by Kent Scheidegger · Feb 28, 2023 7:34 pm
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has conceded defeat, the Chicago Tribune reported at 9:00 CST Tuesday. At about that time, the New York Times listed the results as 36.4% for Paul Vallas and 20.2% for Brandon Johnson, with Mayor Lightfoot third.
Plurality winner Mr. Vallas has run on a tough-on-crime platform, the WSJ reports. He has the backing of the Chicago police union. But the windy city isn’t out of the woods yet. Continue reading . . .
by Michael Rushford · Feb 28, 2023 11:26 am
While homicides are down slightly in Chicago this year, according to the Chicago Police Department, robbery, sexual assault, motor vehicle theft, aggravated battery, burglary and theft over the first two months of 2023 are up 52% compared to last year. Almost 4,000 additional crimes in just two months. Chicago’s progressive District Attorney Kim Foxx, and Mayor Lori defund-the-police Lightfoot share much of the responsibility for this, but Governor J. B. Pritzker (D) and the democrat majority legislature are also complicit, having enacted “reforms” that have weakened sentencing. Chicago police are also operating under an Obama-era consent decree which ties the hands of officers and requires the department to prove it is not racist. This has driven officers out of the department to take early retirement or to jobs in other cities. Currently Chicago PD is 1,300 officers short. What to do? State Rep. Thaddeus Jones (D) has the solution….force businesses to hire security guards to protect customers from the criminals state laws and local policies has kept on the streets.
by Kent Scheidegger · Feb 27, 2023 10:39 am
Statutes are generally drafted by lawyers on legislators’ staffs. Unfortunately, too many lawyers did not take basic logic as undergraduates, and it is not generally taught in law school. The U.S. Supreme Court has now taken up a case to unravel the logic of a bit of statutory drafting that could have been written more clearly. Continue reading . . .
by Michael Rushford · 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.
by Kent Scheidegger · Feb 22, 2023 2:25 pm
The U.S. Supreme Court today denied a stay of execution to Florida murderer Daniel Dillbeck and declined to take up his case. No dissent is noted. (See update at end of post.)
The Florida Attorney General’s statement of the question presented follows the break: Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Feb 22, 2023 7:49 am
The U.S. Supreme Court today vacated an Arizona Supreme Court decision denying a murderer’s challenge to his death sentence. At the time the high court took up the case, CJLF considered filing an amicus brief in support of the state but decided we really couldn’t support the Arizona court’s decision. I am not at all surprised at the outcome but a bit surprised the state got four votes. Continue reading . . .
by Michael Rushford · Feb 21, 2023 11:13 am
The following article was published in the February 17 edition of the California Globe:
Data released last September by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services provided researchers at the Manhattan Institute with the necessary information to compare the rearrest rate for offenders prior to the state’s 2020 bail reform law with the rearrest rate after the law took effect. The intent of the bail reform law was to force judges to release more arrestees without bail, called Non-Monetary Release (NMR). Charles Fain Lehman’s piece in the City Journal confirmed what many in law enforcement had predicted: when offenders are released without bail, they are more likely to be rearrested for committing new crimes. This finding was ignored by the major media and liberal think tanks like the Brennan Center, which had for months tried to convince the public that releasing more offenders without bail was not the cause of increased crime across the state. One exception was a September New York Post article by Jim Quinn which noted: “in 2019, 166 of the NMR participants got re-arrested each month. In 2021, the number soared to 445 re-arrests a month, including more than 300 felonies each month.” That’s over 2 ½ times more rearrests per month.
by Elizabeth Berger · Feb 16, 2023 2:06 pm
The United States should move away from incarceration and ultimately work toward a system that creates “real safety,” according to a new, widely circulated report from the Vera Institute of Justice. In the report, the authors claim that severe sentences do not deter crime nor help survivors of crime heal, and therefore are not achieving their intended purpose. However, the argument seems to be rooted in emotion rather than facts. The research actually presents a more nuanced picture.
The controversy regarding incarceration is not new, and has remained a major topic of debate in recent years. Clearly, there are many different opinions regarding the utility of incarceration and its effectiveness, many of which are emotionally-driven and not rooted in facts. Rather, the research on incarceration presents a very nuanced picture. It is simply naive to think that any one policy would be 100% effective or 0% effective, and these types of “all-or-nothing” arguments are often rooted in emotion rather than facts.
In this post, I’ll give an overview of the lengthy report’s executive summary and give my thoughts regarding their key points. Stay tuned for part two of this post, where I will perform a deeper assessment of the report in its entirety.
by Michael Rushford · Feb 14, 2023 3:22 pm
California Assemblyman Corey Jackson (D-Moreno Valley) has introduced a bill that would bar the use of police dogs in arrests, apprehensions and crowd control. Evan Symon of the California Globe reports that the purpose of AB 742 is to end the disproportionate number of African Americans and people of color that are apprehended and injured by police dogs. “We have to understand that the use of police K-9s has been a mainstay in this country’s dehumanization and it’s cruel and violent history,” said Assemblyman Jackson. The problem is, a ban on police dogs will not reduce African American exposure to police, and will almost certainly increase shootings of suspects of color. The disproportionate number of police encounters with blacks is the result of the disproportionate number of crimes committed by blacks. In Los Angeles for example, blacks commit forty-four percent of all violent crime, though they’re nine percent of the population.
by Kent Scheidegger · Feb 13, 2023 10:37 am
In the last few elections, there have been some encouraging signs that voters in major cities are beginning to turn the corner and wake up from the delusions of wokeness. San Francisco booted its criminal-coddling district attorney. New York Democrats nominated the relatively tougher-on-crime candidate for mayor, with the general election being a foregone conclusion. The results have not all been positive, though. Philadelphia voters unwisely reelected their criminal-coddling DA, and a majority of Californians are so allergic to voting for a Republican that Gov. Newsom’s appointed attorney general sailed into a full term.
On a list of big-city mayors rank-ordered by effectiveness in fighting crime, Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot would be near the bottom. Is Chicagoland ready to give her the boot? Collin Levy explores that possibility in this column in Saturday’s WSJ. Continue reading . . .
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