Category: General

Crime, particularly violent crime, has increased by historic levels in Los Angeles and New York City over the past two years.  As noted in many recent postings, in both cities broad daylight assaults, carjackings, robberies and murders are a routine part of daily life and often captured on video.  District Attorneys in the New York boroughs have responded by declining to prosecute thousands of criminals as reported by Bruce Golding in the New York Post.  Last year prosecutors dropped all charges for more than 6,500 suspects, an increase of just under 17% compared to 2019.  A law enforcement source told Golding that while the retirement of veteran prosecutors has contributed to the problem, District Attorneys worried about reelection in the Black Lives Matter era are simply letting suspects off.  “Throw in a bucket of woke and no one is getting prosecuted.”

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Since my college days in the 1960s when I began paying attention to such things, I noticed that whenever liberal/progressive/socialist policies had failed, the default response from proponents was always that the resources and time devoted to these policies were inadequate.  This kind of deflection remains standard practice among liberals today.  But there are a couple of places in the United States where the government’s investment in progressive criminal justice policies has been substantial and carried out for over a decade.  No state has taken progressive sentencing and police reforms further than California, beginning in 2011 with Governor Jerry Brown’s groundbreaking Public Safety Realignment bill AB109.  That bill qualified roughly 30,000 prison inmates for  early release and eliminated state prison sentences as an option for car thieves, fraudsters, and most burglars and drug dealers.

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If you read major U.S. newspapers or watch the network news lately you have been informed that while homicides increased in some American cities over the past two years, overall crime is down.  This Associated Press story by David Klepper and Gary Fields is a typical example of this narrative.  Nationally homicides last year increased by 25% with roughly 20,000 people killed.  Preliminary data from police departments suggests that the homicide spikes were much higher in urban centers last year and will increase even more this year.  We have also been told that these increases have occurred in some places that did not defund their police, so we can’t blame the anti-police progressives or politicians like President Biden who, last year labeled police as racists.  The problem with this narrative is that it is false.  Two years of double-digit increases in murder is evidence of a serious breakdown in law enforcement.  In urban centers the homicide increases are much higher than national numbers reflect.  Murders in Los Angeles County are up by 95% over last year’s decade high.   In Chicago murders were up 22%, in Minneapolis 56% and in Portland an astounding 800% according to the AP article.  Other crimes went up as well.

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A 23-year-old vagrant in the Los Angeles County community of Glendale was allowed to go on a crime spree this week thanks to the county’s zero bail policy.  Zero bail was instituted last year to somehow address the Covid-19 pandemic by releasing drug dealers and thieves without bail shortly after their arrest.  Under District Attorney George Gascon, LA County is continuing the zero bail policy.  Louis Casiano of Fox News reports that Kaelun Scharrer was first arrested Monday evening in a stolen car containing drug paraphernalia.  Six hours later he was released without bail.  Scharrer then proceeded to the American Brand Shopping Mall and stole a tip jar and fled on foot.  He was later arrested, charged with a misdemeanor and released again without bail.  He walked out of the police station and immediately stole a flatbed truck.  He was later arrested with the truck in the city of LaVerne.   This time the thief is being held in jail on $25,000 bail.  The LA County Police Chief told reporters that crimes like car theft have increased under zero bail.  Duh.  Progressives want to make zero bail permanent.

A poll commissioned by the campaign to recall progressive Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón found that 61.4% of registered voters support replacing him.  James Varney of the Washington Times reports that Gascón did not respond to a request for comment.   Gascón’s policies of releasing property offenders without bail, declining to fully charge serious offenders, and seeking to reduce the sentences of even violent criminals, has contributed to an epidemic of crime an violence in Los Angeles, sparking the effort to remove him from office.  The poll, conducted between July 23-28, involved 650 LA County voters of which 53% were Democrat and 17% Republican, with the rest either declined to state or independent.  The poll also found that 41.5% of respondents are willing to sign the recall petition, with translates into 2,331,653.  The campaign needs to gather signatures from 579,062 registered LA Country voters by October 27 to put the question on the ballot.

With the unprecedented surge in shootings and homicides in California over the past two years, you would think that even the state’s woke, progressive political class would take action to crack down on criminal firearm use.  Nope.

Michele Hanisee, veteran prosecutor and President of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys in Los Angeles has this piece explaining how  progressive LA Country District Attorney George Gascón and the politicians in Sacramento want to decriminalize the use of firearms by criminals at the same time the “LA County Sheriff has reported a stunning 111 percent increase in homicides from January 1, 2021, to May 21, 2021.”  Most of the murder victims were shot.  Hanisee notes that policies reducing penalties for crimes enacted in Sacramento and ordered by Gascón, not the increase in legal firearm sales that liberal politicians decry, is causing the skyrocketing increase in shootings and homicides in California.

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It has become apparent over the past several years that many of those devoted to the progressive movement taking over the Democrat party are divorced from reality and ignorant of history.  This is particularly true when it comes to criminal justice policy.  In 1994, more than twice as many Californians were victims of violent crime than in 2011.  Murders in the Golden State dropped by 60% during that period.  There were comparable reductions in New York, Texas, Illinois, Florida and most other states.  There have been mountains of research devoted to finding out why this occurred.  Perhaps the best compilation of data on this phenomenon is Professor Barry Latzer’s 2016 book, The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America.  Latzer concluded that while differences in culture between different racial and ethic groups have historically influenced crime rates, societies’ response to crime plays a major roll in the level of violent crime.  In the mid-1990s Americans of every racial and ethnic group demanded a stronger law enforcement response to the criminals dominating its cities during the crime wave of the 1970s and 1980s.  That stronger response, including major improvements in policing, delivered two decades of vastly safer cities and neighborhoods, disproportionately benefiting to those living in high-crime urban neighborhoods.  None of the thousands of young adults who joined the Black Lives Matter protests last summer know anything about this.

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Fatal drug overdoses set an all time record in 2020, with over 93,000 Americans dying.  Just shy of a 30% increase compared to 2019.  Maggie Fox of The Philadelphia Tribune quotes Dr. Nora Volkow of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, “This is the highest number of overdose deaths ever reported in a 12-month period.  These data are chilling.   The COVID-19 pandemic created a devastating  collision of health crises in America.”  The Dean of Public Health Practices at Johns Hopkins agreed; “The pandemic had a lot to do with it….but as the pandemic recedes, we are still dealing wit this overdose crisis.”  The story went on to discuss the need for treatment programs and controls on over-prescribing doctors.  Earlier this year a Washington Post story by Devlin Barrett reported that last year America saw the largest one-year increase in homicides since records have been kept.  The story notes that the increase in murders was not limited to large cities.  Small towns also saw increases of up to 30%.  Experts suggested that the collapse of public confidence in police contributed to the increase, but that the pandemic also played a significant role.  The head of the National Fraternal Order of Police suggested that changes in criminal justice policy which left more criminals on the street  contributed, but that suggestion was discounted by a data analyst who explained that increased murders occurred in places where such reforms had not been implemented.

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