Crime and Drugs: A Tale of Two Cities

One of my neighbors has been selling bicycles from his house for years. With his aptitude for repairing bikes, he has been able to make used bicycles look almost new, and as a result, people in town are happy to pay him $100-$200 for some of the bikes that he has displayed in his front yard. Each time he puts out a bicycle, it usually sells within only a day or two, because people here recognize a bargain when they see one.

I’ve known about my neighbor’s bike business for more than a year, but until a conversation with him this week, I had never stopped to consider what his business suggests about the safety of our neighborhood.

When my neighbor wants to sell a bike, he puts it in front of his house, only a few inches from the sidewalk, and displays a “For Sale” sign with his phone number. He doesn’t lock the bike. He doesn’t use surveillance cameras. The bike is not behind a fence. He doesn’t sit out on his porch with a shotgun, ready to protect his property against potential thieves. He doesn’t even chain a guard dog beside the bike to growl menacingly at anyone who might be tempted to ride off with it without paying.

Instead, he simply leaves the bikes unattended, propped up on their kickstands and with tires fully inflated, only inches away from a sidewalk where anyone walking by could easily ride off with them in less than 30 seconds.

And yet almost no one has ever taken one of my neighbor’s bikes. He estimates that he has sold more than 300 bikes during the past few years. And only two have ever been stolen. One of those, he thinks, was taken by some kids who live one block over. I’m not sure he’s ever figured out who took the other bike.

When my neighbor mentioned this, he expressed dismay that anyone would steal any of his bikes. I, on the other hand, was amazed that the rate of theft has been so low. After all, the street where we both live in Ashland, Ohio, gets a lot of traffic. It’s less than a mile from downtown and only two blocks away from a large public park. On one end of our street is a busy college campus with more than 2,000 students. On the other end is the city hospital. There are people walking up and down the sidewalk all day – students, families, kids, and others. And yet my neighbor’s $100 or $200 bikes are perfectly secure in their unlocked state.

Some of this, I imagine, is because we live in a small town where the same families have been for a long time. My neighbor, in fact, grew up in the house where he currently lives. He’s now in his mid-to-late 50s, I would guess, and his parents are no longer living. For several decades as a younger adult, he lived in a house one block over, but when his parents died, he moved back into his childhood home and gave his other house to his daughter.

That’s the way some families on our street are; they have deep roots. And that’s the way the previous owners of our house were. In fact, when my neighbor asked which house I lived in, I told him that I lived in the one that used to be “Martha’s house.” He knew which house I meant, because Martha was a woman who lived in that house for fifty years before we bought it in 2023, and she became a familiar figure to all the neighbors. With the same people here for decades, neighbors know to look out for each other. They learn to trust each other – and they warn each other about people they find they can’t trust.

A Small Town with a Larger Crime Rate

But as important as small-town neighborhood ties are, that can’t be the only reason for the low crime rate, because there are plenty of small towns where it’s not safe to leave a bike unattended. One of those, in fact, is the town where I grew up – Bangor, Maine.

Bangor has a population of about 30,000, so it’s a little larger than Ashland, which has a population of only 20,000. But it has a small-town feel, and the neighborhood where we lived was filled with people who had owned their homes for decades and who knew everyone in the area.

Like our current neighborhood in Ashland, the neighborhood in Bangor where I grew up was near a city park, and it was filled with old homes that were about 90 years old when my family moved in – just like our Ashland neighborhood. The people who owned the house that my parents bought in the 1980s had been there for forty years. And our elderly next-door neighbor had probably owned his house for about that long.

But it was not safe to leave the garage door open overnight in my neighborhood, and I never would have dreamed of leaving a bike parked in front of our house unattended and unlocked. Compared to some cities in which I’ve lived, Bangor felt safe, and I never heard of a person getting mugged there. But theft was (and is) an issue to be concerned about.

In Bangor, a person has 40 property crime incidents per year for every 1,000 residents in the town. Or, to put it another way, a person has a 1 in 25 chance of being the victim of a property crime incident (e.g., theft) in any given year. That may not seem terrible, but it means that the town actually has a slightly higher rate of property crime than either New York City (where a person has a 1 in 26 chance of being the victim of property crime in any given year) or Washington, DC (where the chance is 1 in 28). In Ashland, Ohio, by contrast, a person has only a 1 in 63 chance of experiencing a property crime incident in any given year, because there are only 14 property crime incidents per year for every 1,000 residents in the town.

To be fair, Maine also has one of the nation’s lowest violent crime rates. It’s one of the places where a person is least likely to be murdered. And if I had to choose between being the victim of violent crime or property crime, I would certainly choose to experience property crime rather than violent crime any day.

But that doesn’t mean that property crime can simply be shrugged off. There has to be a reason why Bangor’s property crime rate is more than twice as high as Ashland’s. Both of these towns were founded at approximately the same time, and both went through some of the same cycles of industrialization and then deindustrialization. Both are filled with aging homes and a graying population. Both have plenty of historic neighborhoods and cultural institutions. The ethnic population of each town is similar – that is, close to 90 percent white and native-born.

If anything, one would think that the demographics of the two cities would suggest a lower property crime rate for Bangor, because Bangor’s unemployment rate is lower, and it has a much higher percentage of four-year college graduates. Median household income and home prices are almost identical between the two towns – but are just marginally higher in Bangor.

And while both Ashland and Bangor experienced industrial decline at various points in their past, Ashland’s industrial decline has been more recent and has arguably had a more substantial effect on the town. In short, there’s no obvious economic, educational, or demographic reason why Ashland should have a lower property crime rate than Bangor.

It’s not as though Ohioans are inherently more virtuous than northern New Englanders. In Mansfield, Ohio – a small city only a few miles away from Ashland – 1 in every 33 residents experiences a property crime incident each year, a rate that is much closer to Bangor’s than to Ashland’s.

But there is one thing that Bangor has long had that might contribute to its crime rate: a thriving illicit drug culture. Between 2017 and 2021, the average annual drug overdose death rate in Ashland County, Ohio, was 12 per 100,000 people, but it was 28 in Penobscot County, Maine, the county where Bangor is located.

This year, the Bangor police chief, who has said that drugs are the main driver of crime in Bangor, instructed his officers to ask everyone they arrested (regardless of the cause of the arrest) whether they are a drug user. In the first three months of the experiment, 79 percent answered yes.

There’s a clear correlation between drug use and crime – including property crimes. That’s true in Ohio, just as it is in Maine. While Ashland enjoys a much lower drug overdose death rate than many other parts of the state, neighboring Richland County (where Mansfield is located) suffers from the far higher rate of 55 annual drug overdose deaths per 100,000 people – and it also has a much higher property crime rate than Ashland.

The Implications for National Politics

Safety has generally been a winning political issue for conservatives. In the 1970s and 1980s, Republicans built a winning coalition for themselves by positioning themselves as simultaneously tough on crime and tough on drugs. During that same period, Democrats struggled with a reputation for being weak on both drugs and crime. And while other factors were involved in the Democrats’ losses, the fact that they were not seen as a party that could keep Americans safe was one of the reasons why they held the White House for only four years between 1969 and 1992. When Bill Clinton finally broke the Democrats’ losing streak, he did so partly by positioning himself as just as tough on crime as any Republican.

In recent years, Democrats have lost that image. That’s not just because of calls from the extreme left a few years ago to “defund the police” but also because in the last ten years Democrats have been at the forefront of a campaign to legalize or decriminalize drugs. While in most areas of the country, calls for drug legalization have centered mainly on marijuana, Democrats in a few states have flirted with the idea of legalizing harder drugs as well. Last year, Massachusetts residents voted on (and ultimately rejected) a referendum to decriminalize psychedelics such as hallucinogenic mushrooms. And Oregon decriminalized small-scale possession of all drugs (even fentanyl and the most potent opioids) in 2021, although the experiment was such a disaster that the state reimposed criminal penalties for some drug possession in 2024.

While I understand why many progressives believe that drug laws are unjust and unequally enforced – and why they believe that criminalization is not the best way to fight drug addiction – the problem they face is that as long as they focus their message on decriminalization or legalization of drugs, it is very hard for them to present a convincing message about the dangers of drug use and the close connection between drug addiction and property crime. Drug use, whether legal or illegal, makes neighborhoods less safe – and therefore less desirable to live in. Republicans have intuitively grasped that message; progressives, unfortunately, have sometimes forgotten it.

But it also seems to me that voters might have forgotten something else: the local solutions that are available to address a problem that we too often view primarily in national terms. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan won votes based on a promise to impose “law and order” on a national level through a policy of getting tough on drugs. And recently, Republicans have made political gains by promising to stop fentanyl from getting into the country. But the results of these national policies were hardly uniform. If Ashland County, Ohio, has a much lower drug overdose death rate than neighboring Richland County or Penobscot County, Maine, that cannot be due to a national policy. Clearly, there must be some factor at the local level that is discouraging illicit drug use in some areas while fostering it in others.

So, maybe when we think about keeping drugs and property crime out of our communities, we need to think locally. Once drugs enter a community, it’s very hard to get them out – which means that after that, it will also be equally difficult to reduce the property crime rate. To prevent this downward spiral from starting, maybe we can strengthen the local institutions (including families and churches) that discourage illicit drug use. And when it comes to politics, maybe the most critical voting decisions we can make are not just about presidential contests but are instead about the local political races that sometimes get overlooked. If we live in a community where people can leave their bikes unattended, I want to make sure that we do everything possible to encourage that family-friendly level of safety to continue for the next generation.