Crime Is Up and Democrats Are Scrambling
Radical left calls to “defund the police,” echoed enthusiastically by Democratic party luminaries including Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, now look like another one of the left’s daffy ideas with readily foreseeable consequences: it has unleashed a veritable crime wave.
The FBI reported that homicides nationwide increased 29.4% in 2020, the largest year-to-year jump since the FBI began reporting murder statistics in the 1960s. Aggravated assaults increased 12% and violent crime overall was up 5.6%.
Trying to cover its tracks, the radical left blames the pandemic. But violent crime that had been trending downward since the early 1990s began rising in 2015, not 2020, according to the FBI.
Why 2015? Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, touching off riots in a number of cities across the country. Brown’s killing subsequently was shown in court to be the result of his assault on the officer. Ignoring the facts, progressives from Barack Obama on down used this unfortunate event as an excuse to accuse all police as instruments of what they called “systemic racism.”
Several confrontation videos from police body cams were hyped by the mainstream media implying they were everyday occurrences. As a result, police instinctively have become less proactive and reduced their contacts with the public.
Harvard economist Roland Fryer reviewed these publicized cases and found a “statistically significant increase in homicides and total crime” in those cities where the incidents occurred. He estimates that media focus on these rare events, making them appear common, “caused almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies.”
Blaming the system rather than the individual for crimes prompted a number of cities and states to enact so-called “bail reform.” With judges restricted from holding most defendants until trial, petty crime has risen dramatically: California has effectively decriminalized shoplifting.
Likewise, releasing thousands of repeat offenders from prisons and jails to alleviate overcrowding has had predictable results.
The left’s misguided attempt to protect criminals from supposed police racism has proven to be completely at odds with its preoccupation with social justice: The burden of the shocking rise in violent crime falls most heavily on minority communities.
In 2019, 44% of all homicide victims were black while blacks made up 13% of the population. Almost 90% of those black victims were killed by other blacks. Minority communities are all too aware of this and continue to call for more police protection, not less as illustrated by Gallup polls taken in 2015 and again in 2019. A recent Atlanta survey found that crime is by far the public’s greatest concern, far exceeding homelessness and the pandemic.
Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in May 2020, is the poster child for the effects of demonizing and defunding the police. Violent crime was up 17 percent in Minnesota last year and murders were up 58 percent, breaking a record set in 1995.
Through September 2021, the number of shots fired in Minneapolis was up 380 percent compared with the same period in 2019. With police officers resigning in droves, traffic and pedestrian stops in high crime neighborhoods dropped 75%.
Voters in Minneapolis were given a choice this fall: keep their police department or replace it with an ill-defined Department of Safety with fewer officers. They voted resoundingly to keep their police force.
Many leftist elected officials across the country who “drank the Kool-Aid” in the summer of 2020 and cut back police funding were voted out of office this month.
Overwhelmingly Democratic Seattle voters elected a new mayor who promised to support the city’s police, defeating a candidate who backed defunding the police. In a stunning turnabout, voters elected a “get tough on crime” Republican as city attorney, defeating her opponent who had cheered on last year’s rioters and refused to prosecute them.
New York City’s new mayor is a former police officer who has promised to restore law and order after eight years of deterioration under an avowed socialist mayor.
Buffalo, New York, voters rejected a socialist mayoral candidate who was stridently anti-police and re-elected their four-term mayor who’d sat out June’s primary.
The progressive left jumped on what it expected to be a winning issue: defunding the police. Working with the left-leaning media, they whipped up a firestorm of police brutality claims that they knew weren’t representative of the public’s experience. And as a result, 900 innocent people were murdered.
We can expect a lot of backtracking by these same progressive politicians in the coming year. They’ll claim respect for law and order but still lace their rhetoric with phrases about social justice so as not to alienate their base.
Nonetheless, the progressive left has left itself vulnerable to a potent Republican issue in next fall’s elections. We’ll be seeing a lot of flashbacks to ill-considered statements made by progressive officials that voters will see as coddling criminals and jeopardizing innocent lives.
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Just after this article was written, Darrell Brooks killed at least 5 people and wounded at least 40 at a Christmas parade in Waukesha WI. This comment is also for Ed’s recent article on the Rittenhouse trial as well. (If Josh W / SGI editor chooses to delete this comment – I am perfectly OK with that decision) Darrell Brooks is innocent until proven guilty. He is an African American with a an apparent history of vitriolic remarks towards white Americans that certainly could be deemed racist by some. MSBNC and CNN will do their best to avoid coverage of this horrific crime. FOX no doubt will do the opposite. The truth is this crime cannot be compared to the Rittenhouse event as little children were involved and self defence irrelevant. Was this man’s action linked to the Rittenhouse verdict? The timing and location of the event makes one wonder. Here is the point. Is mainstream media and vitriolic coverage responsible? Is the elephant in the room that non stop bombardment of racially charged coverage – specifically targeting one race, acceptable while another form of racism is framed to a lesser degree due to the historical track record of that racism being more horrific and prolonged. I think the answer is simple – two wrongs do not make a right. Until we condemn all racism with equality and justice across the full spectrum of humanity – RACISM WILL PREVAIL. PRESIDENT BIDEN – this message is for you as well. May not reach you – but my guess in coming weeks it will from other Americans of all races.
SAD ADENDUM to comment above. (This opinion piece is now archived so likely few will ever read this added observation, HOWEVER this is for the historical record )
It has been weeks now since the Waukesha incident. No mention of the horrific tragedy nowadays in mainstream media. It’s as if it never occurred. The real smoking gun that there is a media blackout is using YouTube search results – term “Waukesha” and 95% + of the video results are 10 to 12 days old (as of this posting today). The size and ramifications of the event and specific casualties which include little children is significantly relative in magnitude to other current events. Even on an international basis when a similar incident occurred in Germany at Xmas a few years back, comparatively the dearth of current coverage of Waukesha is unbelievable. In my comment above I predicted this would happen. Now one could do a “thought experiment” and substitute different racial characteristics, and ask ourselves would media coverage and exposure be different. Impossible to know that answer, but my guess most would agree something fishy is going on.
As I tell my wife when she catches me in one of my many inconsistencies, “that’s different.” As far as the mainstream media is concerned, “This one is different.” You’ve pointed out that this one is indeed different: The tragedy’s scope is much bigger and the coverage is, well, non-existent. Even Fox News has mostly dropped it for fear of being called racist.
It’s hard to accuse the leftist media of double standards when they have no standards at all.
FINAL ADDENDUM – SEE DATE. After coverage last night about dearth of coverage of Waukesha on Fox by Carlson we finally have the first Lady there… speaking today. Almost 3 weeks of MSM blackout. I leave no explanation for future historical researchers, but point to Howard’s comment above as one explanation made during this period of cover up.