Rising crime rates in the US and efforts from the White House and in Congress to pass sweeping police reform legislation have thrust crime policy into the center of the national political debate.

In early mayoral, congressional and senatorial campaigns, attacks are flying back and forth over whether candidates are tough on crime or want to defund the police, often using blunt language that masks the nuances of a complicated issue.

Homicides increased across large and small America cities in 2020, preliminary FBI data shows, and remained higher than usual through the early months of 2021. At the same time, there have been double-digit percentage decreases in robberies and rapes, according to FBI data. Concerns among Americans over crime has spiked as well, according to polling from The Washington Post and ABC News – but Americans are unsure whether more policing is the solution.

In response, Joe Biden’s administration has rolled out an extensive set of policy proposals. The proposals order states to shift money from coronavirus aid programs to gun violence prevention programs. They also allow the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to revoke licenses of gun dealers when they violate federal law. And they direct the Department of Justice to establish new “strike forces” to focus on firearms trafficking.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, lawmakers are inching toward a bipartisan police reform bill. Earlier this month Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the lead Republican negotiating this bill, alongside Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Congresswoman Karen Bass of California, the Democratic leads, released a statement signaling a dramatic step forward in those discussions, which some had left for dead.

“After months of working in good faith, we have reached an agreement on a framework addressing the major issues for bipartisan police reform,” Scott said in a statement, though he added: “There is still more work to be done on the final bill, and nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to.”

The effect of all of this is unclear, especially on the communities most affected by rising crime, which often tend to be communities of color.

On the campaign trail, Democratic candidates have had to parry time-honored attacks from Republican opponents of being weak on crime and supporting proposals to “defund the police”.

In Florida, congresswoman Val Demings has had to rebuff accusations that she, a former Orlando police department chief, is soft on crime. In a recent special election in New Mexico’s first congressional district, Democratic candidate Melanie Stansbury was excoriated by her Republican opponent for backing bills that would shift money from police departments. Stansbury nevertheless won the election.

“It was just very hard to pin on Melanie specifically,” said Michelle Mayorga, the pollster for now-congresswoman Stansbury’s campaign. As a state representative Stansbury had worked to bring state dollars to law enforcement organizations – something her campaign highlighted – which complicated her opponent’s attack strategy.

In New York, a messy Democratic primary ended with a former New York police department captain, Eric Adams, as the favorite to become the next mayor of the city. Adams’ performance in the primary suggests that a background in policing is a perfectly viable route for a successful Democratic candidate.

“Republicans in the right wing generally have a lot of practice on the issue. They have been using crime and fear of crime and the image of African American males as a threat for a very long time,” said former congressman Brad Miller of North Carolina, who in 2020 wrote an article in the liberal American Prospect magazine arguing for Democrats to take a different approach from the “punitive criminal justice laws” they supported in the 1990s.

For months, Republicans have tried to leverage Black Lives Matter protests into broader claims that progressives support proposals that would threaten widespread lawlessness. Such framing – with little basis in fact – has been a frequent mantra of the right wing in the US, often loaded with racism and attempts to stoke fears of Black men.

“I have heard the actual phrase ‘defund the police’ more out of the mouths of Republicans and reporters than I have any Democrats,” Congresswoman Gwen Moore of Wisconsin said in an interview. Moore is pushing legislation that would introduce de-escalation training for communities as a way to reduce crime. “You have got to give the devil its due. The Republicans have been excellent at messaging and once somebody said something about defund the police and they ran with it.”

When he was president, Donald Trump liked to warn that electing Democrats would trigger crime sprees across the country. It was not a strategy that worked. Trump leaned hard on that imagery in the 2018 midterms, yet Democrats retook control of the House of Representatives and a number of governorships.

The crime rate rose in 2020 under Trump’s watch as well, though the huge economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, which threw millions of Americans out of work, likely played a significant role.

But that rise in major violent crimes continued after Biden succeeded Trump as president and with the reopening of the US economy.

“The numbers that we’re facing today are not dissimilar to the ones that we were facing during the Trump administration. And frankly I think that they’re going to be a little bit elevated now for certain primary reasons,” said John Sandweg, the former acting director of the United States department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Democrats expect Republicans to continue hammering them on the issue and for that to create a heightened sense of fear among some segments of the electorate. There is also an understanding that in affected communities, any rise in crime will weigh on voters’ minds.

But experts also point out that although crime rates may be on the rise in the US, they are still nowhere near the heights they were in past decades. In New York in 1990, for instance, the city saw more than 2,200 killings. In 2020 there were 468.

That leads some Democrats to caution about how to engage with the crime spike.

“Now, I want to say that any amount of harm is unacceptable and too much, but I also want to make sure that this doesn’t drive a hysteria, and that we look at these numbers in context so that we can make responsible decisions about what to allocate in that context,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in a public discussion with fellow Democratic congress member Jamaal Bowman, also of New York.

Indeed, at the local level discussions over policing often play out in a more nuanced way than one side arguing against funding the police and another side arguing for it – as Adams’ performance in New York showed.

Mike DuHaime, a veteran Republican strategist who advised former governor Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani when he ran for president, said that it’s harder than it might initially appear for Republicans to attack all Democrats as weak on crime.

“I think the problem for Republicans is the people who are calling for defunding the police are in very safe Democratic districts, so they’re not easily defeated,” DuHaime said. “If you look at competitive districts around the country, whether they be Senate races or governor’s races, I think what you’re going to see is centrist Democrats taking a much more centrist approach to policing than the far left is looking for.”