A few months ago, my work took me to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chattanooga is a small city, population about 180,000, in the southeast of the state. Like the rest of the state, Chattanooga is by no means progressive. It didn’t have a "defund the police" movement or a progressive prosecutor. But even there (I learned, and some Manhattan Institute polling confirmed) there’s a widespread perception that crime is on the rise.
As I detail in a newly released MI report, though, the reality is more complicated. You can click through and read the whole thing, but the top line is that while Chattanooga—like many cities—had a violent crime problem, it’s mostly been brought under control. Facing a shrinking police staff, they focused their limited resources on bringing down violence using evidence-based strategies, and succeeded in doing so. But, I argue, they’ve done so at the expense of controlling disorder in the city—public homelessness, trash, drug-related violations, etc. This is what has prompted persistent unease even as crime has come down.
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Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. This piece first appeared in Charles Lehman's Substack, The Casual Fallacy. Based on a recent report.
Photo by Joe Daniel Price/Getty Images
