Broadsheet

I was about to write about the train murder in North Carolina, but the assassination of Charlie Kirk pushed it out of the news. For those who don’t know, here’s the story:

Gruesome video shows a man stabbing a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee to death on a Charlotte light rail train…The unprovoked attack — which is being investigated by the FBI — happened shortly before 10 p.m. August 22…
The victim, Iryna Zarutska, fled Ukraine in 2022 with her mother, sister, and brother to escape the war with Russia…
The suspect, Decarlos Brown, 34, was…charged with first-degree murder. Homeless at the time of the stabbing…Brown has a lengthy criminal history, including convictions for armed robbery, felony larceny and breaking and entering. Family members told CNN he has a history of mental health struggles…He spent more than five years behind bars for robbery with a dangerous weapon, state records show. North Carolina state records list 14 cases for Brown, other than those related to the killing. They stem back to 2011 and include arrests for minor offenses like speeding and shoplifting. It is unclear how many of them were prosecuted[.]

A more detailed (and more gruesome) account can be found here.

About two weeks after the murder occurred, it exploded into the public consciousness. The FBI declared an investigation, and President Trump posted a montage of the victim on social media.

This being America in the 2020s, a lot of people insisted on viewing the case in racial terms. Right-wing accounts decried black crime rates, and Fox News showed statistics about interracial violence. This was unhelpful. Although the killing was probably a hate crime — the perpetrator repeatedly says “I got that white girl” in the video — it was also the act of a lone schizophrenic who claims that the victim was reading his mind. Blaming a whole racial group for the actions of a lone psycho killer makes no sense.1 As Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael Mangual write, this is really a story about how our broken justice system releases repeat offenders and criminally insane individuals back into society again and again, rather than a story about race relations.

On the flip side, some progressive commentators seemed more worried about racist reactions to the crime, or about the fate of the perpetrator, than about the gruesome murder itself. CNN’s Brian Stelter fretted about “pro-Trump activists” making political hay out of the murder, while Van Jones expressed sympathy for the killer, declaring that “The man who stabbed Iryna Zarutska was hurting…hurt people hurt people.” This was also unhelpful. Just as minority groups shouldn’t be blamed when someone from that group commits a crime, the perpetrators shouldn’t be given special protections or consideration because of their race.

Meanwhile, some cynical commentators (including myself) simply noted that it was nice to see MAGA types expressing sympathy for an immigrant refugee, and for a Ukrainian. It would be nice if they could extend the sympathy they felt for Iryna Zarutska to the many thousands of young Ukrainian women who are being raped and murdered by the invading Russian army.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say about the racial politics of this particular murder. But the urban politics are much more interesting. In the wake of the killing, a number of people argued that incidents like this are why America doesn’t have good public transit:

These people are overstating their case, but when you get right down to it, they do have a point. America’s chronically high levels of violence and public disorder are one reason — certainly not the only reason, but one reason — that it’s so politically difficult to build dense housing and transit in this country.

For many years, I’ve been involved with the urbanist movement in America. I want to see my country build more dense city centers where people can walk and take the train instead of driving. That doesn’t mean I want to eliminate the suburbs; I just don’t want to have San Francisco and Chicago and Houston feel like suburbs. If we have dense cities and quiet suburbs, then every American will get to live in the type of place they want to live in. Currently, the only dense city we have is NYC.

But I think my fellow urbanists are often a bit naive about what it’ll take to get more dense, walkable city centers in America. They often act as if car culture is an autonomous meme that just happened to develop in America, and that real considerations like violent crime played no role in driving Americans — both white and nonwhite — out of urban cores in the 20th century.

A fair amount of research around the world shows that fear of violent crime keeps a lot of people from using public transit. Urbanists can shout all they like about how driving is far more dangerous than taking the train or bus, but telling people what not to be afraid of has a very poor track record as a method of persuasion. Air travel and terrorism are both examples where dangers that are out of people’s control are scarier than dangers people feel they can avoid, such as car accidents. We devote huge societal resources to minimizing the risks of plane crashes and terrorist attacks, and if we want more Americans to embrace life in dense cities, we’re going to have to do the same with the risk of crime on public transit.

The slaying of Iryna Zarutska was a sensational incident, but not an isolated one. Back in 2018, three people were stabbed to death on the Bay Area’s BART train within a span of five days. There was a mass shooting on an NYC train in 2022. That same year, an Asian woman was pushed onto the train tracks and killed at the Times Square station. In 2024 a sleeping woman on the NYC subway was lit on fire and burned to death.

Those are the most sensational incidents, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg; tons of crime on public transit goes unreported, even when it reaches epidemic proportions, such as during the anti-Asian hate crime wave in 2021.

Americans are simply not going to accept a transit-centric lifestyle unless and until the incidence of violence on trains and buses goes way down. I was about to write a whole post about this, but I realized I already wrote one, last year:

I could probably improve on it a little, but not much. So here’s that post, republished. Urbanists need to take this to heed.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m a huge fan of dense, walkable cities. Much of my enthusiasm comes from living in Japan for several years, and I’ve written a bunch of posts about why Japanese cities are so especially great. Here was the most relevant one for today’s post:

Back home in America, I’ve called for a bunch of changes to make our cities better places to live. Most importantly, we need more housing density and better transit. These are the two main goals of the YIMBY movement. I also want more commercial density — lots of shops in walkable downtown areas — which is something YIMBYs should focus on more than they do. I don’t think American cities are going to become like Tokyo — or Paris, or Singapore, etc. — anytime soon. But I think places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Miami, and Philadelphia can move enough in that direction to make a big difference in America’s quality of life, and probably in our economic productivity as well.

But we’ll need to change a lot about our society in order to get there. Usually, when I talk about urbanism, I talk about land use deregulation, increased transit funding, and transit cost reduction, so that we can build dense housing and transit cheaply and abundantly. And I think those policies are incredibly important. But when I suggest these policies to conservatives, or even just to politically neutral NIMBY types, the response I always get is that Japan and Europe can have nice cities because they have public order. They point out the vast disparities in violent crime between America and the rich nations of Eurasia:

With America’s high crime rates, they say, we could never have cities like that.

And I think the conservatives and NIMBYs are partially right. They’re partially wrong, in that you don’t have to have a city as safe as Tokyo in order to have lots of density and good transit. NYC has a homicide rate of about 4.6 per 100,000 as of 2023, which is about 10 times that of Tokyo and 4 times that of Paris, and yet it’s super dense and very walkable. But they’re partially right. One reason is that, just as they say, low levels of both violence and general public disorder probably make it a much more pleasant experience to walk around a downtown area. In my post about why Japanese cities are such nice places to live, I wrote:

Good public safety makes people feel safer leaving their homes — especially women, and especially at night. This makes neighborhoods more vibrant and increases the feeling of community. And when it’s safe to go outside, living in a small apartment doesn’t feel nearly as confining; no one feels like they have to hide inside their house from muggers, rapists, etc…In fact, there’s a virtuous cycle between public safety and dense walkability — the more people are out walking around, the more “eyes on the street” there are to deter crime, which in turn makes more people feel safe walking around.

In fact, there’s evidence that crime represents a sort of “congestion cost” that makes cities function less efficiently.

But there’s another effect here that’s political in nature. Both violence and general disorder probably discourage locals from supporting both housing density and public transit — in other words, they give rise to NIMBYism. Transit, especially if it’s made free or if fare-jumping is easy, allows both criminals and drugged-up disorderly types2 to reach otherwise peaceful neighborhoods. And since apartment complexes A) are cheaper to live in than single-family houses, and B) usually come with inclusionary zoning requirements that require any new complex to include some poor tenants, they also mean more poor people in the neighborhood. If a city has poor public safety and public order, this means increased danger — or at least increased anxiety — for existing residents.

This turns some people NIMBY out of concern for public safety. And NIMBYs themselves are the main obstacle to building denser cities in America. When NIMBYs tell you that America isn’t safe enough for density, they are describing their own motivations and concerns.

It’s important to note that it barely matters whether NIMBYs are right about the effect of apartment construction and transit on local crime. For example, while there are certainly a number of studies finding that adding transit increases crime near bus stops and train stations, the estimated effects are generally small, and a few studies find no effect.3 But the claim that trains bring crime to safe neighborhoods is incredibly common in American politics. Without a widespread perception of public safety and order, people will keep using NIMBY anti-development policies to try to keep anyone away from them who even might commit a crime or make a scene on the street.

We can try to simply yell at fearful NIMBYs to stop being a bunch of NIMBYs and call them racists and segregationists and petty landed gentry, but this approach historically has poor results. Instead, the country should address their concerns about violence and disorder, in order to build a constituency for urbanism in America. (And of course, needless to say, lowering crime and increasing public safety is good in and of itself.) Europe, Asia, and New York City have all largely figured out how to do this. We can learn from their successes.

Europe, Asia, and NYC put a lot of cops on the street

Matt Yglesias had a good post back in 2023 about Europe’s approach to public safety and order:

Slow Boring

Europe's "law and order" urbanism

I love walkable cities with mass transit and traditional urbanism, but I actually don’t love huge cities…

2 years ago · 256 likes · 441 comments · Matthew Yglesias

One key is gun control, of course. But another very important policy is to have a lot of police officers. Matt writes:

France has, for example, about 150,000 members of the Police Nationale, plus another 100,000 members of the Gendarmerie. They are supplemented by a Police Municipale in the cities that’s about 20,000 strong, and there are apparently about 1,000 rural guards. That’s about four officers per thousand people, while the FBI says the United States has between 2.4 and 3.4 law enforcement personnel per person, depending on how you count.

In fact, although Europe has a reputation for being lenient in terms of policy toward crime, most European countries — and East Asian countries — have more police per capita than the United States does. Here’s a chart from Lewis and Usmani (2022) showing that while America has higher rates of incarceration, other rich countries tend to have more cops:

The guys with machine guns in the image at the top of this post are, if I’m not mistaken, part of the Gendermerie Nationale, France’s national police force. You see these guys standing all over Paris with big imposing guns. Somehow it detracts from neither the walkability nor the charm of this safe, low-crime European megacity. Yglesias notes that nationalized police forces are a feature of many European countries, which might or might not be a good lesson for America.

But the real point here is that as Lewis & Usmani argue, and as Alex Tabarrok has been arguing for years, the U.S. is probably under-policed. In fact, there’s a ton of evidence that simply hiring a lot more police officers reduces crime. German Lopez did a great review of the research literature in 2021, when “defund the police” was a hot-button issue, so I’ll quote from him:

There is solid evidence that more police officers and certain policing strategies reduce crime and violence. In a recent survey of criminal justice experts, a majority said increasing police budgets would improve public safety…A 2020 study…by [Chalfin et al. for] the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded, “Each additional police officer abates approximately 0.1 homicides…
A 2005 study [by Klick and Tabarrok] in the Journal of Law and Economics took advantage of surges in policing driven by terror alerts, finding that high-alert periods, when more officers were deployed, led to significantly less crime.

And Chalfin and McCrary (2018) find that once they try to correct for certain errors in police data, the effect of policing on crime is even larger.

Increased numbers of police act through several channels, which can be difficult to disentangle with evidence. First, their presence on the street deters crime directly, because people don’t want to commit crimes in front of police. Lopez writes:

Hot spot policing…focuses on problem areas, even down to specific city blocks, with disproportionate levels of crime and violence. Police departments send officers to these places with a goal of deterring further disorder…A 2019 review in the Journal of Experimental Criminology looked at dozens of studies and found hot spot policing reduced crime without merely displacing it to other areas, and, in fact, there was evidence of “diffusion” in which crime-fighting benefits actually spread to surrounding areas. The review relied on several strong studies, including randomized controlled trials (generally the gold standard of research), suggesting that the findings were based on solid ground.

Second, the general presence of a bunch of cops in a city acts as a deterrent, because would-be criminals are afraid of being arrested and punished after the fact. There are some studies on “focused deterrence”, in which cops try to contact gangs and warn them not to commit violent crimes, and these generally find a positive effect. But there’s probably a more general deterrence effect that operates through word of mouth — when would-be criminals hear about people getting arrested, it makes them think that if they commit crimes, they too will get arrested.

The third way cops fight crime is via incarceration itself — they arrest criminals, who then get prosecuted and incarcerated, which removes repeat offenders from wider society. Scott Alexander has an excellent (and very long) review of the literature on incarceration and crime here:

Astral Codex Ten

Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

10 months ago · 527 likes · 919 comments · Scott Alexander

The basic upshot is that removing criminals from society does prevent crime, although the financial cost of preventing crime this way — which involves supporting prisoners for many years of their lives — is very high. Hiring more police does reduce crime a lot, but the physical incapacitation piece of that is the most expensive piece. Ultimately he agrees with Tabarrok, and with Lewis & Usmani, that America is over-prisoned and under-policed.

In general, there’s an emerging consensus that the specter of long prison sentences doesn’t act as much of a deterrent to criminals, but that a high probability of being caught is a very effective deterrent. Jennifer Doleac, who studies the economics of crime, writes:

[M]ost people quickly age out of crime. There is lots of data documenting that the likelihood of committing crime increases until ages 18 to 20, then decreases. (Crime is largely a young person’s game.) That means we are incarcerating lots of people who are no longer an active threat. It’s a waste of money and does not make us safer.
Long sentences might be useful if they deterred crime — that is, if the threat of a harsh punishment provided a meaningful incentive to obey the law. But research consistently shows that increasing the probability of getting caught is far more effective. Most would-be offenders are probably not thinking very far ahead, which means the chance they’d be arrested weighs far more than the details of any future imprisonment.

(I highly recommend this long interview of Doleac by the excellent Jerusalem Demsas of The Atlantic, by the way.)

Alex Tabarrok agrees with Doleac’s prescriptions, harshly criticizing economists who assume that criminals are rational actors. He argues that a high probability of swift punishment for wrongdoing, with small punishments at first and long sentences only for a few incorrigible offenders, is the way to go.

A high probability of punishment comes from more policing. It increases the chance that a cop will be available — even nearby — to go catch a criminal. It increases the number of cops to follow up leads and investigate cases. And as Doleac writes, more cops allow for more frequent nonviolent positive interactions between the cops and the communities they police, which builds trust and improves both reporting of crimes and snitching. (Note: Congress is already working on a bill to provide more funding for detectives, to improve the abysmally low rate at which American police forces actually solve crimes.)

So anyway, this is the first big piece of what Europe and Asia do to reduce crime: Hire a lot of cops. This is also a big part of why NYC is one of America’s safest big cities. In terms of total police department employment per population, New York is second only to D.C.

Of course, gun control is also an important factor in why cities in other rich countries are safer. Some American cities have been able to enact stringent gun measures that, if enforced, would prevent most criminals from owning guns. But therein lies the rub, as they say — as Matt Yglesias has pointed out, gun control can only be enforced by a whole lot of policing.

Other rich countries are also noted for the professionalism of their police forces. America requires very little training for its officers, compared to its peer nations:

This isn’t because the U.S. is averse to long training requirements for its professions — an American cosmetologist has to train for 3000 hours to be certified, which is almost five times as much as a police officer. One might think that handling matters of life, death, and the law would take a little more professionalism than putting on makeup and cutting hair.

Another thing that Europe and Asia do — and which NYC does to some extent — is to have cops stand around on the street instead of driving around or waiting for calls in a station. I wrote about the effectiveness of police boxes and foot patrols back in 2020:

In America, the police mostly drive around, looking for people to pull over and waiting to respond to 911 calls. In Japan, however, lots of police walk around on the street, or stay in police boxes known as koban (交番). And this totally changes the dynamic of police-community interaction!! In Japan, you can (and people often do) ask cops for directions! You can stand around and chat with cops if you like! You can even ask cops for recommendations for local shops and restaurants. And the cops themselves have a totally different experience — instead of only interacting with civilians when something bad is going on, they see thousands upon thousands of people peaceably going about their business, and interact with many of these people…
In the U.S., a cop showing up means that a dangerous, potentially violent confrontation is imminent. In Japan, it’s no big deal — just a person in a uniform standing there, like a security guard in a store…
In addition to creating routine, positive police-community interactions, police can deter crime just by walking around. Experiments with police foot patrols have found that they reduce crime substantially.

There’s plenty more evidence that foot patrols are highly effective in reducing crime.

Note that there’s a strong synergy here between urban density — especially commercial density — and effective policing. If there are a few areas with a lot of foot traffic, it’s easier for cops to stand around and make sure those areas feel safe.

Leftists and many progressives, of course, doggedly oppose all these measures, labeling them “carceral urbanism”. But although I’ve jokingly embraced that label, the reality is that an urbanism that focuses on public safety isn’t really very carceral — it would shift America’s resources from punishing crime to preventing it from happening in the first place. Lewis & Usmani call this a “first world balance”, and it does seem to be what all the countries with nice cities are doing.

Europe, Asia, and NYC get mentally dysfunctional people off the street (and the train)

One thing more people are realizing in the wake of the pandemic is that urban disorder and urban violence are not quite the same thing. Disorder refers to things like public drug use, chaotic street behavior that poses a threat of potential violence, and ubiquitous property crime. No city typifies this distinction more than San Francisco, which has a low-ish murder rate for a U.S. city, but which is awash in visible drug use, petty crime, and scary mentally ill people on the street. Here’s what I wrote back in 2023:

SF has one of the highest property crime rates of any city in the nation. Car break-ins are ubiquitous, and seeing thieves stripping car engines on the street is commonplace. The city has suffered from the same wave of retail smash-and-grab thefts common throughout the Bay Area since 2020. There is a steady drumbeat of stories about thieves ransacking businesses, invading homes, and robbing patrons in cafes.
Now, having your car smashed or your store ransacked or your laptop stolen out of your hands usually doesn’t kill you. Only very rarely do you actually die from that. But it’s a constant reminder that you’re at the mercy of men who could do violence to you if they wanted. If you try to keep hold of your precious laptop, will the thief pull out a knife and slash your throat? If you accidentally catch someone smashing your car window, will they use the baseball bat on your head instead? If you try to protect the merchandise of the store that employs you — on which you depend for your very livelihood — will the thief pull out a gun or a knife? And so on. Property crime is scary because it carries with it the threat of violence.
The second reason is the presence of a lot of loud, aggressive, erratic people on the streets…San Francisco is awash in methamphetamine (which makes people violent and sometimes psychotic) and fentanyl (which is highly addictive, and may cause violence or psychosis upon withdrawal). Signs of these epidemics are everywhere; needles are everywhere on the streets, and drugs themselves are often discovered just sitting around. A number of downtown areas are basically open-air drug markets…
Streets filled with aggressive, screaming strangers and ubiquitous drug markets usually don’t kill you. But they make many people feel unsafe nonetheless. Could the guy who staggers by you bellowing racial slurs be about to beat you…or stab you… Who used the needles lying on the ground in the park where you take your children to play, and will the drugs they used caused them to turn violent? Etc.

San Francisco’s urban chaos is immediately visible to everyone who visits:

It’s true that these problems mostly afflict the downtown area and the Mission district; most of the rest is relatively orderly and nice. But the areas blighted by disorder are the exact same areas that have the greatest density and the most transit stops. This fact has not been lost on the residents of San Francisco’s nicer neighborhoods, who are some of the most NIMBY in the entire nation.

The disorder also afflicts public transit as well. San Francisco’s trains, especially the BART, are notoriously full of disreputable characters, making them a terrifying experience for women, the elderly, and other vulnerable groups. Here’s a pre-pandemic article from SFist that paints a pretty accurate picture:

BART has been lamenting a loss of around 10 million riders on weeknights and weekends over the last five years…[T]he insides of trains are filthy and gross, and people are worried about being robbed or accosted while they ride them…As for petty crime, that seems to be more prevalent during rush hours when thieves can snatch cellphones on crowded trains, dart out of doors and disappear onto crowded platforms. But news reports of violent crimes like one that happened Tuesday night when a man was the victim of an unprovoked attack with a chain, or the fatal stabbing that occurred in the middle of the day last November, are enough to scare anyone from wanting to be trapped on a nighttime or weekend train, especially in Transbay Tube, when someone is having a mental health crisis or is otherwise being threatening.

A pretty clear illustration of the danger of disorder on public transit comes from New York City this week, where a mentally unhinged person burned a sleeping woman to death on the subway. NYC is one of America’s safest big cities, and the murder rate is low. But you should be able to ride the train without being worried that a crazy person will burn you to death if you fall asleep.

There are a number of things American cities can do to curb this urban disorder, if they’re so inclined.

First, note that both Europe and Asia make it much easier to involuntarily commit people with psychiatric disorders to mental institutions. The U.S.’s de-institutionalization movement in the 1960s and 1970s went much further than similar movements in other countries, and the idea that involuntary commitment represents a form of totalitarian state oppression is still a pillar of progressive ideology to this day.

Of course, sometimes, the progressives were right — and still are. Involuntary commitment lends itself to abuses, since mentally ill people are easy to take advantage of. Mental hospitals require constant monitoring to prevent such abuses. But the alternative that America has embraced since the 70s is arguably even less humane — it has condemned many people with severe and dangerous mental illnesses to bounce back and forth between jail and the terrors of the streets.

Involuntary commitment, not conformist culture or racial homogeneity, is the why mentally ill people don’t scream at you on the streets of Tokyo. I have personally witnessed a dangerous mentally ill person being forcibly restrained and committed in Tokyo — it’s not pretty, and I hope there’s oversight to prevent that person from being abused, but it works.

Notably, New York City has tried to fight the post-pandemic wave of urban disorder by stepping up efforts to involuntarily commit people. San Francisco, though, has declined to follow suit. And most cities in America simply ignore the question, since they’re not walkable enough for mentally ill street people to matter much.

As for transit, a key method of keeping it orderly is to simply make people pay for it. Crazy people and petty criminals are often deterred by the small cost of a train or bus fare. Progressives, of course, always push for free public transit; when that doesn’t work, they fight against vigorous enforcement of fare jumping. But this usually spoils the commons that public transit represents — by letting a bunch of crazy people and petty criminals ride for free, it discourages the mass of normal folks who can choose to walk or bike or drive or take Uber. This results in public transit becoming a form of taxpayer-supported welfare instead of a service that most voters use — and this tends to make it vulnerable to budget cuts and disinvestment.

Lo and behold, when some BART stations in the Bay Area put in new ticket gates that are very hard to get past, and added more cops on trains, conditions on the train rapidly improved.

Beyond expanding involuntary commitment and enforcing transit fares, there are a bunch of small things American cities can do to curb disorder — arresting people for selling fentanyl on the street, investigating and imprisoning the smash-and-grab rings that terrorize urban retail outlets, and so on. San Francisco did many of these things in advance of Xi Jinping’s visit to the city for the APEC summit in 2023, and large parts of the downtown area have been noticeably nicer since then (“noticeably nicer” being a relative term, of course). If SF can clean up disorder for the dictator of China, why can’t it do it for its own regular law-abiding taxpaying citizens?

Matt Yglesias also points out that cities in Europe are much more tolerant of ubiquitous security cameras. Cameras are certainly one reason why crime in Japan is so low. In America, the progressives who tend to dominate big-city politics and culture have fought tooth and nail against expanded use of cameras, despite the fact that the chief beneficiaries of those cameras would be poor people of color.

In general, American cities — and to some degree, states — have tried to use anarchy as a form of welfare. By being permissive toward aggressive street behavior, drug use, fare jumping, and petty crime, they have tried to make life more tolerable for poor people. Except it’s primarily poor Americans whose lives are wrecked by the social ills that progressives refuse to crack down on; the middle class and the wealthy can retreat to their car-centric suburbs.

And so American cities are known throughout the world as shitholes, and their residents hide in their houses and drive their cars down highways to the mall instead of taking the train and walking through a nice downtown full of shops. Small-time fentanyl dealers, shoplifters, and unhinged street bullies have a slight measure of freedom, and the regular citizens of America go visit the metropolises of Asia and Europe and wonder what their own country is missing.

Update: Lehman and Mangual have some additional data about the lack of safety on American public transit, and some good ideas about what could be done to improve it:

Charlotte’s public-transit system has a reputation for danger. In recent polling, just 37 percent of residents of the surrounding Mecklenburg County described the system’s buses and trains as safe from crime, and just 29 percent called the stations safe. That’s consistent with research showing that extending the Blue Line caused an increase in crime in the immediate vicinity of new stations. But the problem isn’t just in Charlotte. Although major crimes are declining nationwide, crimes on transit remained elevated through the end of 2024, according to data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
How can Charlotte keep people such as Brown off the train? The answer goes back to his first offense of that evening—failure to pay his fare. People likely to commit major offenses underground also tend to commit minor offenses: fare evasion, riding bicycles or scooters in a station, or using drugs. In recent years, many jurisdictions have ratcheted back enforcement of these offenses on public transit. Charlotte is only now saying that it will add fare-inspection capacity, following years in which nobody checked tickets.

I strongly recommend the rest of the article as well.

Subscribe now

And focusing only on white victims causes us to ignore other horrific cases, like the black San Francisco father who was attacked and stabbed to death by a Hispanic man while picking his son up from school the other day.

These people often get called “homeless”, but in my experience actual homeless people tend to be less disorderly and violent than drugged-up people who already have places to live.

The same seems to be true of housing construction. Some studies find that public housing, or subsidized “affordable” housing, is associated with a small increase in local crime, other studies find no effect. In general, the effect seems to depend a lot on the type of neighborhood where the housing is built, and on the characteristics of the housing itself. These studies are less cut-and-dry than the studies of bus stops and train stations, so I decided to put them in a footnote.

GDP projections of Federal Reserve Governors and Reserve Bank presidents, Change in Real GDP¹
Projection Date	2025	2026	2027
Sept 2025	1.4 to 1.7	1.7 to 2.1	1.8 to 2.0
Jun 2025	1.2 to 1.5	1.5 to 1.8	1.7 to 2.0

Unemployment projections of Federal Reserve Governors and Reserve Bank presidents, Unemployment Rate²
Projection Date	2025	2026	2027
Sept 2025	4.4 to 4.5	4.4 to 4.5	4.2 to 4.4
Jun 2025	4.4 to 4.5	4.3 to 4.6	4.2 to 4.6

Inflation projections of Federal Reserve Governors and Reserve Bank presidents, PCE Inflation¹
Projection Date	2025	2026	2027
Sept 2025	2.9 to 3.0	2.4-2.7	2.0 to 2.2
Jun 2025	2.8 to 3.2	2.3-2.6	2.0 to 2.2

Core Inflation projections of Federal Reserve Governors and Reserve Bank presidents, Core Inflation¹
Projection Date	2025	2026	2027
Sept 2025	3.0 to 3.2	2.5-2.7	2.0 to 2.2
Jun 2025	2.9 to 3.4	2.3-2.6	2.0 to 2.2

From The 19th – CHICAGO — It is 2 p.m. on a Friday before a long weekend and as Kat Abughazaleh sits down at the tamales shop near her campaign office on Chicago’s North Side, she laments that the day has been so busy that she’d only managed to scrounge up a single saltine with some hot sauce.

Saltines and hot sauce have become a go-to snack for the 26-year-old Democratic congressional candidate. Running for the House of Representatives has proven to be consuming, and the combo always seems to be on hand.

Already that day, Abughazaleh had woken up early for a therapy appointment (that she’d forgotten to schedule), taken her cat to the vet, arrived at the office for an all-day staff retreat to discuss their signature-gathering efforts to get on the ballot and participated in a photo shoot for this story. She updated her widely followed social media accounts along the way, teasing a forthcoming video that would highlight how the fight for workers’ rights in Chicago helped establish the imminent Labor Day holiday.

Thursday had been a late night — the campaign had hosted a punk show at a Wrigleyville bar. Punks for Progress featured three bands: Rude Echoes, The First Rule and Malört & Savior. In between sets, the local stand-up comedian Steve Tapas cracked that he knew the $5 he spent for the Abughazaleh campaign sticker on his drink cup “was not going to Democratic consultants” and blasted party leaders for being feckless when it came to standing up to Republican President Donald Trump.

Kat Abughazaleh sits outside a restaurant near her campaign office in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, on August 26, 2025. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)

“What did you say? You didn’t like Chuck Schumer’s resistance? What? You don’t think the DNC, that took over $1.5 billion to lose the last campaign, is doing enough?” Tapas said to jeers from the crowd.

The vibe in the bar was righteous fury. Attendees in earplugs — available for free in the rear of the room, at the merchandise table — nodded their heads as Tapas said, “The price of eggs is $9 and my trans friends are scared to walk down the street.” They were dressed in “Tax the Rich” t-shirts, and in American flag pants, and in denim jackets with patches for the punk bands Minor Threat and Bikini Kill and another that urged “Protect Trans Youth.” There were songs about American imperialism and lyrics about how “nothing lasts forever, even one’s country.” There were reminders to tip the bartender, a military veteran. Special guest DJ Jayleigh, who spins for drag and burlesque shows, joined The First Rule on stage for their song “Dictator (We Elected A…),” written after Trump’s first election, when Abughazaleh was not yet old enough to vote.

Abughazaleh wore a black leather jacket over a “Make Nazis Afraid Again” t-shirt, denim cutoffs, fishnet stockings and black high-heeled boots. Periodically, she would stop skanking — a type of moshing associated with ska music — and take the microphone to talk about affordable housing, groceries and health care, a trifecta she called “basic human rights.” She gleefully told the crowd that she had just texted a friend: “There’s a keffiyeh in the mosh pit!” She and members of Malört & Savior took shots of the band’s namesake anise-flavored liquor, infamous to Chicago.

Looming over the event was Trump’s recent intimation that the city could be next on his list to send federal law enforcement. “Are we pissed the fuck off?” Abughazaleh called out. “Yeah!!!” the crowd responded. “Can I get a ‘fuck ICE!’ in here? Can I get a ‘fuck Trump!’ in here?” she continued.

“This is not just about me getting into Congress — I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life,” Abughazaleh told them of her campaign. “I’m 26 and this is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done, it is the most exhausting thing I’ve ever done. How do people do this for decades and decades? The conclusion I’ve come to is that they stop doing it right. And what we need right now is representatives that talk to people, that listen to them, that flex empathy like a muscle, and then leave this job … for the next generation.”

When Abughazaleh launched her bid to represent Illinois’ 9th District on March 24, her 26th birthday, she joined a growing cohort of young Democrats who have concluded the stakes for democracy are so high — and the party’s old guard is so reluctant to give up power — that they need to push their way into the political arena, even if they are met with resistance.

At the time, the heavily Democratic district’s current representative, Jan Schakowsky, had not announced plans to retire, so Abughazaleh’s candidacy meant that she was challenging an incumbent who had held the seat since the year she was born, 1999. Abughazaleh explained that while Schakowsky was a reliably liberal vote in Congress, the last presidential election — when Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden on the ticket at the eleventh hour and ultimately lost to Trump despite raising and spending $1.5 billion in a whirlwind campaign — underscored the need for proactive generational change.

Abughazaleh’s campaign slogan is a question: “What if we didn’t suck?” The “we” are Democrats. In a direct-to-camera launch video, she says, “Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dismantling our country piece by piece and so many Democrats seem content to just sit back and let them. So I say it’s time to drop the excuses and grow a fucking spine.”

Though Trump’s approval rating is underwater and sinking, a series of opinion polls released over the summer also portend serious issues for Democrats as they attempt to take back control of the House, Senate or both in the 2026 midterm elections. Angry Democratic voters spent the summer at town halls pleading with their representatives to do more to counter Trump and his agenda. Pundits have started asking whether this is the Democrats’ “Tea Party” moment, likening it to the grassroots conservative takeover of the Republican Party in 2010 after the election of President Barack Obama.

Abughazaleh explained that the question of Democratic succession is “less about age and more about the fact … that you’re legislating on ideas that are completely abstract to you as a person.”

“Most of our members of Congress didn’t go through school shooting drills or didn’t have kids that went through school shooting drills; they don’t have to worry about out-of-pocket [health care] costs or paying rent because they own their house, and that’s good for them, but it makes it really difficult when you’re legislating about corporate landlords or about universal health care or about gun control,” she said.

Abughazaleh’s path to being a congressional candidate has been as surprising to herself as much as to anyone else: She was supposed to be monitoring right-wing politicians for Media Matters for America, the liberal nonprofit newsroom where she got her first non-service industry job after graduating from George Washington University in 2020. But after Musk sued the organization over their reporting on antisemitism on his social media platform X, Media Matters was forced into layoffs and Abughazaleh lost her job. She joined her partner, Ben Collins, in New York City for a time and then did a stint freelancing as a “digital nomad” while she figured out how to leverage the large social media followings she had built across platforms. Her longtime bio on X, formerly Twitter, was: “I watch Tucker Carlson so you don’t have to.”

When Collins moved to Chicago to become chief executive of the satirical newspaper The Onion, Abughazaleh saw it as a chance to explore another geographic “cornerstone” of her family. Abughazaleh’s maternal grandmother was a prominent GOP operative in Texas; she was raised in a household where President Ronald Reagan could do no wrong. She grew up in Dallas, spent summers in a tiny Colorado town and moved to Tucson halfway through high school. Chicago, though, was where her father spent much of his childhood. His own father settled there after fleeing The Nakba, an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” that describes the mass, forced displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Abughazaleh noted that she “could have, from day one, been like, ‘I’m a third-generation Chicagoan,’” to quash early criticism in the House race that she was a carpetbagger who had moved to the city just months before. “But I think that’s kind of toxic, how we look at politics, and I don’t think that should make someone vote for me. There are a lot of refugees in our own country that are coming here, whether it’s because you or your kid is trans, or you’re trying to protect your reproductive health,” she said, adding that once she starts trying to have children, for example, she won’t be comfortable spending time in Texas due to its restrictive abortion laws.

“One of the cool parts of the campaign is learning specifics about my family history here,” Abughazaleh continued. “I knew my grandfather came here for college. He went to George Williams, when it was still in Hyde Park, then went back to the Middle East and opened the first Western-style supermarket in Kuwait. We have a lot of really cool volunteers who have kind of gone into archives. They found this picture of my grandfather in his yearbook … it’s like ‘Taher Abughazaleh, an ardent advocate for the rights of the people, reads his Quran in traditional costume.’”

The move to Chicago meant Abughazaleh was on the ground for last summer’s Democratic National Convention. She got credentialed as an independent creator to cover it. When it became clear that party leaders would not allow a Palestinian speaker as Israel’s war in Gaza raged on, dividing the party’s base, she joined a group of uncommitted delegates outside to protest. They slept there; the experience was overwhelming. “I heard slurs that I never heard before, aimed at us, and I am a Palestinian kid who grew up in Texas after 9/11,” she said. But there was also kindness: Colleagues at a podcast she was contributing to sent tea, coffee, nicotine and snacks.

“I still had hope till the end of the DNC. I was, like, maybe there’s a chance to turn this around. And then they didn’t; she didn’t,” Abughazaleh said of Democrats and Harris. “Then a bunch of people who haven’t won an election in a decade or more came in and gave the same shitty advice that’s lost us elections unless we had a literal global pandemic.”

On election night, Abughazaleh went to bed early as Collins continued to watch returns. When she woke up briefly in the early hours of Wednesday and saw that it was shaping up to be a near clean sweep of swing states for Trump, she thought, “Fuck it, I’m going to run for something.”

Then she went back to bed.

It took Abughazaleh several more months of tallying up what she thought was wrong in Democratic politics before she definitively decided to challenge Schakowsky. The final straw was watching party leaders at Trump’s inauguration, then, them “pushing through his fascist appointees.” She recalled thinking, “They’re not going to do anything, are they?” Sometime in February — “I don’t remember the exact breaking point, but there’s a note in my planner” — she told herself: “OK, I guess I’m running for Congress now.”

But she would run a very different type of campaign.

Abughazaleh has focused on mutual aid and is using her campaign’s fundraising prowess to inject resources into the district. The price of “admission” to her launch event was donated menstrual products, which were given to an area shelter. Backpacks filled with supplies were stacked in a corner of the campaign’s office from a recent back-to-school drive. During the backpack drive, the campaign booked a popular barbershop for the day, providing $2,500 worth of free haircuts, mostly for kids. Sam Weinberg, Abughazaleh’s 24-year-old campaign manager, said he was drawn to work for her, despite not having traditional campaign experience, because of the “vision of the campaign she had,” which “wasn’t awful and soul sucking.”

Amanda Litman, the co-founder and president of Run for Something, which supports young and diverse progressive candidates in state and local races, said that roughly 67,000 people have signed up to explore a run for office since the 2024 elections — more than during the entirety of Trump’s first term. About 80 percent are under 40 and the field slightly favors women. While Run for Something does not work with candidates for federal offices, Litman said she still gets a lot of email from people considering running for Congress, “and particularly about primarying Democrats.” She has spoken to Abugazaleh informally and is tracking her campaign, but is not advising her in any official capacity.

Litman said the biggest spikes in interest that Run for Something saw were in the two weeks after Trump beat Harris; in February, after the first wave of firings of federal workers by Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE; when New York City progressive Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral primary; and in March, when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer “caved” — Litman’s word choice — during a congressional standoff over a spending bill and worked with Republicans to avert a government shutdown. As another spending fight looms, liberal commentators are questioning whether Schumer and other leaders need to embrace more obstructionist tactics.

“The thing we’re hearing that’s different this time around is that people are saying, ‘I’m done waiting for my turn,’” Litman said of the influx of candidates. “They’re particularly furious at the party leadership and they want to see that the leaders are as mad as they are.”

She said if you plot Democratic candidates on two axes, fight versus fold and transform versus return, in terms of the direction of the party, it’s “the people on the fight and transform, they’re breaking through.”

At the federal level, these candidates face real headwinds: Taking on an entrenched incumbent requires tenacity and economic resources. But it has been done before. In 2018, now-Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat then-Rep. Joseph Crowley of New York, who was seen as a potential successor to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the years since, she has built a national profile via her savvy use of social media and membership in the Squad, a group of progressive House lawmakers who are mostly women of color. They are a frequent target of right-wing media and politicians, while also sometimes playing the role of left-of-center antagonists to their own party. Their stances on national and international issues — a minimum wage hike, raising taxes on the wealthy, universal health care, the war in Gaza — carry immense weight with the Democratic base.

Ocasio-Cortez is now seen as a potential challenger to Schumer. Around the time that the minority leader canceled his book tour during uproar from Democratic voters about the government-funding battle, Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont packed tens of thousands into venues for their Fighting Oligarchy Tour.

“AOC is absolutely an inspiration,” Abughazaleh said. “She created a permission structure for people like me to be able to run, and I wanna create a permission structure for even more people.”

Abughazaleh pointed out, when drawing contrasts between herself and her Democratic primary opponents, that she comes into the race already having a sizable social media following and is likewise already accustomed to weathering attacks from prominent far-right figures — many of them virulently misogynist.

Young candidates who, like Abughazaleh, are challenging their party’s status quo skew liberal. Beyond policy, they share the sentiment that their party elders did little to stop Trump’s rise and are ill-equipped now to contend with the far-right forces his movement unleashed. They reject the conclusion, after Democrats’ brief soul-searching following the party’s devastating 2024 loss, that Harris’ failure to respond to Trump’s attacks on her support of transgender people led to her defeat. (Rumored 2028 presidential hopefuls, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, have since publicly softened their support for transgender rights, specifically as it relates to playing sports.)

These young candidates make the case, in styles that range from angry to humorous, that it’s time for those in power to step aside from the broken system they have built and make room for a generation that has never experienced anything else, but insist a different, better Democratic Party is possible. They believe that showing they are willing to fight to protect vulnerable people’s rights, while offering an economic plan that appeals to the middle and working classes, isn’t an either/or but a both/and endeavor.

“Trans people have kitchen tables. People that love trans people have kitchen tables. Immigrants have kitchen tables,” Abughazaleh said. “Democrats have been messaging on this issue, which is basic human decency, wrong this entire time. It’s a two-pronged thing. When it comes to extremism, if you’re constantly ceding ground that trans people don’t deserve to exist, or that there are carve-outs for that … it never stops with the people that you deem inhuman, it will always come to you.”

At a Pride Month event, Abughazaleh gave anti-LBGTQ+ protesters the middle finger during a clash, prompting outrage online from the political right. “Yes, I did flip off some bigots for telling children they’d go to hell and, no, I’m not going to apologize,” she said in a video response. The campaign designed a “Kat isn’t sorry” t-shirt with her image, middle finger raised. The shirt urges people to “stand up for trans kids.”

Abughazaleh noted that the far-right uses a playbook of division so their attacks “resonate with people whose material needs aren’t being met.” She cited Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “war against queer people” as a modern-day example. She also pointed to how “when the Nazis came to power in Germany, one of the first things they did was burn down the library of gender and sexuality.”

Abughazaleh does not accept corporate PAC money and has pledged to offer would-be constituents greater access to her, something her campaign is already doing with weekly “office hours.” During one such office hour in July, as she waited for her first guest to join, she fielded a question from the online chat about what she would do after serving her self-limited five terms. She immediately responded: “Hang out with Heater, obviously.” Heater is the cat Abugazaleh adopted with Collins last year after she gifted him a visit to a Brooklyn cat cafe, even though she is allergic to cats. She has embroidered Heater’s likeness on a pair of denim overalls. The orange cat is also depicted on a favorite set of earrings.

Abughazaleh said that when she made initial calls about taking on Schakowsky, “I had people literally hang up the phone when I said there was an incumbent.” She saw it as further evidence of a broken system where you can “literally be blacklisted” by the party and deprived of its machinery and support. After Schakowsky, the incumbent, decided to retire, the 9th District’s primary grew crowded. The field now includes fellow front-runners Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, a one-time Democratic gubernatorial challenger to current Gov. JB Pritzker, and state Sen. Laura Fine, who has name recognition but trails them both in fundraising.

Abughazaleh joked that for a split second after buying tamales for herself and a campaign worker, she worried the charge wouldn’t go through because she was behind on submitting her expenses for reimbursement. She has been open about likely being one of the “poorest members of Congress” if she is elected, only recently secured health insurance and often talks about the “paywall” that keeps people out of politics.

“I think that competitive primaries are great. If we win, I want someone to try a primary the next [cycle], because I think that if you truly are the best candidate, you shouldn’t be worried about a little competition,” she said.

“When Biden was in power, it was like, ‘Well, we have to keep up a strong front, so you can’t challenge the party.’ And now that Trump’s there, it’s like, ‘Well, we have to show we’re united, so we can’t challenge the party.’ If now is not the time to challenge who is in power, when will there ever be a time?” she asked.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

The post Kat Abughazaleh’s punk-rock House bid appeared first on DCReport.org.