Jay Mitchell is not a stupid man.
Until his resignation a few weeks ago, Mitchell was an Alabama Supreme Court justice. He holds a law degree from the University of Virginia. He was a partner at Maynard, Cooper & Gale – one of Alabama’s finest law firms and a law firm that is not known for hiring dummies.
When he first ran for his spot on the ASC, Mitchell touted his work with underprivileged children, and particularly with inner-city youth. So, we also know that he is not ignorant of the plight of the poor, nor is he unfamiliar with the pitfalls that often push kids to commit criminal acts.
So, you see? Not stupid, right?
But there his byline was last week at the top of an op-ed that appeared in a number of media outlets around the state – an op-ed that leaned heavily into the ignorant tropes of “lock ‘em up” justice and “tough-on-crime-is-the-only-way” attitudes. An op-ed that pushed half-truths and distorted reality.
It was shockingly dumb. And one might argue that it was purposefully dumb.
That’s the only explanation I can come up with for an educated man to pen an op-ed that on one line bemoans the act of turning a blind eye to some criminal activity while on the next line praising a president who is a 34-time felon.
But Mitchell’s op-ed goes beyond the usual partisan tropes. After bringing up the back and forth between Sen. Tommy Tuberville and California Gov. Gavin Newsome over the immigration protests – an exchange that referenced Alabama’s murder rate being three times that of California – Mitchell put the blame for Alabama’s high murder rate on the state’s “major cities” and their “leftwing, soft-on-crime policies.”
“It’s true that Alabama’s major cities are blighted by violent crime,” Mitchell wrote in the piece that appeared on Yellowhammer News. “Just last year, Birmingham had a record high homicide rate—with over 150 people brutally murdered. Montgomery has had a similar surge of criminal activity.
“But this culture of violence is a choice that we can and must reject. Simply put: consistent enforcement of good laws creates public safety. We saw it clearly in New York in the 1990s and again in Los Angeles in the 2000s, where political leaders championed tough-on-crime policies that led to historic decreases in violent crime.”
Ten minutes and a Google search later, you know this is all utter stupidity from someone playing to a certain crowd. Because neither New York in the 90s nor LA in the 2000s utilized “tough-on-crime” tactics to reduce crime. Instead, they utilized the same community policing efforts that have been employed in Birmingham and Montgomery and other cities around Alabama.
In LA, specifically, money was poured into the department with the specific focus of holding officers accountable, hiring a more diverse force and vastly expanding community relations efforts to ensure police were addressing the real problems of the communities they serve.
Both cities also set about employing a variety of early mitigation strategies, most of which focused heavily on gang deterrents. In short, they tried to give kids alternatives to joining gangs, and they did so by improving educational opportunities, work training and counseling (specifically conflict resolution counseling).
There is simply no way that Jay Mitchell is not aware of this. It is also impossible that he is unaware of the impact that such efforts would have on communities in Montgomery and Birmingham, where gang violence is particularly high and is driving the upward tick in homicides.
Now, ask yourself this: Why is a smart man pretending to be dumb?
We know the answer to that, too, don’t we? He’s doing it because playing dumb in this instance is more politically advantageous than telling people the cold, hard truth. And it is way, way easier than actually addressing that crime he’s worried about it in a way that would actually make a real difference.
Because if he’s honest, we’ve tried the lock-em-up approach since Alabama was first founded. It has been an abject failure. We have more inmates per capita than every country in the world, except El Salvador. And still, our crime rates are through the roof and showing no signs of falling.
What we’ve never tried are all of the things that helped New York and L.A. out of their crime boons – funding all the things that we know actually deters crime before it happens.
Mitchell knows this. He has to. It had to play a role in why he volunteered his time in those inner-city programs.
Why is this our world now? Why is it more politically advantageous to pretend to be stupid and push ideas you know are utterly useless and counterproductive? Why do voters want to be told this lunacy?
There are many, many problems within the American political system, particularly where Alabama is concerned, but perhaps the biggest is our lack of aspiration for intelligence. Somewhere along the way, we stopped trying to be smart, stopped valuing intelligence. And instead, we started valuing the “common sense approach” to complex issues, which means only that we’re going to boil complicated matters down to their dumbest forms and apply a solution that makes us feel good but probably doesn’t work.
And now, we’re left with smart people pretending to be dumb because that’s what voters value more.
