The Lawton Crime Myth
Here’s a simple, perhaps surprising fact: Lawton is not a crime-ridden city.
Over decades, the city of Lawton has acquired a negative reputation across Oklahoma. When I first moved to Lawton as a teenager, my new classmates made sure to impress upon me how “ghetto” Lawton is and how there was gang violence on every street corner. When I interned at the Oklahoma state capitol last semester, there were people (emphasis on people, plural) who apologized to me as soon as I said I was from Lawton. A quick Google search can reveal a plethora of half-baked articles and unscientific polls indicating that Lawton is just a terrible, run-down city, incapable of supporting civilized life forms.
However, the data tells a different story. While Lawton is hardly a crime-free city, it’s certainly not the “Little Chicago” that one might hear about online. Among its companion cities in Oklahoma, Lawton is on the low end as far as its overall crime rate goes. Lawton’s numbers look less like Chicago, and more like Norman or Moore. While violent crime remains a problem in Lawton, we experience an exceptionally low rate of property crime.
I call this disconnect between the raw numbers and our reputation the Lawton crime myth. It’s a tall tale, spun up over years through a combination of biased perceptions and idle chatter, despite its distance from reality. Here, I’ll present a few theories as to why Lawton has its poor reputation. I’ll explain how I believe unfair comparisons, personal biases, and deep-seated racism have perpetuated the Lawton crime myth, and I’ll explain why we owe it to ourselves to transcend it.
1. Unfair Comparisons
One explanation for the Lawton crime myth might be that many Lawtonians don’t think of Lawton as a city that can be compared to other cities, but as a small town. Depending on one’s measurement, Lawton has a population approaching or exceeding 100,000 people, and it’s surrounded by multiple suburbs with populations that often commute to Lawton for work, retail, and leisure. Even if it remains underdeveloped, Lawton has a large historic downtown, and it enjoys the presence of more business establishments than anywhere west of Oklahoma City. Lawton is a city, and it has city-sized crime.
However, speaking from personal experience, I’ve observed that people don’t think of Lawton in this way. If Oklahomans think of Lawton, they are most prone to think of it as rural. When my Normanite roommates were recently discussing their personal experience with Lawton, they both expressed surprise at learning that Lawton has such a population large enough to support multiple Walmarts, an airport, a multi-route bus service, and a regional university. I’ve found that this attitude is common among Oklahomans. Many know that Lawton has three high schools, but few know that these high schools have over a thousand students each.
Accordingly, when Lawtonians and Oklahomans evaluate crime in Lawton, they may be more likely to compare the city to Medicine Park, Cache, or Elgin. Compared to these small towns, Lawton has exorbitant crime rates, even if these comparisons are logically unsound. Lawton is a city, and it cannot be fairly compared with its neighbors.
2. Bias from Personal Experience
A second explanation for Lawton’s reputation as a high-crime city is that some Lawtonians do legitimately experience high rates of crime. Like every city, crime in Lawton is concentrated in certain neighborhoods. If one lives in central Lawton, then they are more likely to experience many types of crime, including vandalism, burglary, and assault. Accordingly, residents of those neighborhoods may be more likely to judge Lawton to be crime-ridden as a whole.
Another personal bias derives from the dynamics of social groups. In 2022, nearly 80% of crime victims in Lawton were acquainted with their perpetrator before the crime. Most crime in Lawton is not anonymous and abstract, but rather, it is a pattern of antisocial behavior that’s more common in some social circles than others. On page 18 of one report by the National Network for Safe Communities, they described how 0.5% of any given city’s population is consistently linked with 60-70% of all crime. The odds are that Lawton functions similarly, with crime being concentrated among gangs, drug crews, and those otherwise affiliated with criminal social groups. Simply put, if one lives in a high crime neighborhood and has ties to that peculiar half a percent, then one is prone to assume that their personal experience reflects the whole.
To the extent that Lawton does have a real crime problem, these neighborhoods and these social groups are where one would find it, and this is where our city should focus its anti-crime efforts.
3. Racism
Another explanation may be that Lawton is unfairly stereotyped due to its ethnic makeup. Pound for pound, Lawton is the most diverse city in Oklahoma, and its non-white population makes up a larger share of the population than it does for any other city with a population above 50,000. Even today, reputable studies find that people of every race tend to associate minorities with criminality. Case and point, in one 2023 study in a noted cognitive science journal, researchers found that individuals of all races were likely to identify computer-generated, black faces with violent crime.
In one particularly damning 2019 article in the California Law Review, two researchers evaluated crime perceptions among police officers in New York City. They found that police officers had grossly inaccurate intuition about what constitutes a “high crime area”, with one particularly striking map on page 383 showing how police officers had, at various times, reported the entire city of New York, from Orthodox Jewish suburbs in Borough Park to the alleyways of the Bronx, as high crime areas. Importantly, they found that police officers were far more likely to report that they were in a high crime area when dealing with suspects who were young, black, male, or some combination thereof. (see pg. 386)
It is not unreasonable to believe that Lawtonians, and Oklahomans at large, are susceptible to well-documented biases like these in evaluating the prevalence of crime in a disproportionately minority city like Lawton. Racism towards Lawton’s large Black and Hispanic population likely taints numerous people’s views of the city.
4. Acquired Reputation
My final, most simple explanation for why people talk about Lawton as if it is a crime-ridden city is simply that they have before. Lawtonians have repeated this myth so confidently so many times that it has become emotionally true. It is so widespread and so pernicious that I felt the need to write an entire essay to explain that this claim is built on false premises. As the oft-cited quotation goes, “Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth”.
Lawton does not suffer from a uniquely high crime rate as much as it suffers from a crisis of confidence. We will never be able to improve our city and tackle its real problems if we continue to tell ourselves self-pitying, unproductive myths like these. Lawton has the capacity to leverage its diversity, its natural beauty, and its high development to become one of Oklahoma’s premier cities, but we can’t do all these things unless we believe that Lawton is worth working for. Lawton must strive to be more than its suburbs, more than its worst neighborhoods, and more than its bigotry. We owe it to ourselves and our community to disavow the Lawton crime myth.