... and I hope all of us here in Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, and Ferguson can capitalize on the branding opportunity and visibility that the RNC has gifted us. Urban America in general came in for a thrashing in Cleveland, where cities were mentioned mainly as places that riot, shoot cops, harbor illegals and terrorists, and suck up other Americans’ tax dollars. In his vision of a nation engulfed in lawlessness, the newly self-appointed law-and-order candidate requires an axis of evil, and apparently we’re in it.

Those who fact-checked the nominee’s incantation of terrors revealed the usual abundance of cherry-picking, mendacity, and “truthful hyperbole.” Americancities aren’t descending en masse into anarchy, despite legitimately alarming homicide spikes in D.C., Baltimore, and Chicago. So far this year, homicides are down in a little over half of the 63 cities reporting to the Major Cities Chiefs Association, and violent crime in general is a fraction of its rate during the Reagan and Bush I administrations. The degree to which Americans perceive a domestic crime wave lapping at their driveways is worthy of a separate discussion—in New York magazine, the sociologist Alex Vitale speculates that one reason a majority of people since 2000 estimate (wrongly) that crime has gone up since the year before is that so many of us no longer have “direct experience with crime.” Instead, we are transfixed by TV crime dramas and media reports of spectacular-but-relatively-infrequent events. In other words, we’ve grown so safe that merely consuming real or imagined depictions of urban mayhem—and hearing our leaders shrieking warnings of it—is enough to terrify us.

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