Author: Michael Rushford

Six months after Soros-backed progressive Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner resigned, new Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore has initiated a crackdown on crime, increasing prosecutions by 45%. Gardner, who refused to prosecute what she deemed “low level crimes” such as theft, assault and drug dealing, and even murders in the name of racial justice, quit her job last May before the state Attorney General could remove her from office. Jim Salter of the Associated Press reports that Gore, a democrat and former Deputy U.S. Attorney, was appointed to replace Gardner by Republican Governor Mike Parson. He entered the prosecution office with a 6,700 backlog of pending cases including 250 murder cases. Gore almost immediately hired 24 attorneys to fill vacancies and strengthened the working relationship with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

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A Los Angeles judge has denied a cop-killer’s petition to overturn his death sentence and gain release on parole.  Thomas Buckley writes in the California Globe that Jessie Gonzales’ habeas corpus petition claimed that prosecutors withheld evidence regarding the reliability of a witness during his 1979 murder trial. The withholding of possibly exculpatory evidence was held unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1963 ruling in Brady v. Maryland. District Attorney George Gascon’s office conceded the Brady error but argued that it did not void Gonzales’ conviction, only his death sentence. Because Gonzalez is 76, under Gavin Newsom’s generous early release policy, he would undoubtedly be set free.  Fortunately, even though both the defense attorney and Gascon’s office were supporting the murderer, the effort failed.

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With crime and violence increasing since the 2018 election of Soros-bankrolled District Attorney Larry Krasner, who refuses to prosecute most criminals, the Philadelphia City Council has taken action. The Associated Press reports that by a 13-2 vote Philly’s leaders have banned ski masks in schools, recreation centers, parks and aboard public transportation. Those caught in these places wearing a ski mask will be fined $250. Supporters say that the masks make it difficult for police to identify offenders. The ACLU responds that there is no evidence that ski masks cause or encourage crime, but banning them would provide police with probable cause to detain innocent people who wear the masks.  How this ban addresses the call by some government health agencies for the public to resume wearing surgical masks due to increased covid 19 and other viruses remains to be seen. Unless and until Philadelphia voters replace their criminal-coddling District Attorney with a real prosecutor and restore genuine consequences for crime, a ban on ski masks doesn’t make much sense.

In 2020, as rioters were setting fire to parts of Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser celebrated the group that organized the riots by painting a two block section of 16th Street NW, right outside the White House, with 50 foot tall bright yellow words “BLACK LIVES MATTER.”  Joe Schoffstall of Fox News reports that this month, the Mayor spent over $270,000 to repaint the mural while maintaining cuts to the police budget as crime is increasing dramatically.  According to the DC Metropolitan Police Department, as of November 29,  homicides in the district have increased 32% compared to 2022.  Robberies are up a whopping 69%, with overall violent crime up by 40%.  Motor vehicle theft has almost doubled (93%) compared to last year and other thefts are up 23%.

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Two recently released Gallup polls here and here found that 63% of Americans consider crime to be extremely or very serious.   77% of respondents believe that crime has increased in the U.S. while 55% see an increase in their own community.  The poll found that 28% reported someone in their household had been a victim of crime over the past 12 months.  Regionally more respondents in the West (64%) felt that crime was higher in their community.  Politically, 92% of Republicans, 78% of Independents and 58% of Democrats believe that crime has increased nationally.  58% reported that the criminal justice system was not tough enough on criminals, while 26% said it was tough enough and 14% said the system was too tough.  According to the survey, about one in three (36%) of crimes go unreported.  I will go out on a limb here and suggest that most of these unreported crimes are property crimes in California, Oregon, Washington State, Illinois, DC, Minnesota, New York and New Jersey where the penalties for property crimes are either so low or nonexistent that no thief fears the law.  55% of respondents believe that strengthening law enforcement is more important than reducing racial bias.  A significant increase from seven years ago. This data suggests that pro-law enforcement candidates running for office next year, are going to have an edge against progressive opponents and incumbents who are committed to defunding the police and ignoring the level of crime committed by different races.

The socialist/progressive narrative that America’s criminal justice system is systemically racist is endlessly parroted in the mainstream media, although it has been repeatedly proven false.  To address this, some race-baiting pundits expand the narrative to explain that more blacks commit crimes than other races because more blacks are poor, resurrecting the old fiction that poverty is a “root cause of crime.”   Hans Bader discusses this in a Thanksgiving piece in Liberty Unyielding.

Progressives commonly claim the black crime rate is not really higher than the white crime rate, they are merely overpoliced, resulting in blacks being incarcerated more than whites for committing the very same crime. Or that even if the black crime rate is higher, society is really to blame, by driving blacks to crime through economic deprivation and discrimination. Progressives sometimes make both arguments in alternative, as the progressive Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus once did — she argued that if the black crime rate really is higher than the white crime rate, that reflects even worse on society than if the black crime rate isn’t.

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Over the past 18 months Los Angeles police have arrested Dashwan Dow five times for robbery.  On each occasion progressive LA District Attorney George Gascon has refused to hold him, leaving Dow free to find new victims.  Michael Ruiz of Fox News reports that Dow is currently on the loose and considered armed and dangerous.  An October surveillance video shows Dow and an accomplice engage in the follow-home style robbery of a man and a woman in a North Hollywood parking garage.  The video shows Dow sticking a gun in the man’s stomach while stealing his belongings.  Police believe Dow was also involved another follow-home robbery days earlier where he took money and jewelry from another North Hollywood couple.

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The common denominator among city, state and federal governments controlled by democrats is the belief that the criminal justice system is systemically racist.  To prove this, politicians and activists cite government data on traffic stops, arrests, prosecutions and sentences which uniformly show that blacks, which make up 13% of the U.S. population, are many times more likely to interact with law enforcement than other races.  To them, all races commit crimes proportional to their share of the population.  To honor this narrative politicians and democrat voters have enacted and enforced policies to eliminate traffic stops, reduce arrests and prosecutions and reduce or eliminate sentences for all but the most violent crimes.  Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald wrote about this recently in City Journal, noting how these policies and this narrative came to a head in the summer of 2020 with the George Floyd riots.  Crime has increased dramatically since then and the vastly disproportionate number of victims and the criminals that victimized them were black.  The country’s leaders need to publicly admit this.

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The former Chief Public Defender of Allegheny County, PA lost his bid to be elected District Attorney last week when he was defeated by longtime incumbent Stephen Zappala Jr. Steve Bohnel of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that Zappala’s opponent, Matt Dugan beat him by 10% in the primary last May after progressive billionaire George Soros contributed $700,000 to his campaign.  While both candidates are democrats, republicans nominated Zappala as a write-in candidate, allowing him to face Dugan again in the November 7 election.  Soros-funded groups contributed another $1.3 million to Dugan in an attempt to buy the election, but voters from both parties did not want Pittsburgh to go the way of Philadelphia, where Soros-bankrolled Larry Krasner as the District Attorney.   Since Krasner assumed office, both violent crime and property crime have increased dramatically, while arrests and prosecutions have sharply declined.

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An Alabama murderer has been scheduled for execution between January 25 and 26 of 2024.  Kenneth Eugene Smith was twice convicted of murdering Elizabeth Sennett in March of 1988.  As reported by Devon M. Sayers and Emma Tucker of CNN, earlier this year Smith won a state Supreme Court decision accepting his request to be executed by nitrogen hypoxia rather than by lethal injection.  The article cites a description of the method by the Death Penalty Information Center (an opponent of capital punishment) as depriving the brain and body of oxygen, so the inmate would die by suffocation.  That is technically true, but a person breathing nitrogen gas simply goes to sleep painlessly.  Last year 717 Americans died similar deaths from accidentally breathing carbon monoxide.  Now Smith’s attorneys argue that nitrogen hypoxia is an untested experimental method which is unwarranted.

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