Monthly Archive: April 2023

A little publicized 2021 public opinion survey by the Skeptic Research Center asked respondents to self identify as very conservative, conservative, moderate, liberal or very liberal.  The researchers then asked “how many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019?”  20.28% of very conservatives believed that between 1,000 and 10,000 or more black men were killed by police.  13% of conservatives believed this.  25.8% of moderates thought so, while 38.7% of liberals and 53.5% of very liberal agreed.  In 2019, twenty-five unarmed black men were killed by police. The same survey asked “what percentage of people killed by police were black.”  The responses ranged from 60.4% from very liberal to 37.8% from conservatives.  Even the very conservatives thought 44.5% of those killed by police were black.  The actual percent was 24.9%.   How could so many people from all political stripes have been this wrong?  The fact is that for decades the public has been fed a steady diet of lies by liberal politicians and the mainstream media characterizing the police as racially-obsessed bigots randomly slaughtering innocent black men.   In an article from today’s City Journal, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald painstakingly deconstructs this propaganda.

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On April 4, Chicago voters doubled down on woke criminal justice reform by electing Brandon Johnson as Mayor.  Out-of-control crime has been the city’s leading policy issue for several years, with most believing that former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s defeat was due to her failure to effectively address it.  Johnson’s recently-announced policies are even more anti-law enforcement than hers.  He is erasing the street gang database that has helped police identify violent offenders, calling it racist.  The Sun Times reports that instead of filling the hundreds of vacancies in the Chicago PD, Johnson is closing down police stations and wants to hire non-police “trained professionals” to respond to 911 calls.  He had vowed to address the root causes of crime (poverty, housing, education) rather than aggressively going after the criminals.  Last weekend, the criminals responded by shooting 35 people with 8 fatalities.  Two of the victims were shot when hundreds of teens took over the Millennium Park area, smashing windows and setting cars on fire.  The previous weekend 20 people were shot with three fatalities.  It looks like the open season in Chicago will continue.

A story posted in the online edition of the Sacramento Bee reports that after California’s 2016 adoption of Proposition 57, “The Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act,” recidivism went down according to a report from state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). The initiative allowed criminals convicted of so called non-violent crimes such as drug dealing, car theft, grand larceny and burglary to be released from prison early based upon their behavior while incarcerated.  The criminal’s prior convictions, even for murder or rape, were not required to be considered in the CDCR process to determine who was eligible and how much time off they would receive.  The Bee article notes that the measure was opposed by law enforcement organizations like the San Francisco Police Officers Association, Association of Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs and the California District Attorneys Association, who warned that it would allow the release of dangerous violent offenders resulting in increased crime.  But in the three years after Proposition 57 passed, the CDCR reported that the conviction and return-to-prison rates for released inmates declined.

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Justin Jones, the Tennessee legislator expelled last week for active participation in a protest (insurrection?) that shut down proceedings in the statehouse, was indicted for assaulting a motorist during a George Floyd protest in the summer of 2020.  Caroline Downey of National Review reports that Jones was caught on video blocking a street outside the state capitol and attacking the driver of a pickup with a traffic cone as he attempted to leave.  The video was shown to a Grand Jury, which indicted Jones for assault and reckless endangerment.  Jones claimed that his actions were “peaceful” and that the police and prosecutors were “pushing a false narrative portraying me as violent.”  The video clearly shows Jones’s carrying out the assault, but my favorite is the protester in the yellow shirt who does an NBA flop when the silver car he’s blocking touches him.  He would be ejected from a game for such a blatant fake.  It is terrifying to be caught in one of these road blocks and swarmed by protesters.