Facing Midterm Blowout, Dems Pivot to Become Crimefighters

After a decade of supporting reduced sentences for even the most violent criminals, zero bail, abandoning pro-active policing, and endlessly lecturing Americans that police and prosecutors are racists,  democrats from the President on down are now declaring themselves to be the party of law and order.  This pivot is based on the assumption that the public is so stupid it can’t recall that democrat political leaders had justified the summer riots of 2020 sparked by the killing of George Floyd.  Those riots were followed by unprecedented and continuing increases in crime in most large American cities.  Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald penned this piece in the New York Post discussing the President’s new Safer America Plan announced last Thursday.  The plan promises to fund the hiring of 100,000 additional police officers, presumably to make up for the thousands of cops who have taken early retirement or just quit due to their treatment in cities where democrat political leaders have labeled them racists.  In many parts of the country it has become open season for attacking police officers, usually by black criminals left on the streets by laws and policies adopted by democrats to advance “racial justice.”  As MacDonald notes;

As recently as May 2022, Biden released an executive order alleging that the police disproportionately kill “Black and Brown people” and that there is “systemic racism in our criminal justice system.” The May 2022 order called for “ending discriminatory pretextual stops” — code for ending all remaining proactive stop activity. It called for increased investigations of police departments for civil rights violations.

The recruiting and retention crisis in policing is not an economic problem, it is a problem of morale. Throwing federal taxpayer dollars at local police departments will not help them restock their ranks as long as officers continue to face the charge that they are racist for fighting crime where it occurs most intensely — in minority neighborhoods. Biden’s “Let’s Bail Out the Midterms” plan (a k a the Safer America Plan) preserves a distinction favored by seasoned cop-bashers to try to give themselves crime-fighting cred: The police should “focus on violent crime,” in the words of the Safer America Plan, while, in essence, not sweating the small stuff. But it is precisely the enforcement of public order laws that is the key to public safety.

On July 7, a 15-year-old squeegee extortionist in Baltimore fatally shot a 48-year-old driver who had confronted him and his peers; the teen pumped four additional bullets into the driver as he lay wounded on the ground.
“Broken Windows” enforcement that would address the squeegee scourge and other street disorder has fallen off sharply in the post-Floyd world. Biden would actually contribute to public safety if he called for a return to Broken Windows enforcement and if he repudiated the argument, embraced by left-wing prosecutors across the country, that such policing is racially biased. Until Biden affirmatively walks back his rhetoric of the last three years, however, his and the Democrats’ effect on public safety will continue to be dire.