DEMOCRATS AND PROGRESSIVES - FROM BARACK OBAMA ON DOWN - BLAME LAW ENFORCEMENT FOR SOCIAL INEQUALITY

Crime Is Up and Democrats Are Scrambling

 

By Jason L. Riley 

The Wallstreet Journal

October 5, 2021

 

Last week’s Federal Bureau of Investigation report on the nationwide rise in homicides might be the least surprising news of the year. Nor is it any shock that the political left is trying to duck blame for the trend.

Murders spiked by close to 30% in 2020, the biggest one-year increase since 1960. Aggravated assaults rose by 12%, and violent crime overall increased by 5.6% from 2019 levels. The left blames Covid-19, but the trend predates the pandemic. Violent crime, which more or less had been steadily declining since the early 1990s, began reversing course in 2015, not 2020. “Violent crime and homicide rates rose in the U.S. in 2016 for the second consecutive year, driven in part by a spike in murders in large cities,” the Journal reported in 2017, citing FBI data.

The real surprise would be if crime rates weren’t rising. Since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., seven years ago, there has been a concerted effort on the part of Democrats and progressives—from Barack Obama on down—to blame law enforcement for social inequality. Resources have been diverted from police departments to appease activists. Sections of major cities have been turned over to hoodlums. The public has been fed a steady diet of malarkey about cops gunning for young black men. Camera phones and social media have made statistically rare fatal encounters between police and black suspects seem commonplace, and the press has expressed next to no interest in providing context.

A 2020 study by Harvard economist Roland Fryer and co-author Tanaya Devi assessed the impact of these “viral” incidents and noticed a disturbing pattern: police become less proactive, their contacts with civilians decline, and violent crime spikes. That’s what happened in Ferguson after Brown was shot by an officer, in Chicago when the same thing happened to Laquan McDonald, in Baltimore after Freddie Gray died in police custody, and in Minneapolis after a cop murdered George Floyd.

In addition to vilifying police, many states and cities have passed “bail reform” laws that limit the ability of judges to hold defendants until trial. Local prosecutors now brag about how few crimes they prosecute. California has effectively decriminalized shoplifting. Covid likely has contributed to the uptick in crime, but not in ways that the left wants to talk about. In hindsight, perhaps releasing thousands of repeat offenders from jails and prisons to alleviate overcrowding wasn’t such a good idea.

The question going forward is whether the pendulum has swung too far, even for some liberals. New York’s mayoral election is next month, and the winner is expected to be Eric Adams, a former cop who has focused his entire campaign on crime control. Saturday’s New York Post cover featured the faces of some of the city’s youngest homicide victims this year. So far, 21 New Yorkers between the ages of 10 and 17 have been killed by guns or knives, which is “more than three times last year’s tragic toll,” the paper noted. When elites dump on police, low-income communities pay the price.

Atlanta and Seattle are likewise holding mayoral contests this year, and crime is a major political issue in both places. Murders in Atlanta rose 62% from 2019 to 2020, and a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll found that crime is by far the biggest concern among voters, with homelessness a distant second. Former Mayor Kasim Reed, who holds a slight lead in the race, has spent the campaign talking about the “unacceptable” crime rate, running television ads that say public safety is “job number one,” and vowing to hire more police if elected.

The Seattle Police Department investigated 73% more homicides in 2020 than it did a year earlier, and around “300 police officers have retired or resigned from SPD in the past 18 months, offset by about 90 new hires,” the Seattle Times reports. Which may explain why Bruce Harrell, the mayoral candidate who has distanced himself from the “defund the police” left, holds a solid lead in the race over a more progressive rival who has been endorsed by Bernie Sanders.

As in New York, the winners in Atlanta and Seattle will almost certainly be liberal Democrats, but if progressives are having trouble convincing even residents of these deep blue metropolises that the police are a bigger problem than the criminals, we’re moving in the right direction. The left’s obsession with social inequality is at cross-purposes with its coddling of criminals, who prey primarily on the poor. Safe communities abet upward mobility and help narrow inequality. Pretending otherwise out of political expediency is not only misleading but dangerous. It amounts to playing with people’s lives.