Soft on Crime Begets More Crime
Posted on June 2, 2015
"Southern District Police Station Baltimore MD Dec 11" by Pubdog - Own work. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
You don’t have to be a sociologist or a criminal studies major to figure this out.
The headlines are pretty stark.
In the NY Times:
Shootings in New York City have been rising for two straight years, the first time that has happened since the end of the 1990s, when the city was still in the early years of a remarkable downturn in crime.
Homicides by gunfire, seen as a key measure of preventable violence, are up steeply this year. Of the 135 killings through May, 98 involved a gun, up from 69 such killings at this point in 2013 and in 2014.
In the USA Today, a story about Baltimore:
Three more fatal shootings in this troubled city Sunday bring May's homicide count to 43, making it the most violent month in nearly 40 years.
Police say two men were fatally shot in the head about 1 a.m. ET. About 11 a.m., a man was fatally shot in the back.
With 43 homicides, May is deadlier than August 1990 when 42 people were killed, according to USA TODAY data.
And another story in the USA Today, this one about Chicago:
After recording the fewest murders in decades last year, violence is soaring: a 40% increase in shootings and 29% more homicides in the first three months of the year.
The city has recorded 355 shootings this year as of Monday compared with 253 shootings for the first quarter of 2014, according to crime statistics released by the Chicago Police Department on Wednesday.
Eighty murders were recorded in the first quarter of 2015. There were 62 in the same period last year.
Most of these murders are happening in the toughest parts of town.
Black kids killing black kids. Gang members hitting gang members. Drug dealers killing drug dealers.
Every once in a while, somebody innocent gets murdered.
An enterprising young African-American female reporter was gunned down in Baltimore last week. It was very, very sad and it attracted a lot of press attention.
But mostly, the murdered are anonymous, just another crime statistic.
These are the parts of town that are most likely to protest about the police. These are the citizens who complain about stop and frisk and traffic stops and crack-downs on pot smoking.
But when the police go away, the criminals come out and play. And kill.
The Ferguson protests put a spotlight on police brutality. Except, as it turned out, those protests were all based on a bunch of lies. Michael Brown was a thug who died after violently confronting a police officer.
Sure, the cops in Ferguson and in other parts of urban America sometimes go overboard trying to keep communities safe.
And yes, sometimes they use brutal tactics that go way over the line.
Perhaps there is a middle ground somewhere.
But I can tell this. When liberals spend the bulk of their time attacking the police and the job that they do, more people die at the hands of the criminals.
I remember when I served on a jury in DC several years ago.
Two African American men were charged with a gangland murder.
Both were clearly guilty. But we could convict only one of them.
The lone hold-out that resulted in a hung jury was a white liberal man who felt that the case wasn’t overwhelming enough. Yes, he acknowledged, he was probably guilty.
The black jurors were furious. They knew the streets and they knew that if they put this young killer back out on the streets, young people would die.
The policies of Bill De Blassio and Stephanie Rawlings Blake have led to the deaths of young black people. If you advocate polices that are soft on crime, you get more crime.