Contemporary scholarship on punishment, politics and society generally treats democratic politics and crime policy as a dangerous mix. In this view, when crime comes onto democratic political agendas, it generates perverse political incentives that result in politicians pandering to and/or manipulating mass publics bent on harsh punishment. In this article, I argue that an examination of violent victimization complicates this conventional wisdom. Using violence as a framework, I challenge three fundamental assumptions about the relationship between democracy and crime. From there, I suggest how different democratic institutional arrangements might facilitate broader public participation in crime politics, and how that participation can lead to promoting less, rather than more punishment.