Case Explained: Literary Hub » What We Talk About When We Talk About Crime – Legal Perspective

Reading the news, you’d think that crime is something naturally occurring, universally observable, and perhaps a little bit subjective, like a groundhog’s opinion of seasonal change. This arises from an incredibly weird juxtaposition where most of the national and local news we receive tells us only about the most shocking, memorable, or horrifying crimes and then turns around and takes a poll wherein ordinary people are asked whether they think crime is rising.

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Now, to be clear, crime is either rising or falling, in ways that usually make a bit of sense if you think about humans. Interpersonal violence, for example, appears to have risen after the pandemic lockdown, suggesting that bad things happen when we’re cooped up, under historic-scale anxiety, losing our jobs, unexpectedly homeschooling our kids, maybe drinking more to cope, and separated from our friends, with limited access to both the things we enjoy and the medicines we need (and, well, toilet paper).

This is what happens when we’re fed a carefully curated (often misleading) mirage, seemingly real safety data operating as highly legitimized clickbait.

There’s a great example of how our perception of crime is more political than realistic in a poll from Gallup that reveals that for the last twenty years if you ask Americans whether they think crime in their locality is higher or lower than it used to be, their answer doesn’t reflect the crime rate; it reflects whether their preferred political party is in or out of power.

Most people do not experience crime regularly, or even bear witness to it on a daily or weekly basis, nor do most people spend much time thinking about the underlying drivers of crime (except for you, of course, since you’re reading all about it here). Which means that when a pollster calls up a randomly selected citizen and asks them whether crime is up or down in their community, they probably don’t know. So they repeat what they’ve been told, usually by reporters, police spokespeople, or politicians who may be offering more ideology than information and taking us further from the possibility of having a shared news-based reality.

So, for example, as crime fell in 2023, the majority of Americans would still swear up and down that crime was rising. This is what happens when we’re fed a carefully curated (often misleading) mirage, seemingly real safety data operating as highly legitimized clickbait.

In the Bronx arraignment court, the handful of attorneys staffing the court on any given shift saw all the arrests and arrested people in the period of time for which we were there, giving us a regular sample of local criminal accusations. A substantial chunk of our cases were arrests for driving on a suspended license and trespassing, both of which involved little harm to the public. The suspended license folks were almost always stopped for a small traffic infraction like failing to signal or rolling through a stop sign, and often had no other matters in their record.

Crime, in this way, is often a reflection simply of where police choose to be.

The trespassing folks were often young, and mostly only hauled into court because New York’s “Clean Halls” program allowed landlords to sign up to have NYPD prowl the halls and stairwells of apartment buildings, demanding ID of anyone in those spaces and then arresting them if they weren’t a resident of the building and couldn’t get a resident to claim them as a guest . . . which meant that if you went to a friend’s apartment to see if they wanted to hang out and your friend happened not to be home, you were going to jail.

The accusations we would fight day in and day out were a good reflection of what the data tells us about crime: most crime is boring. Misdemeanors. Schoolyard scuffles, neighbor disputes, low-level drug use, injury-free DUIs. Very little of what we see is the kind of crime covered on the news. Violent crime is much less common than property crime, but on the news we see roughly equal amounts of news about the two. Unsurprisingly, the more people watch local crime news, the more frightened they report being, even if crime is not prevalent locally.

As described in the last chapter, there is a world of invisible crime the general public is simply not seeing, hearing about, or being protected from. So what are we encountering when we do hear about crime on the local news?

When we talk about crime, what we’re actually talking about is crime that police tell us about. They’re not telling us about any of the stuff in the last chapter. And they’re also not telling us about things happening in places they never choose to go, inspect, or attend to. Crime, in this way, is often a reflection simply of where police choose to be.

Take two communities—let’s call them Uptown and Downtown. Both have drug use and sales, wage theft in the local businesses, and environmental crime by industrial companies in the area. In Downtown, police concentrate their forces and set quotas for arrest, using a “stop and frisk” policy that subjects ordinary citizens to constant searches of their person. This drives up the number of low-level arrests for drug possession that police are able to make, sends more people to jail for substance use problems, and establishes Downtown as a “high crime” neighborhood. The jailing doesn’t fix addiction, and hardly anyone reaches recovery. Adults who should be home caring for their children are constantly being removed, fracturing families through continual arrests.

These constant arrests drive higher rates of eviction and joblessness as well as deepening poverty through the imposition of steep court fines and fees, leading ultimately to higher violent crime as economic mobility withers and people suffer from higher rates of untreated mental health conditions and substance dependence, fueled by the weakened access to care that comes with entrenched poverty.

In Uptown, though, police do not come unless called upon by the residents. In this gated suburbia, drug purchasing and use continue at the same initial rate as Downtown, but behind closed doors. Instead of being subjected to arrests and jail to stem addiction, the residents of Uptown, who remain housed and employed, are able to privately seek out medical help and substance use treatment, leading to higher rates of recovery from addiction.

Because arrests in Uptown happen only if police are called in by residents—usually only in cases of real violence or threat—Uptown is seen as a low-crime neighborhood. Inside the houses of Uptown there is no less domestic violence, child abuse, or date rape than in Downtown, but residents of Uptown are allowed to choose when to bring in an outside party and when to deal with matters privately, giving them a greater ability to choose when they want to engage with the court system and when they want to use private, therapeutic, or other means to respond to or recover from harm.

No-knock warrants set up some of the most lethal encounters between police and ordinary people, as evidenced by the case of Breonna Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old medical professional who was killed by police during an error-ridden no-knock raid in 2020.

Designation as “high crime” or “low crime” isn’t just branding for these regions, but materially changes the way police are allowed to enforce the law. In the case Illinois v. Wardlow, the Supreme Court weakened the right to be left alone—but only in “high crime” neighborhoods, where they decided that a citizen’s unprovoked flight from a police encounter was sufficient to legally justify seizure of that person by police, and that a police officer’s assertion that a person was being “evasive” was enough to create “reasonable suspicion” and allow police to stop someone. This ruling had a massive impact on low-income neighborhoods, which were suddenly subjected to a separate system of law, curtailing residents’ rights more sharply than their wealthier, whiter counterparts’.

And yet people living in hyper-policed neighborhoods may have much better reasons to run from police. As Justice John Paul Stevens himself pointed out in Wardlow, “Among some citizens, particularly minorities and those residing in high-crime areas, there is also the possibility that the fleeing person is entirely innocent, but, with or without justification, believes that contact with the police can itself be dangerous, apart from any criminal activity associated with the officer’s sudden presence. For such a person, unprovoked flight is neither ‘aberrant’ nor ‘abnormal.’ Moreover, these concerns and fears are known to the police officers themselves, and are validated by law enforcement investigations into their own practices.”

These erosions leak into other areas of law. Let’s say the state in which Uptown and Downtown are found has “castle doctrine” and “stand your ground” laws that allow people to defend themselves and their homes with violent force. The law, specifically, says that a homeowner does not need to retreat from an intruder before using self-defense, but can rather use lethal force to defend themselves and their property.

Because police can claim to the local judiciary that Downtown is a “high crime” area, they are able to get a judge to sign off on “no knock” warrants, which are a type of warrant allowing police to forcibly enter a civilian’s home without announcing themselves or identifying themselves as police. No-knock warrants set up some of the most lethal encounters between police and ordinary people, as evidenced by the case of Breonna Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old medical professional who was killed by police during an error-ridden no-knock raid in 2020.

Crime by powerful entities against marginalized people has always been minimized in our law enforcement apparatus.

They also enable the indelible biases of the legal system to reign supreme, because a homeowner who attempts to use the castle doctrine to defend his home against intruders will face grave felony charges if those (unannounced, unidentified) intruders happen to be police.

In Downtown, people are now living in greater fear—poverty and desperation, as well as substance dependence and worsening mental health, have driven up interpersonal conflict in the neighborhood and depressed home values, leaving more properties and lots vacant or derelict. More people are interested in carrying guns to protect themselves, but because police have chosen to concentrate enforcement so profoundly on Downtown, most people have also, by this time, been arrested at least once. This means that many people cannot legally own a firearm, but out of fear for their safety or their families’ they choose to carry one illegally anyway. But because the law allows police to search people more readily in “high crime” areas, people in Downtown are routinely stopped and frisked, leading to high rates of arrest for weapons possession. This, in turn, deepens the impression of Downtown as a dangerous place.

In Uptown, meanwhile, people keep their unregistered guns quietly in their homes. Many Uptown residents visit gun shows out of state and bring illegal weapons home for fun, unchecked by police. As Uptown becomes wealthier and Downtown becomes poorer, a greater concentration of local business leaders and powerful leaders chooses to live in Uptown. At work, these residents of Uptown are engaging in all manner of crime, but they are choosing forms of crime that are difficult to investigate and are therefore de-prioritized by police.

Wage theft, for example, is booming. This is a crime in which an employer illegitimately refuses to pay workers to whom wages or benefits are owed, such as by directly refusing to pay, paying less than minimum wage, withholding tips, not paying for benefits like Social Security, Medicare, or unemployment insurance, or misclassifying an employee as an independent contractor—and it’s incredibly common, not just in Uptown, but in all of America.

In 2017, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that just one form of wage theft (paying below minimum wage) resulted in minimum wage workers having more than $15 billion stolen from them every year, a number that exceeds the value of all robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and car thefts combined. This is a crime whose lack of enforcement arises cleanly from what police are willing to do, and whom they are willing to respond to. Because of course if a low-wage worker whose paycheck has been withheld decides to take money from the till, and their boss calls the cops, they are going to be arrested for larceny.

But if the boss is the one taking money from the employee, they are almost never dealt with by police or criminal courts. Instead, accountability for the powerful is shoved over into the civil rather than criminal court system. If an employee calls the cops, they can declare this outside their area of responsibility entirely, and leave it to local nonprofits or public interest groups to bring lawsuits against these companies. They can say this is a department of labor matter, meaning that the very same low-wage workers, in addition to potentially having to work multiple jobs to survive, must also figure out how to navigate the complex bureaucracy of an administrative agency, or find a lawyer for themselves and engage in civil litigation, just to get the same kind of recompense for theft that others can seek by calling 911.

Wage theft isn’t the only widespread crime you probably aren’t hearing much about. Crime by powerful entities against marginalized people has always been minimized in our law enforcement apparatus. American policing, after all, is an institution that emerged originally in the wake of the end of slavery and in the emergence of industrial capitalism in the mid-nineteenth century to protect the interests of the powerful against the interests of the poor. There is no reason why we, as a country, need to have police who fervently arrest people for jaywalking and prosecutors who ignore the chance to stop the leaders of companies that pollute entire towns or give thousands of children cancer.

Nevertheless, big companies that get prosecuted are likely to get “deferred prosecution agreements,” in which prosecutors agree to essentially put prosecution on hold to give the accused time to comply with certain conditions. These are made available even when the companies themselves may be repeat offenders. How many get them? It’s hard to say. The government doesn’t measure corporate crime rates.

In our example above, I expect that when you picture Downtown, you’re picturing run-down public housing complexes and people sitting on grimy street corners. Far too often, we see these vignettes of American poverty without recognizing them for what they really are: an image of the crimes of landlords who keep tenants in unconscionable conditions but prevail in court because tenants have no right to a lawyer in housing court. An image of public entities failing to comply with the law about lead paint, hazardous trash collection, or other public hazards. An image of people suffering because they cannot afford the price of a medicine they need, which has been unconscionably jacked up by a guy in a suit (or a hoodie) somewhere.

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Excerpted from The Price of Mercy: Unfair Trials, a Violent System, and a Public Defender’s Search for Justice in America by Emily Galvin Almanza. Copyright © 2026 by Emily Galvin Almanza. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.