Crime and Punishment: How Right-Wing Rhetoric is Driving a Moral Panic over New York City Crime Trends
Blue lights on top of a police car. Photo by Franz P. Sauerteig.
A year ago, New York had its closest gubernatorial race in decades. Congressman Lee Zeldin came in a hair-raising close second to incumbent Kathy Hochul, raising both alarm and excitement at the prospect of a Republican governing the deep blue state for the first time in 15 years. To some, though, Zeldin’s popularity was no surprise. As crime increased during and after the pandemic, particularly in New York City, many Republican politicians like Zeldin began to orbit their campaigns around the issue. And when the time came to cast ballots, crime was the second biggest concern among surveyed voters. But this political success comes at a graver cost: as the right continues to weave “tough on crime” narratives into their central rhetoric, they stoke a moral panic that distorts the bigger picture.
It’s true that felonies shot up from 2020 to 2022, trending along with the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. But pundits across the country use these facts to construe their own fiction. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently criticized New York City bail reform policies as too lenient while he claimed his own state’s crime was at a 50-year low. The measurement he referenced, however, omitted around half of Florida’s law enforcement agencies and more than 40% of its population. As Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted former President Donald Trump on felony charges, House Republicans responded by holding a “field hearing” of the borough’s violent crime victims in hopes of painting Bragg as soft and ineffective. And just last month, Trump, entrenched in a civil fraud lawsuit, decried violent crime to be at an all-time high in the city, which wasn’t actually the case.
Even at its peak, violent crime during and after COVID comes nowhere close to the city’s infamously high rates in the 1990s and early 2000s. And the upward trend of recent years has already begun downsizing to pre-pandemic levels. In fact, much of the campaign to portray NYC as a crime–ridden danger zone stems from political maneuvers that politicians design to improve their and their allies’ images. As is increasingly common in the post-Trump era, right-wing ideologues are sweeping the truth aside to make room for a sensationalized narrative that favors their political party and views, which can have grave effects on the public’s understanding of these issues.
Here is where moral panic comes in—i.e., “A mass movement based on the false or exaggerated perception that some cultural behavior or group of people is dangerously deviant and poses a threat to society’s values and interests.” These panics are often fueled by the mass media and trace back decades, from the Red Scare to Reagan’s War on Drugs to the current backlash over transgender identity, among other examples. Particularly, scholars divide moral panic into seven main topic clusters, street crime being one of them. Whenever new, emerging patterns in crime arise, media coverage is quick to follow, which makes it seem as though the situation is out of control to a frenzied public. In the context of New York City politics, both local and national Republicans are inciting moral panic through media sources around urban street crime, attempting to generate mass hysteria and fear in the name of their tough-on-crime agendas.
The effects of this demagoguery—appealing to people’s base emotions and biases over rational thought—run far deeper than public unease. With any emotionally charged mob mentality, people often demand quick, surface-level solutions at the expense of nuance. Research links moral panic to stereotyping of marginalized groups, which can be particularly harmful in shaping perceptions of low-income, predominantly Black and Brown communities in New York City.
In the context of crime, moral panic also oversimplifies policy approaches. While the immediate instinct is to instill harsher and longer sentences for perpetrators, studies show this is not an effective deterrent. Threats of prison sentences, increased severity, and capital punishment all do a poor job of prevention. So, as politicians and the media continue to generate melodrama for public consumption, their proposed solutions perpetuate criminal behavior in an endless cycle of incarceration, instead of addressing the root problems that lead to crime in the first place.
That is not to say that crime is not a serious problem. Violence still plagues NYC communities, even if not to the same caliber as a generation ago. It’s vital that we take the initiative to keep ourselves and others safe and for law enforcement to take proper measures to address suspicious activity, punish those who have committed violent crimes, and protect civilians from harm. But the status quo that many legislators—particularly Republicans, but also Democrats—insist on maintaining is one that capitalizes on widespread fear-mongering and bias to support a system that, put simply, does not work.
Because moral panic compels us to think in binaries—good and bad, order and chaos, crime and punishment—we often neglect to consider the deep inequities that underlie the issue. Violent crime doesn’t afflict certain neighborhoods more than others by a roll of the dice; the disparities arose over decades of racist housing policy that pushed Black and Brown communities to the margins, leaving them with scarce resources and few opportunities for social mobility. These trends continue to divide New York City demographics today, leaving countless citizens vulnerable and countless others wary of approaching these locales.
We see this even in our own community: Columbia University and its students often find themselves at odds with the university’s broader Harlem setting, an area affluent outsiders often shun for safety concerns, yes, but also one with a vibrant cultural significance that often gets overlooked amidst the alarm bells.
Cities are more than their crime rates, and crime is more than numbers on a page. To effectively enact preventative measures that spur meaningful change in New York City streets, we must unite against the backward-minded rhetoric that seeks to divide us.
Elliot Heath (CC ’27) is a staff writer for CPR planning to study English and film studies. A native New Yorker, he’s passionate about U.S.-based politics, social issues, and the arts. He can be reached at emh2276@columbia.edu.