Category: Policy

DC Police Chief: “Lock Them Up”

by · Mar 8, 2023 11:15 am

Last year homicides in Washington, DC reached a twenty year high while the brain-dead City Council was passing a law to shorten sentences for violent and serious crimes.  The Daily Mail reports that yesterday Metro Police Chief Robert Contee made a startling suggestion.  “What we got to do, if we really want to see homicides go down, is keep the bad guys with guns in jail.  Because when they’re in jail, they can’t be in communities shooting people.”

What a concept….actually punishing criminal offenders.  Several questions come to mind regarding this announcement.  What if most of the offenders to be locked up are black?  Is the Chief racist?  Is he actually supporting “mass incarceration,” which progressives tell us was an abject failure in the 1990s?   Answer:  most criminal offenders in Washington, DC are black, and most of their victims are black.  Progressives and race-baiters insist that the only way to achieve “racial justice” is to stop arresting black offenders, leaving them on the streets to find more black victims.  Where is the justice in that scenario?  By the way, Chief Craig and Mayor Muriel Bowser, who also wants the district to crack down on criminals, are both black.

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Missouri AG Moves to Fire St. Louis Prosecutor

by · Feb 24, 2023 1:48 pm

Federalism allows cities and states to adopt widely varying policies regarding crime and justice, so long as the policies comply with the U.S. Constitution.  When elected officials implement policies that result in increased crime or perceived injustice, the voters usually get the last word.  This happened last year in San Francisco, when voters recalled progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin for failing to aggressively prosecute criminals.  Boudin was among several dozen district attorneys, states attorneys and circuit attorneys whose campaigns were bankrolled by progressive billionaire George Soros.  Before Soros began doing this, even big city district attorney campaigns would rarely raise more than $500,000 from thousands of contributors.  To elect pro-criminal progressives to these offices Soros often contributes $500,000 to over $1,000,000 to their campaigns, essentially buying the election.

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Fresno Cop Dead Thanks to Newsom’s Early Release Plan

by · Feb 1, 2023 3:24 pm

In 2016, Governor Jerry Brown and progressive billionaire George Soros pooled just over $10 million to fool the public into passing Proposition 57, the so-called “Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act.”  While it was billed as providing well-behaved non-violent felons with a means to gain early release from prison, District Attorneys warned that it would give the state department of corrections unbridled authority to release inmates with multiple violent prior convictions.  Two years later a Los Angeles appeals court and a Sacramento judge ruled that this warning was correct.  In May of last year Governor Newsom’s appointed head of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) announced new regulations giving over 70,000 prison inmates the opportunity for early release.  A CJLF lawsuit to block these unconstitutional regulations has been dragging through the courts  since last Summer.  On Tuesday,  January 31, a police officer in the small farming town of Selma was shot and killed by gang member sentenced last March to five years in prison for several felonies.  He was released last November after serving seven months.

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Juvenile Crime Takes Off

by · Jan 24, 2023 11:42 am

In the late 1980s roughly one-third of serious and violent crimes in the U.S. were committed by juveniles under the age of 18.   In the eight years between 1986 and 1994 the number of violent crimes committed by juveniles went from 600,000 to 1.05 million.  A major contributor to the high juvenile crime rate over this period was the emergence of Columbian cocaine smuggled by South American gangs into U.S. and marketed by heavily armed street gangs.  Juveniles made up a significant cohort of the members of these gangs, who were constantly at war with rival gangs over marketing territory.  In large urban centers juvenile gang members played a major role in moving crack-cocaine and punishing rivals.  At that time state laws written in the 1950s to deal with teen-aged joyriders and petty thieves with short stays in Juvenile Hall and rehabilitation programs, were inadequate to deal with hardened 17-year-old drug dealers carrying automatic weapons.  Drive-by shootings, violent carjackings, and murders over a victim’s wristwatch or tennis shoes became regular occurrences in big cities and juveniles were often the perpetrators.

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Lessons from Crime and Punishment in El Salvador

by · Dec 9, 2022 9:56 am

Hans Bader has this post at Liberty Unyielding: “The murder rate has fallen by two thirds since 2018, and crime has fallen by 75%, in El Salvador as it has imprisoned large numbers of criminals. The country has put a hefty 2% of its adult population in prison. This is due to the anti-crime policies of its current president, Nayib Bukele.”

Bader quotes an essay by Edgar Beltrán at Law and Liberty:

In 2015, El Salvador reached a sky-high 103 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. The year before Bukele came to power, it was 51 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Now, it is 17.6, about half the rate of American cities such as Philadelphia or Chicago…. Bukele is, by far, the most popular, democratically elected leader in the world. Independent polls have his local approval rating around 80 or 85%. The explanation is relatively simple: El Salvador went from being one of the most violent countries in the world, absolutely dominated by criminal gangs, to reducing crime by 75%. Bukele promised to end crime and he delivered … by putting in jail almost 2% of the adult population of the country.

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Is Crime in San Francisco Worse Than NYC?

by · Nov 14, 2022 11:42 am

Responding to MSNBC interviewer’s statement that New York City residents “don’t feel safe in this town,” and are “worried we could become San Francisco,” the state’s newly-elected Governor Kathy Hochul said NYC “will never be San Francisco.”  Mallory Monench of the San Francisco Chronicle reports that Hochul went on to say that the Big Apple was successfully fighting crime, with homicides and shootings down dramatically from last year.  While the two cities have vastly different populations, on overall crime they are generally comparable.   Homicides are tracking down 14% in New York City compared to last year while they are up in San Francisco by .43%.  But NYC saw dramatic increases in 2020 and 2021, while San Francisco homicides increased only slightly.  Both cities have unacceptable rates of violent crime.  When it comes to property crime Hochul is correct about San Francisco.  The numbers for 2020 show almost three times the rate of property crimes in San Francisco than in New York.  The reporter admits something that most of the media and liberal think tanks ignore, “The number is almost certainly higher in reality since many people don’t report property crime to the police because of the perception that doing so won’t make a difference.”

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Brutal CA Murderer Got Early Prison Release

by · Aug 10, 2022 2:58 pm

The District Attorneys of Placer and Amador Counties told reporters Monday that a Sacramento man arrested for the July murder and dismemberment of an elderly North Highlands woman, gained early release from state prison after serving less than half of his sentence for previous crimes.  Rosalio Ahumada of the Sacramento Bee reports that habitual felon Darnell Erby is facing charges of aggravated murder and burglary for killing 77-year-old Pamela Garrett May, whose dismembered body was found in her home on July 19.  Over the past 20 years Erby had been convicted of 8 different crimes,  arrested 20 times, and had been unable to go more than two years without committing a serious felony.  Under California’s progressive sentencing reforms Erby actually became eligible for parole in 2018, a year after he was sentenced to 12 years for felony convictions in Placer and Amador County.  He was denied parole twice for criminal activity while in prison, but was granted parole in April of 2021.  Governor Jerry Brown’s Public Safety Realignment (AB 209) passed in 2011, and his George Soros-bankrolled Proposition 57, The Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act, passed in 2016, made this murderer’s release possible.

Soros-Funded Victims’ Groups

by · Apr 20, 2022 9:33 am

As National Crime Victims’ Rights Week kicks off on April 24, three California groups, which support shorter sentences and the early release of criminals, will be holding rallies and events portraying themselves as the voice of victims.

The three progressive groups funded by liberal billionaire George Soros—Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice, Californians for Safety and Justice, and Prosecutors Alliance of California—support defunding police departments, declining to prosecute most criminals, and seeking the shortest possible sentences for those who are prosecuted.

As reported on Fox 40 News, earlier this week, representatives of these groups met with legislators in Sacramento to encourage more state-funded services for crime victims, while ignoring the laws and policies that have flooded California communities with criminals.

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The Crime Epidemic in Larry Krasner’s Philadelphia

by · Mar 23, 2022 1:00 pm

Crime is out of control in Philadelphia.  There were 562 homicides last year, twice as many than eight years ago, and homicides have increased by 19% so far this year.  The city’s Police Commissioner reports that last year’s 750 carjackings were triple the number in 2019.   For perspective, New York City, which has more than five times the population of Philadelphia, had 485 homicides and 510 carjackings last year.   A data snapshot from last year indicates that police arrested only 31% of the Philadelphia’s murderers, 14% of criminals who shot people,  and 11% of those committing property crimes.  “Far too many in our city think that it’s open season to commit crime here in Philadelphia,” said the Police Commissioner.  They think it’s open season because it is open season.

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After a While, the Evidence Is Too Much To Ignore

by · Sep 28, 2021 6:34 am

When Vox and NYU, of all places, finally see that policing is the solution and not the problem, you know that our violent crime epidemic has gone over the cliff.

From this article in Vox:

Last year, the US’s murder rate spiked by almost 30 percent. So far in 2021, murders are up nearly 10 percent in major cities. The 2020 increase alone is the largest percentage increase ever recorded in America — and a reversal from overall declines in murder rates since the 1990s.

American policymakers now want answers on this surge. One approach has good evidence behind it: the police.

There is solid evidence that more police officers and certain policing strategies reduce crime and violence. In a recent survey of criminal justice experts, a majority said increasing police budgets would improve public safety. The evidence is especially strong for strategies that home in on very specific problems, individuals, or groups that are causing a lot of crime or violence — approaches that would require restructuring how many police departments work today.

I don’t agree with everything in the article  —  far from it  —  but it’s instructive that our national murder crisis has come to this point.  At some stage, reality does intrude, even in the citadels of liberalism.

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