Category: General

The FBI reports that in 2023 over 79,000 law enforcement officers were attacked, the most since 2014.  As reported by the Associated Press, over the same ten year period the number of officers who were shot increased by 113%, from 200 in 2014 to 466 last year.  Fatal attacks on officers totaled 60 last year compared to 61 in 2022.  Seventy three officers died in the line of duty in 2021.  During the national George Floyd riots in 2020, groups including Black Lives Matter, several civil rights leaders and progressive politicians spoke openly about their belief that police were racists, justifying the attacks on officers.  As that trend has continued, it is no mystery why fewer young men and women are choosing careers in law enforcement.  Update:  On May 17 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning violence against police officers.  61 democrats voted against it.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is expected to sign legislation into law that prohibits drivers from using cellphones as reported by Fox 29.  While most states have adopted similar laws to reduce distracted driving, the new PA law also requires police departments to document and report the race of drivers detained for traffic stops. The purpose of this new requirement, according to the legislature’s black caucus, is to expose racial profiling by police. In doing so, Pennsylvania joins other Democrat-controlled states in the effort to characterize law enforcement as “systemically racist,” a narrative advanced by Black Lives Matter, the ACLU and race hustlers such as Al Sharpton. The irrefutable fact that different races commit crimes at different rates, unrelated to their proportion of the population, is an inconvenient truth that progressive politicians and the mainstream media prefer to ignore. As Pennsylvania traffic officers shy away from stopping a black motorists using smartphones to avoid being tarred as a racist, the new distracted driver’s law will become merely symbolic.

A report released yesterday by WalletHub ranked California as the best state in the country for police officers. The report compared training, salaries and job hazards among the states to establish the ranking.  However, the surveyors did not actually take the time to talk to police officers. Josh DuBois of KTLA reports that the state’s police officer associations are having none of it.

“We don’t see any of these metrics in this ‘study’ but that is the reality law enforcement officers face in California,” he added. The unions also took issue with the report’s findings on officer compensation, saying WalletHub failed to consider the high cost of living in the state, especially where housing is concerned,” said the President of the Los Angeles Police Protective League.”

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Another example of the effect of reducing the consequences for criminal behavior is playing out across America.  Over the past several years, as part of the progressive criminal justice reform movement, the penalties for drunk driving have been reduced.  Like commercial burglary, shoplifting, simple assault and drug dealing, drunk driving is considered a “low level” crime in most states.  Scott Calvert of the Wall Street Journal reports that while the number of fatal accidents involving drunk drivers are the highest in 20 years, arrests for drunk driving have plummeted.

“Though the risk of arrest is widely considered a key deterrent to drunken driving, DUI arrests in recent years have sunk to multidecade lows, Federal Bureau of Investigation figures show. They dropped from just over a million in 2019 to about 780,000 in 2020. The FBI said there were 788,000 such arrests in 2022, the latest data available.” Continue reading . . .

In New York City, under District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a repeat offender who randomly attacks women is more than likely going to be released without bail just a few hours after his arrest.  The charge against him is likely to be dropped, or if he is convicted he will be sentenced to probation.  Bragg, who was elected with financial support from pro-criminal socialist George Soros, considers most assaults which do not involve weapons as non-violent crimes.  In late March New York’s ABC affiliate reported on multiple random attacks of women including a man who punched a 27-year-old woman in the face in Greenwich Village at 2 p.m. on March 25, and on the same day, a 36-year-old woman was punched in the back.  Shortly after noon on March 26, a 24-year-old woman was slugged in the head. On the 23rd a 23-year-old woman was slapped in the head on West 42nd street.  On the 19th a 30-year-old woman was slugged on Delancey Street.

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California’s “Racial Justice Act” adopted by the Legislature and signed into law three years ago is the logical result of decades of a national indoctrination campaign by race hustlers and the major media.  The narrative driving that campaign is that the American criminal justice system is systemically racist, intentionally singling out blacks for arrest, prosecution, and sentencing, while allowing other races who commit similar crimes to go unpunished or be subject to lesser punishment.   As proof of this, they cite state and federal crime data that indicates that blacks are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system.  The problem with this claim is that it ignores the undisputable fact that blacks commit much more crime than other races in the United States.  An article by attorney Hans Bader at Liberty Unyielding, focuses on the recent disqualification of a California judge for stating this fact. Continue reading . . .

The Alameda County Registrar of Voters announced last week that the recall effort against District Attorney Pamela Price had turned in enough signatures to force a vote. Natalie Hanson of Courthouse News Service reports that that campaign had turned in over 123,000 signatures to meet the 73,000 requirement to hold a special election. Price was elected in 2022 with major support from progressive billionaire George Soros, who has contributed millions over the past several election cycles, to elect racist, pro-criminal activists to district attorneys offices across the country.  Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg, Chicago’s Kim Fox, Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin and Los Angeles DA George Gascon were all elected with unprecedented support from Soros front groups. Price, the first black female district attorney in county history has presided over a major increase in crime in Oakland as she has refused to prosecute black arrestees and undercharged some of the city’s most violent offenders.

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Proposition 47, a 2014 California ballot measure that decriminalized theft and drug dealing, may be significantly revised when voters go to the polls this November 5.  Evan Simon of the California Globe reports that the Californians for Safer Communities Coalition has turned in 900,000 signatures to the Secretary of State to put the “Fix Proposition 47” initiative on the ballot. This is more than enough to meet the state’s 547,000 signature requirement to qualify the measure.  Since Proposition 47—called “The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act” by its pro-criminal sponsors, including the American Civil Liberties Union and socialist billionaire George Soros—was adopted, California retailers have been looted by brazen gangs of thieves who clear off store shelves and sell the loot on-line with impunity. Under Proposition 47, any theft of $950 or less is considered a petty offense with no consequences for the thieves. While daily news video from security cameras show the crimes in progress, because the criminals are not arrested or prosecuted, most thefts are not even reported. The same holds true for drug dealing.  Downtown areas in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego have become 24-hour flop houses, where drugs are openly sold and users lay blacked-out on sidewalks.

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The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of a Black Lives Matter (BLM) organizer whom a lower court held liable for a police officer’s injury during a protest he organized.  Brianna Herlihy of Fox News reports that during a 2016 BLM protest in Baton Rouge, initiated by organizer Deray Mckesson, a police officer was hit in the head by a rock thrown by a protester, knocking out his teeth and leaving him with a brain injury.  The officer sued Mckesson who organized the event that resulted in his injury.

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The following article was published on April 12 in the California Globe: 

A review of the book DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools (Max Felker-Kantor, The University of North Carolina Press) in the May 2024 issue of Reason Magazine looks back 42 years to the launch of a Reagan Administration’s effort to convince school children that taking drugs was a bad idea. The article by Joe Lancaster describes Professor Felker-Kantor’s view that the DARE program, which brought police officers into classrooms to discuss the dangers of drug use, and the First Lady’s “Just Say No” campaign, which utilized public service announcements and school curriculum to convince kids to avoid illegal drugs, were both failures.

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