Justice & Law Quote by James Q. Wilson

Wilson’s line is a deliberately bracing trade-off: a reminder that liberal democracy doesn’t just deliver rights, it also limits the state’s ability to preemptively control citizens. The phrasing matters. “I believe” softens the claim just enough to sound empirical rather than ideological, while “part of the price you pay” turns crime into a kind of tax on liberty - regrettable, predictable, and, crucially, not fully “fixable” without changing the regime itself.

The subtext is a warning against utopian crime politics. If you treat safety as the supreme good, Wilson suggests, you start shopping for authoritarian bargains: broader police powers, fewer procedural protections, more surveillance, harsher sentences. His “freedom” is doing double duty: it’s the constitutional freedom of due process and constrained government, but also the social freedom of mobility, anonymity, and weakened informal controls that can accompany modern life. By bundling property crime with “some” violent crime, he signals that the argument is strongest where the public feels least sympathetic: theft, burglary, disorder. Violent crime gets a careful qualifier, as if conceding that society may legitimately demand more aggressive responses there.

Contextually, this sits in late-20th-century American debates where rising crime collided with expanding civil liberties and skepticism of state power. Wilson, better known as a political scientist than an elected official, is staking out a conservative realist position: freedom isn’t free, and a state powerful enough to eliminate crime may be powerful enough to eliminate dissent. The line works because it forces readers to admit what most crime rhetoric dodges: every solution has a constitutional and cultural cost.