[Erik Olson]

Journalists in the national print media during the '80s and '90s used startling statistics of an uptick in all crime, from homicide to vandalism, to construct quantified claims about cocaine and street crime epidemics. Threatening imagery of grimacing hoodlums in cuffs and horror stories of crack babies was a daily commonplace disseminated on the news. All media elaborated on hardhearted thuggery, indiscriminate murder, and spiraling crack use, the levels of which the nation had not seen before and has not since. This drove anxiety home in the populace, who believed the script from so-called experts (one academic hack gained currency who coined a word to describe the behemoth, superpredators). Enter politicians, each used the people's fear to eke out a career in Washington. Indeed, promising policies of zero tolerance for the intolerable guaranteed them the support of the fearful; not doing so lost it in the same proportion, or at least in such quantities that most believed it political suicide to be anything but tough-on-crime. No party was exempt. Clinton, for instance, harnassed the momentum to help push him over the threshold between him and the White House; after the tsunami of street crime hysteria that had swept the '90s crested and crashed in the '00s at long last, he went to the NAACP headquarters to publicly apologize for overzealous sentencing policies. Too little too late, though to see a politician admit to having been woefully wrong is exceedingly rare, and so on and so forth.