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Democrats Face Pressure on Crime From a New Front: Their Base

BALTIMORE — A crowd of several hundred voters listened closely as Wes Moore, a Democratic candidate for governor of Maryland, unspooled a soaring peroration about bringing a spirit of unity to state government. Introduced by a sparkling drum line and a row of local dignitaries on a bright and windy Saturday, Mr. Moore promised to deliver a better quality of life for East Baltimore on issues from education to personal safety.

Listening from across a small park was Teresa Armwood, a resident of the neighborhood. Ms. Armwood, 75, said she liked Mr. Moore’s tone overall but had not yet picked a favorite from the throng of Democrats seeking to lead the state.

One subject was foremost in her mind: crime.

Gesturing to a block of low-rise brick homes a short distance from Mr. Moore’s bandstand, Ms. Armwood traced what she described as a perilous journey from her door to the nearest mass transit.

“I walk from over there to the bus stop, and from the bus stop back over there,” she said. “And hope I get that far.”

In Democratic strongholds like Maryland, a rise in violent crime has pushed the party’s candidates to address the issue of public safety in newly urgent terms. Even before the recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, reignited the debate over gun control, day-to-day gun crimes and other acts of violence were rattling the American electorate.

Long seen as a political wedge for Republicans to use against Democrats, crime is increasingly a subject of concern within the Democratic Party and the big cities that make up much of its political base.

And from Baltimore and Atlanta in the East to San Francisco and Seattle in the West, the candidates and elected officials pushing the party to address crime more aggressively are largely people of color. Candidates are motivated not mainly by fear of Republican attacks, but rather by mounting outcry from the Black, Hispanic and Asian American communities bearing the brunt of a national crime wave.

Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, a former police captain who made taking on crime the centerpiece of his campaign, has received the most national attention of these figures for his law and order rhetoric — and more recently for his struggles to implement effective anti-crime policies in office.

Yet he is only one of a larger cohort of Democrats who have been campaigning on those themes.

Rushern Baker, another Democratic candidate in Maryland’s race for governor, has promised to declare a state of emergency in Baltimore and pour police resources into the city. Credit…Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times

These candidates are casting aside the timidity that characterized Democratic arguments during the 2020 election, when much of the party was focused on root-and-branch reform of the criminal justice system in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Even though violent crime had begun rising during the coronavirus pandemic, Democratic leaders shied away from discussing it directly for fear of offending parts of their political base.

Alarming trends have changed the political conversation. In Baltimore, the city is on track to record more than 300 homicides for the eighth straight year, along with a rise in carjackings, robberies and other serious crimes. Concerns about police misconduct in the city have not evaporated seven years after the killing of Freddie Gray in police custody ignited protests and rioting, but persistent violent crime has pushed voters’ tolerance to the breaking point.

Those developments have transformed the Democratic Party’s discourse on matters of law and order, forcing the party to balance its determination to overhaul the criminal justice system with the imperative to protect its most loyal voters from a tide of violence.

Tom Perez, the former Democratic National Committee chairman running for governor of Maryland, said crime had moved to the foreground of the midterms. A former labor secretary and a top Justice Department official in the Obama administration, Mr. Perez has emphasized his background as both a prosecutor and police reformer on the campaign trail.

“Crime is a real issue for voters in this campaign, and it should be,” Mr. Perez said in an interview. “And it’s not just an issue limited to Maryland — it’s across America.”

Mr. Perez said his party needed to reject the notion of a binary choice between protecting civil rights and keeping communities safe.

“You either stop crime, or you respect the Constitution — that’s a false choice,” he said.

On the other side of the country, Mayor Bruce Harrell of Seattle, a moderate Democrat who defeated a left-wing opponent last year, placed rising crime and a shortage of police officers at the center of his candidacy.

Mr. Harrell, who was inaugurated in January as Seattle’s second Black and first Asian American mayor, said voters of color in his city responded to a message of making the police more responsive but not “militarized or racialized” — an allusion to the heavy-handed and often discriminatory tactics favored by law-and-order mayors of the past.

Democrats, he said, need to understand that many voters cannot embrace the rest of their agenda if they do not feel safe. “Every community here demands safety,” Mr. Harrell said.

“We’re going to focus on public safety and ensure people feel safe in their own neighborhoods, in their own homes and in their own skins,” Mr. Moore said at a rally.Credit…Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times

‘Appropriate Intensity’

The Maryland election is a microcosm of the developing Democratic arguments. The top candidates have not exactly lurched to the right on matters of law and order; even the sternest-sounding crime fighters are mingling their promises to crack down on violent offenders and impose new gun regulations with pledges to advance a progressive agenda on social welfare.

But in seeking support from Democratic primary voters, several Maryland Democrats are emphasizing public safety. Their appeals are aimed especially at older voters of color in Baltimore and the state’s dense suburbs, who are typically more moderate than the activist base.

During his speech in East Baltimore, Mr. Moore, a 44-year-old military veteran and former philanthropy executive, called for the police to battle crime with “appropriate intensity and absolute integrity.” He promised that as governor he would overhaul the state’s parole system to rein in repeat offenders and increase funding for state law enforcement agencies in order to help police at the local level.

“We’re going to focus on public safety and ensure people feel safe in their own neighborhoods, in their own homes and in their own skins,” Mr. Moore said, drawing energetic applause from the crowd.

Mr. Moore is one of several Democrats, including Mr. Perez and Rushern Baker, the former executive leader of Prince George’s County, who are vying to overtake the early front-runner, Peter Franchot, the long-serving state comptroller who is the only major white candidate in the race.

Mr. Baker has promised to declare a state of emergency in Baltimore and pour state police resources into the city. In early May, he unveiled a television commercial vowing to “stop the slaughter of young Black men” in the city and decrying what he called the state’s indifference to crime victims there.

“Because they’re Black, nobody gives a damn,” Mr. Baker says in the ad.

The issue has permeated state politics beyond the governor’s race. In Baltimore, the incumbent state’s attorney, Marilyn Mosby, is facing a threat in the Democratic primary from multiple candidates who are challenging her record of responding to violent crime there. She is also vulnerable because she is under a federal indictment on charges of perjury and financial misconduct.

Mr. Baker at a news conference in downtown Baltimore in April.Credit…Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times

Her most prominent challenger, Thiru Vignarajah, a former deputy attorney general of Maryland, has accused Ms. Mosby of failing to develop complex cases against violent offenders and of sending a permissive signal to criminals by announcing she would no longer prosecute certain misdemeanors like drug possession and trespassing.

“I think traditional politicians have just misread what the people in these disinvested communities want,” Mr. Vignarajah said. “They don’t want to unleash the police to do whatever they want, but they also don’t want you to tell criminals there are no consequences for their conduct.”

A study published in April by the Pew Research Center found that Black Americans were likeliest to name violence or crime as the top concern facing their communities, followed by economic issues and housing.

Eugene Tetteh, 51, was among the Moore supporters who said in an interview that public safety was a top-of-mind issue, along with education. Mr. Tetteh, who lives in suburban Howard County but does business in Baltimore, said he had been alarmed by how “overwhelmed” the police seemed in the city. Young people, he said, were especially vulnerable on disorderly and dangerous streets.

“There has to be more to it for these kids out there than that,” he said.

Todd Scott, 59, a voter at Mr. Moore’s rally, said he wanted to see the next governor take a comprehensive approach to battling crime and its underlying causes. An official with the state housing department, Mr. Scott said he admired the outgoing Republican governor, Larry Hogan, who has crusaded for police funding and clashed with local Democrats who resent what they see as his heavy-handed style.

“The number one focus in keeping our city and our state where it needs to be at is crime,” Mr. Scott said.

He added that fighting crime has to involve more than locking up criminals. “You’ve got to focus on all the issues that lead our youth to the crime — which is housing, which is education,” he said.

The Shadow of Defund

In 2020, Democrats faced a barrage of attacks from Republicans branding them as indifferent to violent crime and tying the party as a whole to a progressive criminal-justice agenda that included directing money away from policy departments and scaling back prosecution of low-level offenses.

A report compiled in 2021 by three major Democratic interest groups, including the centrist organization Third Way, concluded that Democrats had spent the last election “stuck on defense” on crime. The party, the report stated, needed to have “a proactive story about necessary systemic changes to policing that would stem the violence and still prioritize and provide public safety.”

Mr. Biden has highlighted the public safety funding in the American Rescue Plan, his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill that allocated huge sums of money for state and local services. Last month, the president held an event with police chiefs urging cities to spend pandemic-aid money on strengthening law enforcement ahead of an anticipated summer spike in crime.

President Biden delivering remarks on policing and the American Rescue Plan at the White House last month.Credit…Sarah Silbiger for The New York Times

In the aftermath of the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings, national Democrats have once again rallied behind gun-control proposals, though it is unclear whether any of them has a chance of making it through the split Senate.

Many left-leaning Democrats remain skeptical of traditional law enforcement methods, viewing police departments as irreparably biased against people of color. Other party leaders worry that shunning progressive policies on crime could fracture their coalition, angering progressive activists and younger liberals.

Yet demands for safer neighborhoods from voters of color have made it impossible for Democrats to keep talking around the issue.

In New York City last year, Mr. Adams won the Democratic nomination for mayor after accusing left-wing Democrats of being indifferent to crime “at a time when Black and brown babies are being shot in our streets.” In Atlanta, voters elected as mayor a onetime underdog candidate, Andre Dickens, who promised to be “laser-focused on reducing crime.”

In December, the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, declared a state of emergency in the Tenderloin neighborhood to counter rampant street crimes.

Ms. Breed’s city appears poised next week to recall a progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, whose policies have taken much of the blame for what critics say is San Francisco’s passive response to rising crime. (The city’s former mayor, Willie Brown, recently joked that while New York State was investigating Donald J. Trump for financial crimes, Mr. Boudin would oppose incarcerating the former president because he would be considered a nonviolent offender.)

At a recent campaign stop in Prince George’s County, where Mr. Baker addressed a small group of reporters about carjackings, he said too many Democrats had been afraid to speak out against crime because they worried the Black community would react against it. In his own experience, he said, the reality was just the opposite.

“I don’t want to say they’re being politically correct, but they are,” Mr. Baker said of more cautious Democrats. “They don’t want to look like they’re overreacting.”

Both Mr. Baker and Mr. Moore have stressed how crime had touched their own lives. At his stop in Prince George’s, Mr. Baker talked about having his car stolen three times from in front of his own house. In an interview, Mr. Moore recalled having recently attended one funeral for a friend’s brother who had been shot and killed in his car, and another for an elderly woman who was murdered while working in his church.

For voters, Mr. Moore said, crime was “very personal.”

“You need to listen to what people are telling you,” Mr. Moore said. “And they’re telling you that this issue is a prime issue.”

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