But it’s not just an empathy gap separating Tessa’s murder from Kristal’s. Somehow in 2022, we reached a point in the national discussion when publicly mourning murder at the hands of a brazen criminal constitutes a political statement. The national reckoning that followed the killing of George Floyd in 2020 created unspoken yet very clear rules for any discussion related to crime: Drawing attention to it has been branded as serving a “law and order” agenda that is allegedly “dangerous” to people of color. In this warped view, shaped largely by social media, police misconduct is far more urgent a cause than violent crime, and the former can only be properly addressed if we downplay the latter.

Erased in this new dogma have been all the victims of inner city crimes, whose names we no longer mention—a big fat zero in the New York Times search bar. That’s because when we are faced with heart-wrenching stories of victims, we now think twice before we bring them up, lest we be accused of batting for the wrong team.

And yet, the politicization of crime is a luxury commodity. For journalists or people who dabble in social media thought leadership, a 2 percent or 20 percent increase in crime is just a number in a larger political discussion. But while the elites are debating whether to hit send on that tweet, millions of Americans are left with the day-to-day reality of the rise in violent crime. For far too many people, 2 percent or 20 percent is the difference between life and death.