Law and Order

“Are you in favor of law and order?”
“Law and order with justice where people get treated fairly.”
During the first presidential debate, President Donald Trump posed this question to former Vice President Joe Biden. After a summer of economic crisis and protests for racial justice, the issue of law and order has come to the forefront of the 2020 presidential race. But, this is not the first time law and order has held significance in an election. Law and Order politics has no official definition but refers to a political platform that emphasizes stricter sentencing and more support for law enforcement. Law and Order politics began to enter the American consciousness in the 1960s.
“Law and Order politics really has its origins in 1964 and 1966. The first six years of the 1960s saw… an increase in crime. And in particular, there was an increase in really sensational graphic crime… and many Americans were deeply concerned by it,” CHS History teacher Daniel Glossenger said.
During this same period, the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, ruled on two monumental cases that strengthened the rights of the accused: Gideon v. Wainwright and Miranda v. Arizona. Gideon v. Wainwright ruled that in criminal cases, states must provide an attorney to all defendants who are unable to pay for their own. Miranda v. Arizona ruled that in order for a defendant’s testimony to be used in court, they must be informed of their rights (now known as the Miranda rights).
“The Warren Court began to expand the rights of the accused in ways that many Americans were really not comfortable with… these two Supreme Court cases, they don’t have a really huge impact actually on what law enforcement do on a day to day basis, but the perception was that they were tying the hands of police,” Glossenger said.
As the crime rate rose, many white Americans wrongly attributed the increase in crime to the civil rights movement and integration.

“The third thing that’s happening historically in the 1960s, is that virtually every year, one or more major American cities experienced riots. Some of these were an outgrowth of Black uprisings about the failures of white society to actually grapple with civil rights. But, at the same time, there was also rising inequality and there’s major economic disruptions happening in urban areas. So you can’t just say these riots are happening because of the civil rights movement, but in many cases the militancy of the Black civil rights movement was being viewed in the eyes of many whites as this is driving that crime wave,” Glossenger said.
In 1968, these three phenomena came to a head in Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign. During his acceptance speech, Nixon emphasized his focus on Law and Order: “And if we are to restore order and respect for law in this country there is one place we are going to begin. We are going to have a new Attorney General of the United States of America. I pledge to you that our new Attorney General will be directed by the President of the United States to launch a war against organized crime in this country.”
Despite Nixon’s claim, it is important to note that the power of the president to reduce crime is significantly less than that of individual states.
“It’s interesting because presidents talk a lot, or at least a fair amount about crime and maintaining the law in order, yet it’s something that we tend to think of it as mostly a local function of police power that belongs to the States. [There’s] a little bit of a mismatch there between what presidents can do and the things that they want to say,” Washington University political science professor Andrew Reeves said.
After Nixon’s presidency, an emphasis on Law
and Order helped Ronald Reagan defeat Jimmy Carter in the election of 1980. Reagan, and then later George H. W. Bush cemented Law and Order as a successful Republican strategy.
In the 1988 election between Bush and Democratic candidate Micheal Dukakis, the racist undertones of the Law and Order rhetoric became starkly clear. Bush’s campaign ran the notorious Willie Horton ad. The ad compared Dukakis and Bush’s differing views on crime. It stated that Bush supported the death penalty, while Dukakis not only opposed the death penalty, but allowed convicted murderers to have weekend prison passes.
Then, the mugshot of convicted felon Willie Horton, a Black man, was displayed on the screen as the narrator explained that Horton kidnapped a couple, stabbing the man and raping the woman, while using a prison pass. Although the ad did not explicitly mention the race of the murdered couple, Horton’s mugshot made his race clear to viewers. The ad used the racist trope of a Black man raping a white woman to evoke racial fear in white voters.

However, Bush was not the first candidate to use racial messaging to popularize his campaign.
“That racialization piece is something that’s been going on for a very long time. And so for many of these white voters in the suburbs in ‘66 and ‘68 they felt threatened by this rising Black militancy that was in their minds hand in hand with the rise in crime rates that were happening around them […] There wasn’t really a need for somebody like Nixon to spell it out… because the white suburban voters in the 1960s knew exactly what he was talking about,” Glossenger said.
After losing in 1980, 1984 and 1988, Democrats fully embraced the Law and Order strategy. Bill Clinton was able to win the 1992 election running as a tough-on-crime Democrat. During his presidency, he signed the 1994 Crime Bill into law, which was heavily supported by Biden, allowing states to pass stricter criminal justice laws, such as mandatory minimums.
Beyond affecting the polls, Law and Order politics created policies that changed the lives of millions of Americans.
“Mass incarceration is an effect of having decades of Law and Order politics be a force at the forefront of the American electorate. Mass incarceration doesn’t really start to happen until both political parties converge on the issue. We start to see Democrats in the 70s, 80s and 90s leaning into the idea of hiring lots more police on the streets, building more prisons, [etc.] … when they start to agree it’s really where we see the rise of the carceral state in America,” Glossenger said.
The rise of mass incarceration in the US as a result of Law and Order politics caused the US prison population to balloon from roughly 200,000 in 1956 to 1,600,000 in 2010. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, although the US makes up only 5% of the world’s population, it houses 20% of the world’s incarcerated population.

The effects of the rise of the American carceral state have disproportionately affected Black Americans. According to the Sentencing Project: “In 2016, black Americans comprised 27% of all individuals arrested in the United States—double their share of the total population… What might appear at first to be a linkage between race and crime is in large part a function of concentrated urban poverty, which is far more common for African Americans than for other racial groups. This accounts for a substantial portion of African Americans’ increased likelihood of committing certain violent and property crimes. But while there is a higher black rate of involvement in certain crimes, white Americans overestimate the proportion of crime committed by blacks and Latinos, overlook the fact that communities of color are disproportionately victims of crime, and discount the prevalence of bias in the criminal justice system.”
A clear example of the disproportionate effect of Law and Order policies is the War on Drugs. Starting in 1971, Nixon began what he called “a war on drugs.” Reagan continued the War on Drugs with the implementation of zero tolerance policies. Bill Clinton carried on with the incarceration as prevention model, refusing to eliminate the disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine sentencing.
Although crack cocaine is just a different form of cocaine (powder cocaine mixed with water and baking soda), the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act stated that the distribution of only 5 grams of crack cocaine had a minimum federal prison sentence of 5 years while the distribution of 500g of powder cocaine carried the same sentence. Because crack cocaine is much cheaper than powder cocaine, it became popular in many low income areas. Media outlets began to report on the crack epidemic, showing only Black sellers and users. Although the majority of crack users are white, the American public began to view crack as a drug used mostly by Black people. For this reason, police officers overpoliced Black neighborhoods when looking for crack.
According to the ACLU “In 2003, whites constituted 7.8% and African Americans constituted more than 80% of the defendants sentenced under the harsh federal crack cocaine laws, despite the fact that more than 66% of crack cocaine users in the United States are white or Hispanic.”
In 2016, President Trump updated the Law and Order rhetoric to fit new worries of the American electorate: unchecked immigration and ISIS.
“In 2016 Trump was talking about immigration and ‘build that wall.’ That’s not something we always think of in the same vein as Law and Order, but in some ways he was expanding and sort of linking together Law and Order and immigration,” Reeves said.
However, because of the rise in protests and homicide rates, the 2020 election has returned to a more classic Law and Order rhetoric.
According to statistics released by the FBI “When data from the first six months of 2020 were compared with data from the first six months of 2019, the number of rape offenses decreased 17.8%, and robbery offenses were down 7.1%. The number of murder and non-negligent manslaughter offenses increased 14.8%, and aggravated assault offenses were up 4.6%.”

Both candidates have called for order. Trump’s message is explicit. On August 30, 2020 he tweeted simply “LAW AND ORDER!!!” Biden has said he does not support defunding the police, has condemned riots and his choice of Kamala Harris as a running mate supports his ‘Law and Order with justice’ approach since Harris is a former prosecutor.
“Biden Harris can’t be too far to the left of where the American electorate is on this issue, particularly now with crime rates rising again [however] they’re not high, that’s the other piece of this is that many Americans think that crime is really high and getting higher… even in years when it’s declining dramatically. There’s this media interest in creating a narrative of rising crime. That kind of feeds this fear, and then politicians adopt and respond to,” Glossenger said.
Overall, Law and Order politics has been and continues to be an important platform for both Republicans and Democrats. The increased strictness in the criminal justice system caused by Law and Order has devastated millions of Americans, leading to disproportionate arrest and sentencing rates for Black Americans.