Like almost everything else in present day America, crime in blue cities has become a deeply partisan and polarized issue. While progressives routinely downplay levels of urban crime and call for a singular focus on “root causes” like poverty and racism, Trump, with the enthusiastic backing of the MAGA law-and-order right, grossly exaggerates the dangers of blue cities. He has ludicrously referred to such cities as “war zone(s)” and "hellhole(s)" as, in a dangerously authoritarian escalation, he’s deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., Chicago, and more recently Portland.

So, what’s true and what’s not about crime in blue cites? And what works and what doesn’t in fighting it?

For answers, we turn to one of the country’s most prominent and respected criminologists. David Kennedy is a long-time professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, and the director of the National Network for Safe Communities. Several decades ago, Kennedy famously drew upon insights into urban crime spikes associated with the crack epidemic to devise innovative intervention strategies to interrupt the surging violence that plagued major American cities in that era. Recently, Kennedy authored an incisive New York Times op ed titled “What Both the Left and Right Get Wrong about Crime.”

Kennedy tell us that there’s some truth in the both the left and the right’s characterization of urban crime, but that each sides’ approach, conducted in isolation, is doomed to fail. Rather, he points out that much of the violent crime in blue cities is driven by a very small number of relatively easily identifiable people who are themselves likely to be both the perpetrators and victims of violence. Interrupting those patterns of violent action and reaction requires carefully calibrated, carrot-and-stick interventions targeted directly at those individuals, Kennedy argues.

Kennedy also emphasizes the deep social harms created by urban drug markets, and he strongly rejects progressive claims that targeted enforcement efforts to disrupt such markets just “move the problem around.” Finally, he tells us that while “broken windows” policing originated as a sensitive and effective approach to preventing serious crime, the concept has been fundamentally discredited as it morphed into the blunt and unevenly applied “zero tolerance” approaches in cities like New York.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

Additional References:

2009 New Yorker profile of David Kennedy: John Seabrook, “Don’t Shoot,” June 15,2009.

David Kennedy op ed, “What Both the Right and Left Get Wrong About Violent Crime,” New York Times, Sept. 10. 2025

The modern Democratic Party has a class and culture problem. Blue city leaders struggle to understand their cultural and political disconnect with working-class voters. Why did so many, both within and beyond blue cities, cast their ballots for Donald Trump, who gives tax breaks to the wealthy? When and how did the Democratic Party lose the allegiance of the white (and increasingly of the black and brown) working class?

In this episode, former politics reporter and author David Paul Kuhn joins us to unpack a pivotal, yet often overlooked, event: New York City's "Hard Hat Riot," a spontaneous May 1970 attack by hundreds of blue collar construction workers, in lower Manhattan building the World Trade Center towers, on long-haired anti-war protesters four days after the shootings at Kent State University.

Kuhn, whose richly textured book and fascinating new PBS documentary delve into the riot and its cultural and political import, discusses with us the crack up of the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition as a chasm grew between traditionally patriotic blue-collar workers and countercultural, college educated anti-Vietnam War "elites" amidst the economic shifts of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Kuhn argues the riot serves as a microcosm for an emerging – and enduring – political and social polarization in American politics. He argues that the "hard hats," frequently mischaracterized as pro-war, were in reality anti-anti-war, feeling their patriotism and sacrifices were being disrespected by protestors who were waving Viet Cong flags and burning the Stars and Stripes. The conversation explores how white ethnic working class Americans felt increasingly alienated from blue city leaders and the New Left counterculture, and how first Richard Nixon and then subsequent Republican politicians weaponized that rift for their own political advantage.

Drawing contemporary parallels, the episode explores how the events of 1970 New York City triggered the Republican Party's rapid inroads with non-college educated working-class Americans. The discussion examines the lasting impact of deindustrialization, cultural tensions, and the ongoing challenge for the Democratic Party to re-engage with this critical demographic, offering a historical lens through which to understand the persistent polarization affecting blue cities.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

Read David Paul Kuhn, The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working Class Revolution (Oxford University Press), selected as one of the New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2020”

Also watch PBS’ American Experience documentary, Hard Hat Riot, aired Sept. 30. 2025

Children in urban public school districts are falling behind. While a handful of lower spending red states – Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and, most notably, Mississippi – have delivered remarkable academic progress over the last 12 years, high spending districts in big cities like New York and Seattle have seen test scores plunge.

And it’s not just because of Covid. While over-long school closures in blue jurisdictions did wreak havoc on the educational attainment of children in those communities, the declines began long before the pandemic, coinciding with the shift away from (however imperfect) national accountability efforts that were born of the federal No Child Left behind law and other reform initiatives.

And yet, progressive politicians and school leaders in blue cities often hand wave away the declining performance of their schools, particularly with respect to the sinking test scores of low income children of color, even as they loudly proclaim their allegiance to trendy pedagogical approaches justified in the name of increasing equity. Nor has the declining performance of schools and reduction of choices and standards (like eliminating gifted and talented programs) in blue America generated much public pushback. Although it's also evident that falling enrollments in cities like Seattle are due to more affluent parents in these areas quietly moving their children into higher performing private schools.

So what are the root causes the sinking performance of public education systems in well-funded blue city school districts?

For answers we turned to Whitney Tilson, an ardent (and unfashionable!) education reformer – Tilson is a founding member of Teach for America and of Democrats for Education Reform – who earlier this year ran unsuccessfully for mayor in New York as a Bloomberg-style technocrat, on a platform that significantly focused on fixing what ails New York City schools. While New York City spends more per pupil than any other jurisdiction in the country, academic achievement has declined sharply since the Bloomberg years, falling far behind Mississippi.

Tilson argues that a trendy rejection of the culture of accountability that undergirded school reform efforts through the late Obama years, along with the hegemonic power of teachers unions, is to blame. As one example, he points to blue cities’ rejection of proven phonics-based reading instruction in favor of the supposedly more equitable (and less accountable) “whole language” reading approach: “as a nation we allowed a dangerous left-wing ideological curriculum to infect our schools in a way that resulted in millions of kids not being able to learn to read properly.”

You can read the plan to fix New York City's schools that Whitney Tilson offered during his mayoral campaign here.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.