Crime is often talked about during an election season, with one side drawing a picture of rampant mayhem and chaos. NIU Sociology professor Keri Burchfield, a criminology specialist, said voters ought to be wary of crime as a campaign talking point.
“If politicians or policy makers are focusing on crime and public safety," Burchfield said, "they're really too late in the game.”
She said criminal behavior and feeling unsafe in your neighborhood is the end stage of communities in steep decline.
“Where there aren’t enough jobs, there aren't enough social supports, there's not enough mental health resources,” she explained, "and so we see the progression of what happens due to that neglect. So, if policy makers really want to do something about crime, I think they would be better served dealing with these problems at the front end.”
While issues like rural health or economic development have not been in the forefront, crime receives much of the attention. Republican candidates for Stephenson County board all listed public safety as their top concern in a questionnaire posted on Freepod, a local news podcast.
Presidential candidate Donald Trump throughout his campaign speaks of out-of-control crime. And he blames immigrants for it, often using dehumanizing language to make his argument. Burchfield said it serves to illicit a moral panic.
"Just playing on this hysteria, like the Haitians eating dogs," she said. "They're just lies, and they just play on people's racism and ethnocentrism.”
Studies by academics and think tanks conclude that immigrants are less likely to commit crime than native born Americans.
Even so, some local Republicans tout anti-immigrant rhetoric. Stephenson County Board member Larry Jogerst calls for repeal of the Illinois Trust Act as a means to address crime.
The law passed in 2017 by Republican Governor Bruce Rauner only permits for local law enforcement to cooperate with federal immigration agents under a federal court warrant.
“The second thing it did," said Fred Tsao, the senior policy counsel at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, "was bar local police from arresting anybody based on their immigration status or anything that may be perceived as their immigration status."
Tsao disputes Republicans' claim that the Trust Act makes communities less safe. Instead, he said, the law helps assures that a witness to a crime, or a victim, can reach out to the police without fear that they could be a target.
Tsao added that crimes would go unreported without the law.
“People who prey upon immigrant communities may feel emboldened to continue to terrorize and exploit our communities," he said, "because they know that people are going to be too afraid to call the local police without this policy in effect."
Tsao said it’s unfortunate that immigration has become such a polarizing issue.
“Rather than engaging in name calling or demonization or calling for mass deportation or things like that," he said, "we should instead be welcoming people to our communities. Certainly, [we] have labor needs in our economy and many sectors of our economy that are really crucial to our well-being.”
In the meantime, some northern Illinois elected officials seek to scapegoat immigrants for what they perceive as rising crime in their community. Professor Burchfield says generalizations about crime trends are something that folks ought to be a little skeptical of.
“Are they looking at big cities? Are they looking at rural areas?" she said. "Because all of that is going to condition the way that you interpret what the politician is saying.”
She says the crime estimates provided by the FBI are missing information, since it switched to a new system and not all law enforcement agencies have made the transition.
Nevertheless, she said violent crime has gone down.
“And it has been going down for the last 30 plus years," she said. "But it is creeping up. And I shouldn't even say creeping up, it is going up quite a bit in major metropolitan areas.”
WNIJ reached out to Stephenson County Sheriff Steve Stovall for his thoughts on crime in the area and in an email, he stated that the department, quote, “is a rural law enforcement agency that deals with minimal crime.”
