes. The measure that would have funneled kids into the adult criminal system in the name of “law and order” lost by the biggest margin of the night.
Soon after, Judge Susan Crawford defeated Brad Schimel for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat, overcoming $25 million in campaign spending from Elon Musk. The majority of ads focused on one set of issues: crime and punishment, even from groups with no obvious ties to those issues. Fearmongering about criminal justice is a tried-and-true method of campaigning and subverting democracy.
This time, it didn’t work. We don’t want to over-extrapolate from two results, but these elections provide at least some evidence that the tough-on-crime cudgel is not working as it used to. That may be because crime is in fact down, and people are now realizing, or it may be because those in power are trying to expand the detention net as quickly as possible and people no longer look upon our punishment system so favorably. But we take some solace from these outcomes.
Yet we cannot ignore the ways that this administration is trying to create the conditions for a future crime wave, which would in turn provide it with the fodder for a crackdown on vulnerable, largely Black, brown, and Latinx communities. Despite its “protect public safety” rhetoric, the administration is doing everything to undermine public safety by massively cutting healthcare and treatment funding, divesting from schools, and eliminating research into violence prevention while defunding programs proven to prevent it. This is the perfect recipe for increasing crime. If the federal government wanted to chart a course for making people less safe, it would do what it is doing.
So in today’s newsletter, we celebrate the wins, but explore the ways that this administration is trying to make our communities more dangerous so that it can later pretend to be a protector.
Creating the conditions for a dramatic rise in crime and violence
You wouldn’t know it from political rhetoric, but in this country, we actually have some idea about what causes and prevents violence. We know, for example, that people who have been victims of gun crimes are at extremely high risk of using gun violence in the future, but that investment in trauma support and interventions, especially at hospitals, dramatically reduces violence. Violence interrupter programs also have been shown to reduce shootings, by as much as 30%, and greening vacant lots and replacing broken streetlights also dramatically improves community safety.
Likewise, three out of every five people who are incarcerated have a substance use disorder problem, and half of state and federal prisoners and a whopping two-thirds of people held in jail have a history of mental illness or are currently experiencing one. Treating these problems, therefore, seriously decreases crime.
Enter the Trump administration, DOGE, and radical conspiracy theorists, including those in the cabinet and those fronting as co-President, all of whom are committed to ending this proven crime-reducing and humane approach. There is simply no precedent for the ways in which, in less than three months, the national, state, and local public health infrastructure in the United States has been attacked.
- Ending mental health and addiction support: One of the first public health groups to experience DOGE-led cuts was SAMHSA, “the agency tasked with leading the fight to ease the country’s mental health and addiction crises.” SAMSHA administers the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, which was put into place during President Trump’s prior administration.
- These cuts have decimated grants to states and localities to combat mental illness, addiction, and homelessness–some of the key root causes of crime.
- Much of SAMHSA’s work is dedicated to or directly supports reducing crime and making communities safer by addressing mental health and substance use needs before they reach a breaking point and partnering with law enforcement around the country.
- Mass layoffs in the federal public health infrastructure: Then, in the middle of the night, thousands of workers under HHS were fired, as part of an effort to dismiss 10,000 employees in addition to encouraging 10,000 more to resign or retire. Access to buildings for career employees was abruptly cut off before people could even come into work to clean out their desks. Many of the nation’s top researchers, scientists, and policy analysts in the public health field no longer had jobs. Cuts included 3,500 from the FDA, 2,400 from the CDC, and 1,200 from NIH. In just one West Virginia city, approximately 185 employees were let go from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
- Cuts include:
- “[E]xtensive layoffs in programs that track asthma, air pollution, smoking, gun violence, reproductive health, climate change and other health threats”
- Hundreds of firings in a department that funds “community health centers, the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program, the nation’s organ donation and transplant system, the National Health Service Corps (that gets health care into rural and urban areas), and Maternal and Child Health.” All of these programs have a clear, proven connection to long-term increases in public safety.
- Preparing for and preventing future global pandemics–when the last pandemic led to a sharp increase in crime.
- Conducting vital research on mental health and addiction, disease prevention, and food safety.
- Monitoring and treating first responders who became sick after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
- Cuts to Head Start: Research shows that access to Head Start for kids who are four reduces the likelihood of their own children engaging in criminal behavior by 49%. Head Start has served 40 million children since it began in 1965. But in February, the administration announced it would cut 18% of the staff responsible for child care, early childhood development, and Head Start Programs. Several programs had their funding trapped in the funding freeze.
- Ending Violence Prevention Funding: Tens of millions of dollars in violence prevention funding have been suspended by this administration. The administration has ordered a review of Biden’s gun violence reduction policies, which would include hospital anti-violence aid, and in January, it closed the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. It has removed the Surgeon General’s Gun Violence Warning classifying gun violence a public health crisis, which will have long term effects on further research that is vital to reducing crime.
- Ending Security Measures: While this administration weaponizes claims of anti-Semitism as an excuse to punish anyone seen as an opponent and fuel its deportation machine, it is ending programs that have saved lives, including in the attempted attack at a Texas synagogue. According to a ProPublica report, FEMA’s Security Grant Program supported security in Jewish institutions, while helping train staff in deescalation techniques. These measures have prevented several attacks.
- Arresting Victims: In addition to cutting off access to information that helps law enforcement assess threats, the government seems ready to arrest victims of crime, all but ensuring people will not report them. In Detroit, Michigan, a woman reported a violent attack to the police. She has now been arrested and is facing deportation.
- Ending Protection for Domestic Violence Victims: The administration has cancelled an NIH grant to help early career clinicians measure and help prevent intimate partner violence against pregnant women– which is the leading cause of death of pregnant and postpartum women. It labeled the program “DEI.” An OMB memo lists several other Domestic Violence Prevention programs under review. Several rape crisis centers also reported experiencing funding freezes.
The People Are Fighting Back
The effort to fundamentally uproot our democracy is proving unpopular, and the people are fighting back.
- After ICE agents arrested a mother and her three children in a small New York Village, around a thousand people marched to White House border czar Tom Homan’s home in protest. The family has now been released.
- In California, the state took a major step forward in shoring up its long-broken, fragmented indigent defense system. Well-resourced indigent defenders are pivotal always, but especially now as the federal government shores up its mass deportation efforts. As we have seen in the last week, the administration has no qualms about leveraging the criminal legal system by labeling immigrants as criminals to justify ripping them from their communities and sending them to be tortured in a prison in El Salvador. Having good criminal lawyers is critical to the robust defense effort under way. A bill to ban problematic, “flat-fee” contracts for public defense passed a committee vote in the state’s Assembly, and is an important first step by the state.
- On Monday, former pardon attorney Liz Oyer spoke before Congress about the politicization of the Justice Department despite the Department of Justice’s attempt to intimidate her by sending U.S. Marshals to her house and instructing her that she could not testify to certain matters before Congress.
- It is also worth taking a moment to note, amid the flurry of racist attacks on “DEI” that included wiping Army veteran Jackie Robinson’s military history from the DOD website, that the “racist dorks don’t know ball” and many are taking note.