The Great Mystery of Falling Crime Rates
🪄 And now for my next trick... Crime will vanish · Newsom comes to town · WeGo fixes food deserts · School choice poll results · Review of Materialists · Much more!
Good afternoon, everyone. Today, the country wants to know why crime rates are falling. We have the answer. Gavin Newsom riles up a coven of East Nashville activists. If I told you buses could solve hunger, would you believe me? And there's a new movie called Materialists that sheds some light on what's happening right now in the capital of Yankeedom, NYC.
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As is always the case, news of crime rates falling is met with a mixture of confusion and surprise by city leaders. Mayor O’Connell is quick to take credit for the news that violent crime in the city has fallen 10 percent compared to the same period last year, but as to what’s caused this decline, journalists, politicians, prosecutors, and lawmakers seem mystified.
The fall in violent crime is a part of a nationwide trend as violent rates return to the pre-Covid baseline – which is still high, to be clear. Most city leaders are content to point out that “crime is down” as evidence that whatever policies and plans they put in place are working.
You’re met with thick verbiage about programs and initiatives. Organizations are name-dropped like you’re dining with a movie producer. But typically, there’s a straightforward answer that’s hard for people of a more liberal disposition to stomach.
Take Baltimore for example. Mayor Brandon Scott made reducing violent crime in the city a plank of his mayoral campaign – and he delivered. According to the Washington Post, “As of July 1, 68 people in Baltimore had died by homicide this year, the fewest during the first six months of the year in more than five decades.”
City officials in Baltimore are tossing around the baton of credit, with Scott attributing the decline in part to his categorization of gun violence as a public health threat and Maryland Governor Wes Moore pointing to expanded funding for the city’s police department and attorney’s office.
“After years of investing in violence interrupters, community outreach workers and neighborhood-based prevention initiatives,” the state’s chief public defender wrote in an op-ed for the Baltimore Sun, “Baltimore is witnessing the fruits of this focused approach.”
Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates spoke more opaquely about “repealing ineffective non-prosecution policies,” which hints at what’s really going on. The Post didn’t mention incarceration rates in this particular write-up on Baltimore’s success, but a quick look at the state’s attorney’s office website shows us that, since Scott assumed office, the number of incarcerated repeat violent offenders has more than doubled.
In the office’s press release on the data from January, they attribute the drop to “skillful, coordinated prosecution efforts and increased staffing,” which have “contributed to the incarceration of more violent repeat offenders and an overall reduction in violent crime.”
As for Nashville’s crime dip, we don’t have the kind of data freely offered by the attorney’s office in Baltimore, so we’re instead forced to listen to the canned lines from people who make a living pushing “restorative justice” programs and denying that there is a correlation between “hard-on-crime” policies and reductions in crime.
Between 2022 and 2023, the most recent years for which the city’s District Attorney’s office has data available, we saw incarceration rates rise as crime rates fell. I made fun of the reporting that the Tennessee Lookout did on this back at the end of 2023 when they headlined a piece on the dip “Tennessee’s prison population grows as violent crime drops steeply” and committed the Butterfield Fallacy, failing to connect falling crime rates to increased incarceration rates.
I’d wager that such trends have continued and that the state’s bail reform law aimed at ending the cycle of repeat offenders, which went into effect July 1 of last year, has also played a role. Makes sense when you think about it. DAVIS HUNT
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🏳️🌈 Newsom Encourages East Nashstivists Yesterday, California Governor Gavin Newsom made a surprise visit to a monthly East Nashtivists meeting held at East Nashville Beer Works. He delivered a short speech before the progressive grassroots community organization held a panel with Metro Councilmembers Emily Benedict, Olivia Hill, Sean Parker, Clay Capp, and Vice Mayor Angie Henderson.
Newsom commended the local activists and encouraged them to exercise their “moral authority”—something he said the group had in abundance. Furthermore, he made an interesting suggestion that participating in such noble activism is an honor that can land you in jail.
“You think about some of the most iconic leaders, like Dr. King or Havel or Mandela, or people like, well, Cesar Chavez himself, and at the peak of their influence, they had one thing in common,” said Newsom. “And that was jail time.”
The California governor wrapped up by highlighting the “cruelty” and fearmongering conducted by the current administration and implored everyone to step up and do more: “They're testing the boundaries of their executive capacity, and they're doing so in Los Angeles,” said Newsom. “I assure you, this is a preview of things to come. Do not underestimate what they're capable of doing.”
Newsom seems to be making his rounds in Music City. This morning, podcaster and former U.S. Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan posted a picture with the governor on X. “Well that was an interesting breakfast…,” reads the caption.
🛒 WeGo Market Launch Sparks Food Desert Conversations Yesterday, Mayor Freddie O’Connell announced his plan to explore solutions to combat Nashville food deserts during a WeGo Food Market kickoff event at downtown’s Elizabeth Duff Transit Center.
“We want to hear from community leaders, grocery operators, food advocates, developers, farmers, and residents,” he said. “We’re sourcing ideas about bringing community-focused grocery stores directly into underserved areas.”
Director of the Nashville Farmers Market, Darrell Lane, also spoke about the fresh products that small businesses will be providing at the WeGo market twice a month. Choose How You Move Chief Program Officer Sabrina Sussman was also in attendance and took the opportunity to highlight how Nashville’s decision to create dedicated funding for transit laid the foundation for the WeGo Food Market.
“The market is a living example of how better transit systems can build healthier and more connected communities,” she said. Sussman also mentioned that 22 new WeGo bus operators just graduated and will join the fleet—the largest class in Metro history.
📊 Poll Shows TN Republicans Support Parents & School Choice A statewide Republican voter poll conducted in June by Tennesseans for Putting Students First reveals that 66 percent support expanding the Education Freedom Scholarship Program to allow more students to participate. The political advocacy organization polled 500 likely Tennessee Republican primary voters, and also found that 70 percent trust parents the most when it comes to making choices about their children's education, compared to 21 percent who said teachers and 4 percent who said local administrators and school boards. It’s also worth noting that 78 percent were underwhelmed by the $190 billion in nationwide federal COVID-19 emergency education dollars spent over the last few years, and believe that the funding should have made a bigger impact.
DEVELOPMENT
- Geodis Park-area properties listed for sale (Post)
- M.L.Rose taps Murfreesboro for eighth location (Post)
- Start of planned Midtown tower project could loom (Post)
- East Nashville building once housing Wal-Mart sells for $30.25M (Post)
✹ REVIEW: MATERIALISTS (2025)
In the past two weeks, pundits and armchair politicos alike have struggled to explain Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. But those who saw A24’s sleeper romcom hit, Materialists the week before could have easily predicted why an avowed socialist with almost no actual working-class support overwhelmingly carried America’s most ruthlessly superficial city.
The folks over at New York magazine called the latest from NYC-based filmmaker Celine Song a far cry from her multiple Oscar nominated debut, Past Lives, in 2023. As Angelica Jade Bastién wrote in her comparison of the film to genre classics like Broadcast News and The Apartment, “They’re actually funny, and brimming with the tender considerations of what happens when actualized people crash into each other, professionally and romantically and emotionally.”
Of course the film critic for a publication that has become Mamdani’s own Tiger Beat would miss the film’s entire point. There is little tenderness left in the world to which Song introduces us.
Materialists is a rom-com about people whose fealty to the rattle and hum of NYC has not only made them lose their souls but forget they had them to begin with. It’s more dystopian in its own way than 28 Years Later, The Electric State, or Suzanne Collins’s latest The Hunger Games prequel, a movie in which commodification and status anxiety reach their logical corrosive conclusion.
As high end professional matchmaker Lucy, Dakota Johnson never lets the audience forget she’s performing a role, a thirtysomething college dropout with an $80k a year salary who must steep herself in the parlance of luxury to survive. The other two sides of the film’s love triangle, Internet daddy Pedro Pascal and former Captain America Chris Evans, serve as cyphers–Song’s brilliant move to show the disconnect between her characters and the personas that made the careers of her actors.
By its lowkey finale, Materialists is less an inspiring romantic fantasy than a clear-eyed dissection of what life in a metropolis like NYC does to its inhabitants' moral fiber. Of course such people would see support for a lefty son of privilege like Mamdani as the haute couture of social capital. He’s an indulgence they hope can cure their spiritual bereftness in ways hot yoga never could. He’s the type of character the trio at the center of Materialists would support, but one whose vision won’t keep them from falling any less short.
Materialists is now playing in theaters.
THINGS TO DO
View our calendar for the week here and our weekly film rundown here.
📅 Visit our On The Radar list to find upcoming events around Nashville.
🎧 On Spotify: Pamphleteer's Picks, a playlist of our favorite bands in town this week.
👨🏻🌾 Check out our Nashville farmer's market guide.
TONIGHT
🎸 Larry Keel @ Analog at Hutton Hotel, 8p, $20.28, Info
🎸 Diana Krall @ Ryman Auditorium, 7p, $135, Info
🎸 Samantha Crain @ The East Room, 8p, $22.35, Info
🍀 Live Irish Music @ McNamara’s Irish Pub, 6p, Free, Info
🎸 Kelly’s Heroes @ Robert’s Western World, 6:30p, Free, Info
🎸 Open Mic @ Fox & Locke, 6:30p, Free, Info
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Today's newsletter is brought to you by Megan Podsiedlik (Nashville), Jerod Hollyfield (Crowd Corner), Camelia Brennan (Local Noise), and Davis Hunt (everything else).