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Global Crises, Local Impacts: Threats to Social Cohesion and How Cities Can Respond

Publication Date:

27/11/2024

Content Type:

Event Reports

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Civil Engagementelectionsfaith-based organisationsGlobal Crises Local ImpactsSocial Cohesionyouth groups

Summary

On 20 November, the Strong Cities Network continued its series of monthly webinars on Global Crises, Local Impacts: Threats to Social Cohesion and How Cities Can Respond with a session focused on how cities can maintain social cohesion following contested elections, when polarisation and tensions are high and there may be calls (on/offline) for protests or violence. This session featured a presentation from Max Read, Senior Research Manager, Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which hosts the Strong Cities Network, on research insights on threats to election integrity from recent election cycles in Ireland and the United States. Eric Rosand, Executive Director, Strong Cities Network, then led a discussion between city officials and advisors on how their respective cities handled post-election and political tensions. Speakers included: Doreen Garlid, Vice Mayor of Tempe (Arizona, USA); Jacek Purski, Chairman of the Institute of Social Safety and Advisor to the Mayor of Dąbrowa Górnicza (Poland); and Michael Lorge, Corporation Counsel, Skokie (Illinois, USA). Discussion topics ranged from the importance of building relationships with community leaders before a crisis emerges and addressing the barriers to the reporting of hate crimes and bias incidents to preventing and responding to the growing number of threats against city councils and their members.

Key Takeaways

• Forming strong relationships with community partners and building trust is essential for managing tensions, especially in cities with diverse communities. Strong relationships between community partners – such as faith-based organisations, youth groups and professional associations – and city officials makes dialogue easier in times of crisis. Relationships should be in place and trust should have been established well-before a crisis emerges so they can withstand the shocks to social cohesion that a crisis can cause.
• Threats to social cohesion are often borderless, so communication and collaboration with other cities and awareness of global trends can help local governments be prepared for local impact. While cities may not be on the front lines of global crises, they often acutely feel their impacts. Having an awareness of global issues allows cities to be proactive in preparing for threats to social cohesion, including by producing a plan for when those threats arrive rather than taking action only after they have manifested. Collaboration between cities – including sharing information and concerns about how global crises may be impacting their communities – can enhance city preparedness as it allows one city to share insights into a crisis that may have not yet reached other cities yet.
• Preventing hate crimes and hate incidents begins with tracking early warning signs and being proactive on messaging and outreach. The hate landscape is broader than what law enforcement and relevant legislation might categorise as a “hate crime”. Tracking incidents motivated by hate and understanding (and then helping address) the factors that lead people down the path to hate can be important steps towards curbing hate crimes at the local level. Additionally, ensuring that community leaders are properly equipped to recognise and handle hate incidents, and report them through official channels is a good way to enhance hate prevention efforts.
• Productive and civil disagreement is often lost in today’s polarised landscape, and more needs to be done to encourage vocal community members to engage with civility and compassion no matter how divisive the issue. With national political frustrations often spilling over into local communities, the rhetoric used, and animosity shown, by residents in city council or school board meetings is becoming increasingly heated, with opposing sides often using dehumanising language in their arguments. Among other things, this is slowing down local government processes and can lead to even greater frustration. Learning how to channel this frustration and energy into productive, respectful dialogue reduces local tensions while simultaneously producing more responsive governance.

Key Themes

Election Integrity Narratives: How Efforts to Undermine Election Integrity Threatened Social Cohesion in Recent Elections

ISD’s Max Read presented new research into what narratives drove election denialism in both the United States and Europe this past election season. ISD mapped threats to the election system across the United States and its research revealed that threats to and harassment of election officials and related public figures at the local level were driven by national narratives pushing uncertainty in the election system.

Read emphasised that “one of the more prominent narratives about the election system that we saw this year was claims of non-citizens voting in large numbers in an effort to rig the election”. While this narrative is not new to this election cycle, he said that it “gained increased prominence throughout this year and had the effect of broadening the appeal of election denial narratives by reaching voters who have natural concerns about immigration, border security and crime”. Despite this loud rhetoric, there was little offline activity from far-right groups on election day, he said, and left-leaning counter-protests were muted. There were some threats, including more than 50 bomb threats sent to polling locations and calls to film poll workers, but it is not clear if these were part of a larger, coordinated effort.

Although foreign interference campaigns as such were deemed to be low-impact and did not play as much of a role in electoral outcomes as some predicted they might, he said that narratives about foreign interference did play a role. For example, 84% of claims about electoral interference tracked by ISD in the recent Irish local and European Parliamentary elections included claims of foreign interference. These included claims that political parties and NGOs were registering non-citizen voters in a coordinated attempt to disenfranchise Irish voters, claims that the government fast-tracks citizenships for asylum seekers in exchange for votes, and claims that “foreign” candidates were a threat to Irish sovereignty. In Ireland, ISD found higher rates of offline action, including threats and harassment, with “a disproportionate level of violence and harassment targeting candidates and campaigners with migrant backgrounds”. Read suggested that the favourable outcome in the United States election for those who were more likely to push these foreign interference narratives could explain why less offline threats were detected.

ISD’s research corroborates what Tempe (Arizona) and Skokie (Illinois) experienced on election day. Officials from both cities reported that things were fairly calm on the ground in the lead-up to the election and during election day. While both cities noticed strong rhetoric online, neither felt that it directly translated into offline threats. Strong Cities Executive Director, Eric Rosand noted, however, that even in the absence of physical threats, discontent and tensions between residents were exacerbated. “The divisions that were manifested in the campaign and the differences that exist between those supporting one candidate and another candidate … don’t go away, and they are … manifesting in real time in cities.”

In fact, national political tensions are increasingly manifesting at the local level, even in geographic areas in which they may not be directly relevant. As Michael Lorge from Skokie pointed out, even park district meetings can become fraught with tension as residents search for a venue to vent their frustrations, which are fuelled at least in part by the heated rhetoric surrounding the federal elections. He explained that “there are many, many people on all sides of the matter who are turning their attention … to local matters”, adding that he has noticed “much more activity in getting people elected to school boards, getting people onto commissions and committees, and in particular also turning to parks; things that you would think would sort of be innocuous to strident and strong political views and efforts”. He cautioned that these strains on social cohesion locally that result from hotly contested national elections can test city officials if proper precautions are not taken.

Getting Ahead: The Role of Cities in Anticipating Threats to Social Cohesion as a Means of Prevention

Ensuring that proper precautions are taken starts with prevention. Jacek Purski, Chairman of the Institute of Social Safety and Advisor to the Mayor of Dąbrowa Górnicza (Poland), shared that Dąbrowa Górnicza’s multi-sectoral prevention team focuses solely on monitoring potential hate, extremist and other threats to social cohesion. He said that city staff are now paying special attention to antisemitic rhetoric as a direct result of some the team’s early warning efforts. 

He shared that the city’s focus on monitoring the landscape for potential hate incidents also involves being aware of national trends that may spill over into local politics. In Poland, national narratives “questioning democracy” or “flirting with authoritarian systems” have been pervasive for the past eight years, Purski recounted, so local governments have prepared for anti-democratic and polarising events to take place in their cities. He added that Dąbrowa Górnicza is also focusing on empowering “first line practitioners, like teachers” and giving them tools to train those around them in media literacy and other prevention tactics to prevent issues from arising in the first place.

Doreen Garlid, Vice Mayor of Tempe (Arizona), concurred that getting ahead of trends was essential. “We try really hard to be forward thinking on some of the issues that might come up in our community.” For Tempe, which has a large student population when Arizona State University (ASU) is in session, identifying which global issues students care about is a key step in learning what issues could possibly spread throughout the rest of the community. To this end, the City is in regular communication with staff at ASU to keep a “finger on the pulse” of community issues.

Since threats to social cohesion are often borderless – spanning city lines and regional boundaries – speakers highlighted how communication between cities on the problems they are facing can improve an individual city’s ability to respond to threats. For example, Vice Mayor Garlid shared how she meets quarterly with council members from neighbouring cities to “talk about issues that are in our community and what each one is doing”. She finds that this inter-council dialogue “has really helped us out a lot because one city might hear something that another one didn’t, and we can work together to make the difference”. For Tempe, this is an important part of getting ahead of threats, but each city will have their own threat landscapes to navigate and understand.

Michael Lorge explained that Skokie takes a particular interest in tracking hate incidents “that don’t fit the federal definition” of a crime but are things they “know are negatively impactful in our community and tears at the fabrics of relations of members of the community”, which includes one of the largest communities of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel. This year they are tracking hate incidents before and after the November election to see if election results have any effect on incident rate. They want to understand if “hate incidences are precursors of hate crime” and if they can “foretell a series of events that require intervention” to prevent a hate crime. He emphasised how preventative frameworks like this require community partnerships to run effectively. Since many police departments only track hate incidents, if they fit the strict definition of a hate crime community partners are needed to encourage community members to report hate incidents. For example, in 2023, Tempe had 24 reported hate crimes, even though the likely number of actual hate crimes (let alone hate incidents) is much higher. For this reason, Vice Mayor Garlid is interested in developing reporting practices that make victims or bystanders feel safe when reporting.

Why Building Trust is Pivotal to an Effective Response to Local Crises and Preventing Hate

In diverse cities with varied community groups and interests, establishing trusted relationships between city officials and community leaders does more than just alert the city to potential developing issues; it strengthens cities’ ability to respond to crises when they occur. In Tempe (Arizona), an organisation called For Our City brings together faith-based organisations, businesses, nonprofits and the local government to discuss how to collaborate on new ideas to address issues in the city, building trust between the groups in the process.

Vice Mayor Garlid spoke to the importance of this trust: “What we’ve also done is we have worked hard over many years to build relationships with all different groups in the city…, including our faith communities. So that when issues do arise, when a crisis does come up, we have already built that relationship and worked on that trust in the city to really be able to make us move things forward.” Strong relationships ensure that when city officials are called on to intervene, it is not the first interaction community members have had with the city. With trust built, crisis response work can begin addressing problems immediately. Strong relationships ensure residents that the city is there for them not just in times of crisis, but in good times as well. When trust breaks down, so too does collaboration, and cities may struggle to ascertain what type of response a crisis requires.

Speakers highlighted different approaches to building trusted relationships with community-based partners. Sometimes it involves human-focused, compassionate messaging by the local government on what it values and community priorities. It can also include regular meetings with community leaders or issue-specific engagements by city experts with individual community groups. As Michael Lorge emphasised, “making sure [elected representatives] are out in the community and meeting and talking to people” provides a human face to institutions and helps residents know that if they find themselves in a time of crisis, they have someone they can contact within the city.

Engendering Productive Civil Discourse: How Cities can Combat the Politics of Disruption and Produce Productive Civil Engagement

With the combativeness of politics on the national level in the United States, and contention around the recent election, cities are finding themselves embroiled in conflict between residents motivated by national narratives or what Michael Lorge called “trickle-down political attacks”. He shared how the “politics of disruption” had impacted Skokie city council meetings, with individuals “taking over the public comments section of the agenda” with their own issues, often making a scene or using vulgar language, and disrupting not only official proceedings, but also sometimes preventing the function of government. Lorge lamented that these disruptors make it difficult to have a meaningful dialogue. He said that “the disruption itself is often the goal, rather than a means to advancing solutions”.

In Tempe, Vice Mayor Garlid sees this same issue. She contrasted a different era where people would “use a disagreement to find solutions” with the current era where “disagreements lead to polarisation and then that leads to problems” in the city. In order to try and make progress on this issue, the Democratic Mayor of Tempe and the Republican Mayor of neighbouring Mesa (Arizona) joined together to bring a Disagree Better programme to their cities. Disagree Better is a national programme started by the National Governors Association that promotes healthy debate and productive disagreements. Disagree Better provides toolkits for cities and residents to have better, kinder conversations. The Mayors of Tempe and Mesa have produced videos raising awareness for the campaign. Garlid hopes this will help residents “use their information to help find solutions and to be kinder to each other”.

In the neighbouring city of Springfield, for example, false information was recently weaponised in the context of a political campaign, creating a frightening situation for the city’s Haitian community, including more than two dozen bomb threats. The escalation prompted the State to send in additional law enforcement and install surveillance cameras around the city to be able to reopen schools and government buildings. Abdi shared that the incident prompted an immediate, coordinated effort, led by Springfield’s city leadership, with the support from Columbus’ Mayor Ginther, and other state and local leaders, to provide support to community stakeholders and educate the broader community. While these efforts were successful in deescalating and providing support, Abdi underscored the stress and fear caused – both for the targeted community and broader communities in and around Springfield.

Next Steps

This webinar was the tenth in a series of monthly webinars for mayors, city representatives and research organisations for timely discussion and exchanges of approaches around Global Crises, Local Impacts. The next session, focused on the connection between urban planning and enhancing social cohesion, is scheduled for Wednesday, 29 January 2025.

Additional Resources

Strong Cities Resources

Policy Briefs & Guides:

• Preventing and Responding to Election Disruption and Violence: Ten Considerations for Cities, Strong Cities Network (October 2024)
• Impact: Catalysing City-Led Prevention, Strong Cities Network (September 2024)
• Transatlantic Dialogue Initiative: Ten Key Findings in 2023, Strong Cities Network (March 2024)
• A Guide for Mayors: Preventing and Responding to Hate, Extremism and Polarisation, Strong Cities Network (September 2023)
• A Guide for Cities: Preventing Hate, Extremism & Polarisation, Strong Cities Network (September 2023)
• A Guide for City-Led Response, Strong Cities Network (April 2024)

Global Crises, Local Impacts Webinar Series:

• Global Crises, Local Impacts: Threats to Social Cohesion and How Cities Can Respond: Migration, Event Report, Strong Cities Network (September 2024)
• Global Crises, Local Impacts: Threats to Social Cohesion and How Cities Can Respond: Online/Offline Harms, Event Report, Strong Cities Network (July 2024)
• Global Crises, Local Impacts: Threats to Social Cohesion and How Cities Can Respond: Restoring Civil Discourse & Empathy, Event Report, Strong Cities Network (June 2024)
• Global Crises, Local Impacts: Threats to Social Cohesion and How Cities Can Respond: Local Impacts of Israel-Gaza, Event Report, Strong Cities Network (May 2024)
• Global Crises, Local Impacts: Threats to Social Cohesion and How Cities Can Respond: Local Impacts of Israel-Gaza, Event Report, Strong Cities Network (April 2024)
• Global Crises, Local Impacts: Threats to Social Cohesion and How Cities Can Respond: Local Impacts of Israel-Gaza, Event Report, Strong Cities Network (March 2024)
• Global Crises, Local Impacts: Threats to Social Cohesion and How Cities Can Respond: Local Impacts of Israel-Gaza, Event Report, Strong Cities Network (February 2024)

Other Resources

• Annual Report on Violence Targeting Local Officials – 2023, Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) (May 2024)
• January 6 Scorecard: Analyzing Threats to Democracy – 2024, Western States Center (May 2024)
• 10 Years Later, the Bundy Standoff Continues to Shape the Anti-Government Landscape, Institute for Strategic Dialogue (May 2024)
• Countering Anti-Institutional Extremism in Europe (interview with Erik Akerboom, Director General of the Dutch domestic intelligence service, the General Intelligence and Security Service), International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (March 2024)
• Anti-Government Threats and their Transnational Connections, International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (March 2024)
• Understanding Threats and Harassment Against Local Officials, Bridging Divides Initiative, Princeton University
• Field Guide for Assessing Chances of Online-to-Offline Mobilization, Institute for Strategic Dialogue (June 2023)
• Conspiracy Theories Matter, But Not All Are Meaningful: A Guide for Analyzing Risk to Audiences, Institute for Strategic Dialogue (May 2024)

Contact Information

For more information on this event, the webinar series, the Strong Cities Transatlantic Dialogue or Global Crises, Local Impacts Initiatives, please contact Allison Curtis, Deputy Executive Director, at [email protected].

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