The obstacle (here, anyway) is that many Alabamians don’t see crime as a local issue; they view it as a measure of the character of some other place they don’t like. This goes back decades; you can find Alabama newspapers in the 1960s screaming about crime in Chicago to drown out our problems.
The shorter point here, totally available for any elected Democratic leader who cares to get in front of a camera or make a TikTok video, is that America's blue cities are uniformly safer than its violent, crime-ridden red states. Murder rates in blue states are small fractions of red states', etc.
