The Biden Plan for Criminal Justice

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In her piece in today’s  City Journal , Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald breaks down the Biden/Harris plan for reforming criminal justice.  She notes that the plan reads like a “Black Lives Matter wish list.”   Items on the list include re-instituting  the Obama era requirement that police departments under consent decrees report weekly to a federal judge justifying that their efforts to enforce the law are not racist.  Under Biden/Harris the requirement also extends to the charging decisions of District Attorneys.  The goal is to “strip police officers and prosecutors of their discretion regarding whom to arrest and whom and how to charge.”

The Biden/Harris administration would move to eliminate federal mandatory-minimum sentences for violent criminals and drug dealers and bribe states with federal grants to do this same.  The new administration will expand federal funding of useless racial profiling research of state policing, when the data consistently shows that urban minority districts suffer far higher levels of crime, almost always committed by criminals who are the same race as the victims.  Of course the police are stopping and arresting more people in these districts, that’s where the crime is occurring.   “In Los Angeles, for example, though blacks are only 9 percent of the population, they committed 44 percent of the violent crime in 2019…..In New York City, blacks committed over 72 percent of all shootings in 2018….Whites committed 3 percent of the shootings.” She has more examples.

The Biden/Harris plan would also encourage the elimination of cash bail…something that even voters in the people’s republic of California rejected at the polls last week.   The new administration’s entire approach to criminal justice would be based on the fiction that every law enforcement agency in the country is thoroughly infused with racism, even in cites where the Mayor, Police, Chief and District Attorney are all black.  This is, of course, preposterous, yet it will be the  policy of the new administration.  Don’t believe it?  Read the plan.