Democrats seem incapable of connecting with voters on crime. In the 2024 election, Republicans stoked fear of violent criminals running amok, and since then, Democrats have responded mostly by avoiding the subject, leaving voters to conclude that they don’t care about crime or don’t believe in law enforcement.
Democrats don’t need to cede this ground. They have models in local offices across the country that show how they can win voters’ trust on public safety.
Joe Khan is one of them. This past fall, when Mr. Khan ran for district attorney in Bucks County, Pa., he toured families’ basements, seeing — and smelling — the water running through their filtration systems. It resembled jet fuel. A pipeline belonging to Energy Transfer, a large company that moves oil and natural gas, had contaminated their water supply. Mr. Khan called out the sitting district attorney, a Republican, whose office had declined to prosecute the company, deferring to state and federal authorities.
Mr. Khan won in Bucks County, one of the most politically contested areas in the country, in a Democratic sweep of local offices last November that made him the first Democrat elected district attorney since 1891. In a county that swung from Joe Biden in 2020 to Donald Trump in 2024, he and Danny Ceisler, an Army veteran who was elected sheriff, promised to protect people better than Republican counterparts would, with fairer and less politicized law enforcement. It worked.
When Mr. Khan became district attorney in January, he made good on his promise to pursue street-level assailants as well as white-collar wrongdoers. He prosecuted a man who used Roblox to prey on children, then expanded a lawsuit against the platforms that enabled it, making his one of the first district attorney’s offices in the country to sue the social media platform X. “I’ll go after the bad guys who want to prey on kids,” Mr. Khan said, “and I’ll go after the Silicon Valley companies that make that possible.” The message was simple: No one should feel free to flout the law.
Mr. Ceisler, too, imposed a different balance in his new office. His predecessor had signed an agreement to have sheriff’s deputies assist federal immigration enforcement, which Mr. Ceisler argued diverted them from local duties. “We have over 5,000 outstanding bench warrants in Bucks County,” Mr. Ceisler said. “I asked voters, don’t you want your deputies focused on that?”
Shifting resources back into local enforcement, he increased clearance rates on core responsibilities, such as serving warrants on domestic abusers. Mr. Ceisler took some of the politics out of law enforcement in Bucks County and kept his focus on the safety voters actually wanted, rather than on a federal immigration agenda that detracted from fighting everyday crime.
The county’s voters were probably more receptive to the message of fair enforcement because of the candidates’ backgrounds: Mr. Khan spent 16 years as a prosecutor and had the support of police officers; Mr. Ceisler served in Afghanistan and had run emergency preparedness for Gov. Josh Shapiro. Republicans couldn’t easily charge that they were soft. So one potential lesson is that Democrats should recruit more seasoned law enforcement officials to run for office.
Rob Sand, a former public corruption prosecutor and the only Democrat holding statewide office in Iowa, is running for governor on a record of prosecuting the powerful, in a state Mr. Trump carried by more than 13 points. His career is exactly the kind of enforcement credential that makes the message hard to attack.
This background, however, is not required for Democratic candidates to talk about crime. In 2016, Pennsylvania voters elected Mr. Shapiro as attorney general, even though he had never been a prosecutor, choosing him over two sitting district attorneys. They later elected him governor, after his landmark investigation into clerical sexual abuse.
What Democrats must avoid is a message that sounds too academic or legalistic. The injustices reformers point to are real and worth tackling, but when Democrats lead with that framing, instead of putting public safety first, they hand Republicans an opening to caricature the whole party as anti-police. Voters should not feel judged for wanting their neighborhoods protected, and Democrats need to earn the trust to go after the powerful by showing they will protect ordinary people. “People don’t want to hear ivory tower proclamations about social justice,” Mr. Ceisler told me. “They want to know that you’re going to keep them safe.”
Democrats in some places have learned this the hard way. In 2022, San Francisco recalled its district attorney, Chesa Boudin, a former public defender who had run as a progressive reformer. On the night of his defeat, Mr. Boudin argued that the country runs “two systems of justice,” one for the wealthy and well-connected and one for everyone else, a point not so different from the one Mr. Khan and Mr. Ceisler ran on.
The distinction was that Mr. Khan and Mr. Ceisler made ordinary people’s safety the center of their messages. Mr. Boudin failed to persuade enough voters that he cared about their day-to-day security. Voters will support the ambitious enforcement of powerful lawbreakers only when they are also convinced you are listening to their more immediate fears about holding violent criminals accountable.
Wage theft costs low-wage workers nearly $13 billion a year, and cryptocurrency scams deprived Americans over 60 of more than $2.8 billion in 2024. President Trump’s Justice Department has curtailed corporate prosecutions, closing a criminal investigation into Abbott Laboratories over contaminated baby formula and declining to prosecute Alibaba despite evidence it knowingly allowed dangerous drugs to be sold to American consumers. In cases such as these, ordinary people are harmed and the powerful escape accountability.
Calling for fair, comprehensive law enforcement is always reasonable, but now is a particularly good time: Rates of violent crime are at record lows, even as the Trump administration refuses to investigate other types of serious lawbreaking.
Democrats can get the better of fear-mongering Republicans by persuading voters that they will keep them safe from street-level crime and go after the powerful with commensurate force. If they do, they might win the argument on crime — and even deliver the equal justice they have promised for years.
Rotimi Adeoye is a contributing Opinion writer, a former congressional speechwriter and the author of American Pursuit, a newsletter on politics and policy.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post How to Talk About Crime Like a Regular Person appeared first on New York Times.
