That much-maligned 2024 election autopsy forked over by the Democratic National Committee last week –- with all the aplomb of a teenage boy surrendering his porn stash to Mom –- may be a worthless piece of trash. But it was right about one thing: “listening can indicate where voters are.”
Unfortunately, some “progressive” Democratic leaders too often flunk Listening 101. (Harvard students: that’s like getting an A-). They can’t even manage to listen to one of their heroes, the late Congressman Barney Frank, who spent much of his life trying to tell them the unwanted truth about their ideological blunders.
Among them: liberal tone-deafness about “fear of violent crime,” which Frank noted in a 1992 op-ed column had become “more and more a factor in American life” during the 1970s and 1980s along with “the notion that the Democrats were soft on crime.”
Because right-wingers had so effectively racialized fear of crime, the perception had developed that “Democrats were so much the prisoners of special interests that we wouldn't even support tough anticrime measures lest we offend some of these groups,” wrote Frank. “For many swing voters specifically, Democrats appear unwilling to stand up firmly against criminals because we fear alienating black voters. Of all the political misperceptions from which we liberals suffer, this is the worst -- the least accurate, the most socially pernicious and the most politically corrosive.”
Frank was hardly a lone voice on this back then. Rev. Jesse Jackson, no stranger to America’s grim legacy of white-on-black violence, noted during the crack-addled early 1990s that even he was becoming fearful of black street crime. President Bill Clinton proved the political necessity of being tough on crime (even as he sponsored heavy-handed anti-crime legislation that Jackson adamantly opposed).
But the lessons these leaders were trying to teach were widely ignored. In 2011, then-Gov. Deval Patrick, amid a debate over federal efforts to crack down on crimes involving undocumented immigrants, infuriated the grieving family of a 23-year-old Milford man murdered by a drunk driver living in the country illegally with a remark that evoked the infamously dispassionate Michael Dukakis line from 1988 about the death penalty. “Illegal immigration didn't kill this person, a drunk driver killed this person," said Patrick.
Footnote: the mother of the victim went on to become one of the “Angel Moms,” women who lost loved ones to criminals here illegally, who campaigned effectively for Donald Trump in 2016.
Fast forward to last week, when the Cambridge City Council voted to end the city’s use of ShotSpotter technology, a tool that alerts police to potential gunfire, speeding response time. The move came over the objections of the city manager and Acting Police Commissioner Pauline Wells, who noted the technology might have helped police deal with the mass shooting incident on Memorial Drive a few days before had it been deployed in the area. “Why wouldn’t we want to keep our community as safe as possible” Wells asked.
Because, a parade of liberals testified, surveillance is bad, especially when the data might be used by evil federal authorities to persecute minorities. No actual evidence of abuses related to ShotSpotter needed, apparently.
This was too much for black Councillor and former Mayor E. Denise Simmons, initially a supporter of the ShotSpotter ban who changed her mind after actually listening to her neighbors. Noting that none of the ban’s supporters lived in her crime-wary neighborhood, she urged them to hear “the people that look like me, that you may or may not have talked to, that I think deserve to be heard, even if they are different from what your perspective is” instead of indulging in “performative [allyship] and saviorism of marginalized people.”
Maybe her colleagues should heed the final pleas of Barney Frank.
Or even the advice of the now-discarded DNC autopsy, which noted: “The ability to drive listening through technology-based solutions can be a value add, with the understanding human intervention and inquiry are still needed to understand where the public is and how and why they may be moving.”
