The Chinese government could use TikTok to control data on millions of people and harness the short-form video app to shape public opinion should China invade Taiwan, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday.

Why is the United States so exceptionally violent? In 2021, for example, more than 26,000 Americans were murdered—a homicide rate that would be unthinkable in the affluent market democracies of Europe and East Asia. There are any number of explanations for America’s outlier status, including deep-seated cultural characteristics and the prevalence of firearms. But we suggest a different, more parsimonious perspective: This high level of violence is a policy choice brought about by insufficient action. We are so violent because we underinvest in our criminal-justice system.

That may seem counterintuitive amid claims that the U.S. spends excessively on public order and safety, and a movement to “defund the police.” But across all levels of government, the U.S. spends less than 1 percent of its GDP on policing, a share that has declined since the Great Recession. Our level of spending and the number of police officers we employ per capita put us in the middle of the pack relative to our OECD peers, even though our crime rate is far higher. And police-employment rates are declining, a concern police leaders were raising as early as 2019.

Then there is the structural fact that U.S. police departments are far more fragmented than those of our peer countries—the U.K. has 43 distinct police departments, whereas the U.S. has about 18,000. One result of our idiosyncratic approach to financing law enforcement is that poor and nonwhite jurisdictions have far less police protection than richer and whiter jurisdictions do. All this “under-policing” contributes to higher murder rates, especially in predominantly Black communities.

The problem doesn’t stop with policing. Court backlogs ballooned during the coronavirus pandemic, but even before then, courts were already taking too long to clear cases: According to research from the National Center for State Courts, just 30 percent of felony criminal cases were disposed of within 90 days, compared with the national standard of 75 percent. Our data on crime are in disarray too—in 2021, the FBI was forced to statistically guess at nationwide crime rates.

[Alec MacGillis: The cause of the crime wave is hiding in plain sight]

Some might object that the United States is home to a large and well-funded network of prisons, at least as measured by the number of people we incarcerate in them. But by other measures, we surely don’t spend enough. In-custody deaths are at shockingly high levels. A quarter to half of former prisoners reoffend within five years of release. And ex-offenders are massively overrepresented among the homeless population—a reflection, in no small part, of the inadequacy of the services available to people transitioning out of prison. Our penitentiaries house a large number of offenders, but that doesn’t mean they have the resources to protect and rehabilitate them.

One could trace this chronic underinvestment at least as far back as the Jim Crow South, when underfunded law-enforcement agencies were strikingly indifferent to violence against Black Americans. In The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, the legal academic William J. Stuntz observed that whereas killers of white Americans in that era could generally expect a vigorous response from the criminal-justice system, killers of Black Americans, regardless of race, were very likely to go free. And, as the journalist Jill Leovy observed in Ghettoside, that era’s absence of effective crime control in Black communities gave rise to vigilantism: Many Black individuals who found no recourse in turning to the law felt compelled to take matters into their own hands.

That pattern reverberates even now. In 2020, for example, Black Americans were the victims in 61 percent of all gun homicides, most of which go unsolved and unpunished by the law. Assuming they are apprehended and punished at all, offenders whose victims are Black can be expected to receive lighter sentences than those whose victims are not Black. In some zip codes in the United States, young Black men are more likely to be killed than if they served in wartime Iraq and Afghanistan.

This endemic violence has devastated the civic infrastructure of many American cities. Lawlessness gives rise to middle-class flight, which in turn shrinks the tax bases that finance local law enforcement. The isolation and deprivation that result are nothing less than a moral scandal.

[Nicholas Dawidoff: Poverty is violent]

The criminal-justice system affects millions of people every year, yet this crisis of underinvestment has been largely overlooked. Indeed, recent years have seen renewed liberal support for disinvestment in the criminal-justice system, propelled by the widely held view that we over-police communities of color and over-incarcerate.

The woefully unpopular “defund the police” movement is only the most visible manifestation of rising support for disinvestment. It has also appeared in the push to shift many functions—including traffic enforcement and public-order maintenance—out of the criminal-justice system and often into the (less accountable) NGO sector, and in the imposition of unfunded mandates on police departments and prisons in the name of reform.

This approach is perhaps best understood as a sort of progressive version of “starve the beast,” the conservative theory that slashing taxes forces cuts in government programs. Advocates of criminal-justice reform argue in effect that because the system is broken, we should defund rather than fix it. They point to police misconduct and violence as evidence that policing doesn’t work, not that policing needs more resources. They point to slow courts as a reason to release suspects pretrial, rather than asking how to ensure speedy trials. They point to the worst conditions in America’s prisons and jails as a reason to decarcerate, but they don’t talk about how to make incarceration more humane and less criminogenic.

This “starve the beast” approach is particularly peculiar from the left, which usually identifies government dysfunction as a product of underinvestment. In this case, that prescription is correct: Improving our criminal-justice system means spending the requisite money to address America’s horrific and long-standing problem with criminal violence.

One leader who seems to understand this is President Joe Biden. The White House has pushed back against “starve the beast” progressivism, floating a $37 billion public-safety plan. Some of its investments—including $13 billion for the COPS Hiring Program and investments in court case-management tools—are smart steps in the right direction. But it also spends billions on alternatives to the criminal-justice system, including community-violence-intervention programs whose efficacy is at best unproven, and alternative responders who address just a fraction of police calls for service. It’s worth researching how these programs work at scale, but handing them $20 billion before that’s done seems unwise at best.

What could and should garner bipartisan support is a more focused package, one that concentrates federal dollars on improving the institutions we know keep us safe. Hiring tens of thousands of police officers, as Biden wants to do, is a good start. So is funding to help courts expedite case processing, particularly by modernizing case-management software and practices—which would in turn help bring backlogs under control. An obvious third area is rehabilitating failing prisons and jails. In addition, funding for research, evaluation, and statistics—which pays for both crime data and criminological research—has plummeted in recent years. Charging the Justice Department’s research arm, the National Institute of Justice, with making creative investments would make our system both smarter and tougher.  

Why are these more traditional tools of crime control the right way to fight crime? Because decades of evidence show that they work. Studies of federally subsidized police-hiring grants consistently find that cities that receive the grants reduce crime compared with those that don’t. One study found that the burst of hiring overseen by the Obama administration prevented four violent crimes and 15 property crimes for each cop hired. For every 10 percent increase in police-force size, another estimate suggests, violent-crime rates drop by 13 percent and property-crime rates by 7 percent.

The benefits of funding don’t stop with police. The speed with which courts dispose of cases has been considered central to criminal deterrence for centuries. Supporting this, probation programs that impose what experts call “swift, certain, and fair” sentences—a short jail stay—have been shown to deter drug offenders in Hawaii and drunk drivers in South Dakota. And it’s intuitive that worse prisons engender more crime: Research from Colombia finds that as-if-random assignment to a newer, better prison reduces an offender’s risk of reincarceration within one year by 36 percent.

In short, spending on our criminal-justice system’s capacity offers palpable, proven returns. This is particularly significant against the enormous costs of crime, estimated at more than $600 billion in 2017 alone—mostly due to violence. If we have a pressing problem, and tools that can address it, how can we not use one to resolve the other?

Some conservatives may blanch at expanding federal spending amid soaring inflation and a looming debt crisis. But a small increase in the federal government’s already limited outlays for public safety—about $66 billion in 2021—could be compensated for with spending cuts on less-effective programs. And although state and local policy makers should lead the way, the federal government has long used the power of the purse to backstop the provision of the state’s most basic function: public safety.

Standing up to “starve the beast” progressivism makes sense electorally. But it is also the right thing to do for our too-violent nation. Every year, tens of thousands of people are murdered. We can do more, much more, to stop the bleeding, if only we spend what’s necessary to meet our most basic civic obligation: protecting public order and safety.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave Fox News access to thousands of hours of video from the events of January 6, and Tucker Carlson’s effort to rewrite history isn’t just laughably incompetent; it’s already falling flat.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Barton Gellman: A troubling sign for 2024 “I teach international relations. I think we’re making a mistake in Ukraine.” The most overrated movie of this Oscars season

A Clumsy Gambit

When a mob tried to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, congressional Republicans—especially those in the Senate—seemed briefly to understand the magnitude of the events around them. Kevin McCarthy, then the GOP minority leader, said that President Donald Trump bore responsibility for the attack. Even Lindsey Graham swore he was done with Trump.

This new seriousness didn’t last. A year after the attack, most Republicans—including McCarthy—ducked a ceremony at the Capitol marking the anniversary and commemorating the lives lost. McCarthy would later be elected speaker on the say-so of a handful of extremist Republicans—some of whom openly sympathized with the 2021 insurrectionists—who made him grovel through more than a dozen rounds of voting. Insofar as other Republicans can bring themselves to even acknowledge January 6, many of them still portray it as a legitimate protest that somehow got out of hand rather than what it really was: a seditious conspiracy to attack the American system of government, instigated and encouraged by a sitting president of the United States.

Heading into the 2022 midterms, the Republicans hoped that an attempt by their party’s leader to overthrow the constitutional order would be no impediment to regaining national power. The midterms, however, proved that Americans still care about their democracy and that they could not be swayed to trade their freedom away merely because gas prices are too high. At this point, the Republicans are barely holding the House, and Trump is leading the pack of possible GOP presidential candidates while yawping about “retribution.” Most Americans continue to think January 6 was a terrible day for the United States and that Trump bears at least some responsibility for it.

Not to worry, Republicans. McCarthy and Fox News’s resident pluto-populist Tucker Carlson are on the case. Unfortunately, it’s going about as well as you’d expect from anything that involves the words Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson.

To recap the events of the past few weeks: McCarthy apparently decided that Carlson was the person who could remove the stain of January 6 from the Republican Party. Remember, once Trump was elected in 2016, the GOP was a national majority, holding the House, the Senate, the White House, most governor’s mansions, and most state legislatures across the country. Trump destroyed much of that, and his decision to run again meant that January 6 could not somehow be memory-holed. So the speaker gave the ever-perplexed Carlson access to thousands of hours of video from the attack.

The objective here was clear from the start. If the GOP is going to make a run at national power again, it must find a way to deny the reality of January 6 and neutralize the cloud of seditious stink that still clings to every Republican because of Trump and the insurrectionists. Who better than Carlson to sneer his way through a dismissal of one of the worst days in the history of the United States?

Unfortunately, the attempt to gaslight millions of people isn’t going very well. Carlson, as my colleague David Graham points out, is engaging in a “long-standing Donald Trump approach of demanding that his supporters believe him rather than their lying eyes.” But there are likely limits to that gambit even for Carlson, who is presenting as bombshells things we already knew. It is not a revelation, for example, that the “QAnon Shaman,” Jacob Chansley, walked along with Capitol cops who were trying to keep the fur-hatted weirdo calm even while he was howling in the Senate chamber. Carlson’s attempt to deny the danger of that moment is not only silly but also a gobsmackingly incompetent attempt to use footage depicting a rioter whose bizarre behavior was already well-known to the public.

It’s one thing to assume that the Fox audience isn’t very bright and will believe almost anything—I will gladly stipulate to that—but it’s another to ask them to leap across a chasm of credulity. Sedition-friendly Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, tried to capitalize on Carlson’s after-school-video special by immediately calling for a new trial for Chansley. But even Fox viewers probably know that Chansley wasn’t convicted in a trial: He loquaciously pleaded guilty and got a stiff sentence of 41 months in prison.

I realize that, for many reasons, I am not Carlson’s target demographic. (He’s not much of a fan of my work either.) But when Republican members of Congress are pushing back on a major propaganda effort to help … well, to help the future fortunes of Republican members of Congress, things are not going well. You might have expected someone like Senator Mitt Romney of Utah to zing Carlson, and he did, saying the Fox host had gone “off the rails” and describing him as a radio “shock jock.” But conservative Senators Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Mike Rounds of South Dakota both criticized Carlson. (Even Senate Minority Leader and ongoing profile in courage Mitch McConnell carefully opined that Fox “made a mistake” in depicting January 6 in a way that was “completely at variance” with how the head of the Capitol Police “correctly” described the day.) Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina said Carlson’s presentation was “inexcusable” and, for good measure, “bullshit.”

Trump, of course, thanked both Carlson and McCarthy. Because, really, if the point was to reassure the American public about whether the GOP is still in the grip of violent seditionists, what better way to do it than to clumsily cherry-pick some video and then elicit an all-caps tirade from the leader of the Republican Party?

LET THE JANUARY 6 PRISONERS GO. THEY WERE CONVICTED, OR ARE AWAITING TRIAL, BASED ON A GIANT LIE, A RADICAL LEFT CON JOB. THANK YOU TO TUCKER CARLSON AND SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE KEVIN McCARTHY FOR WHAT YOU BOTH HAVE DONE. NEW VIDEO FOOTAGE IS IRREFUTABLE!!!

Well then. As Sonny Bunch from The Bulwark wryly observed this morning: “Going to be kind of funny to watch GOP candidates dance around acknowledging that the presidential frontrunner and the party’s semi-official media organ are more or less pro-storming-the-Capitol at this point.”

As counterintuitive as it might be, perhaps the best thing for American democracy would be for Carlson to keep bumbling his way through more January 6 footage and to keep images of the insurrection in front of millions of viewers for as long as possible. If that’s how McCarthy and Carlson intend to restore the image of the GOP as a normal political party, who are any of us to argue with such public-relations geniuses?

Related:

Tucker Carlson and the new narrative of January 6 The new Lost Cause

Today’s News

Two of the four Americans who authorities say were kidnapped in a border city of Mexico have been found dead. The other two are alive, but one is injured. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell testified to the Senate Banking Committee, telling lawmakers that the Fed will likely raise interest rates higher than previously forecasted. In a speech at the Morgan Stanley conference in San Francisco, Elon Musk commented on the future of both Twitter and Tesla.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Derek Thompson lays out some surprising effects of remote work: more marriages, more babies, bigger houses.

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Evening Read

Alima Lee

Kelela Knows What Intimacy Sounds Like

By Hannah Giorgis

On a Tuesday afternoon last month, I found refuge from the dreary chill of New York’s winter in the cardamom-scented warmth of Benyam Cuisine, a small Ethiopian restaurant in Harlem. The family-run establishment is normally only open for dinner Wednesday through Sunday. But that day, a co-owner trekked in from Jersey City to indulge two homesick Ethiopian American women: myself and Kelela, the enigmatic R&B singer whose fan base includes the likes of Beyoncé, Solange, Björk, and, not coincidentally, the Benyam host’s niece.

Kelela, who is 39, has cultivated a mystique that’s exceedingly rare in the modern music business. It’s been nearly 10 years since she released her 2013 mixtape, Cut 4 Me, which earned her an eclectic following of industry heavyweights, R&B purists, dance-music DJs, and indie obsessives. In 2017, she dropped her studio debut, Take Me Apart, which cemented her standing as one of modern R&B’s most inventive vocalists. Take Me Apart is by turns brooding, defiant, and haunting—and in each register, Kelela’s voice wraps itself around the melodies with hypnotic confidence. After that creative leap and the subsequent tour, she essentially vanished.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic

Read. “Nomenclature,” a poem by Clint Smith.

“Your mother’s mother came from Igboland

though she did not teach your mother her language.

We gave you your name in a language we don’t understand

because gravity is still there

even when we cannot see it in our hands.”

Watch. Catch up on some Oscars contenders before the awards show on Sunday.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

The director Michael Bay has taken his share of criticism over the years for producing movies that are big and loud and a bit dumb. (One word: Transformers.) His 2001 historical epic, Pearl Harbor, was so bad that the South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone immortalized it in a ballad in their hilarious movie Team America: World Police that included the lyric, “I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark / When he made Pearl Harbor.” But I am going to admit that I am a sucker for a few Michael Bay movies, and especially one of the most fun adventure movies of the 1990s: The Rock. (I discovered in a conversation this morning that this is yet another movie, like so many from roughly 1970 to 2000, that is completely unknown to my Daily editor Isabel Fattal, so I am recommending it to both you and her.)

Released in 1996, The Rock features Ed Harris as a renegade Marine general who has had enough of the wimps in Washington ignoring the sacrifices of brave men who died in black operations. He and his crack military team steal some nerve gas, set up a base on Alcatraz—the Rock—and hold San Francisco hostage. After just about everything else fails, an FBI biochemist played by Nicolas Cage and a former British spy played by Sean Connery (who is obviously supposed to be James Bond and whose character was held for years as a prisoner for stealing American secrets back in the 1960s) are sent in to get the rockets. Bullets; carnage; hard, manly stares; set jaws; inventive cursing; and a fair amount of hilarity ensue. This movie has so much testosterone in it that you could grow a beard sitting too close to the screen, but it’s also genuinely funny, with some classic dialogue that I cannot possibly repeat here. Bring a lot of popcorn to this one, and try not to repeat the best lines at the office.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.