Federal Tax Dollars Fund Woke Criminal Justice Reform

Roughly $1.27 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars is being spent to support alternatives to law enforcement in Wichita, Kansas. The Act was passed out of Congress and signed by President Biden in 2021 on the fiction that the $1.9 trillion slush fund would be spent to help the country recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. Chance Swaim of The Wichita Eagle reports that the Wichita interrupter program will be run by the non-profit Community Restorative Innovation and will send counselors and “violence interrupters” into high crime neighborhoods to implement the Cure Violence model, which treats violent crime as a public health problem which can be reduced through education, counseling and encouragement.  The same model has been utilized in Chicago for 24 years.  How has that been working out?

Under the program, outreach workers and violence interrupters, often ex-cons who use their connections to street gangs and people who participate in criminal activities to get out in front of shootings and other violent crimes, work by deescalating tensions and talking people out of retaliating. The interrupters will focus on intervening to stop immediate threats. Outreach workers will keep in contact with people of the highest-risk of committing gun violence and attempt to connect them to resources as a longer-term solution.

Another part of the nonprofit’s work will include voter registration and other “community culture objectives” such as providing trauma-informed counseling to help victims of violence and raising awareness of systemic racism.  So the program also registers new democrat voters and indoctrinates minorities about the racist criminal justice system.

The news story does not provide any data on the measurable success of this program anywhere it has been implemented, so I went to the Cure Violence website.  The only evaluation newer than 2016, was for the program in New York in 2018 which reported a 63% reduction in shooting victims and a 33% positive shift in norms.  I am not sure how these numbers are defined but shootings in New York city exploded in 2020 and the norms have shifted to every man or woman for themselves in may parts of the big apple. I looked a little deeper. One evaluation reported a 100% reduction in killings in Halifax, Nova Scota, which seemed too good to be true. According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation there were eight homicides in Halifax in 2015, and 12 homicides in 2016.

The takeaway from this is that the federal government misled the public about how the American Rescue Plan Act money was going to be spent, and a good portion of it is being wasted on poorly evaluated, feel-good programs promoting the systemic racism narrative.

It just so happens that Manhattan Institute scholar Jason Riley penned this informative piece in today’s Wall Street Journal reporting on an exhaustive meta-analysis of fifty-one recent studies on racial bias in the criminal justice system by Stetson University sociologists, Christopher Ferguson and Sven Smith.

Their findings? .  . . .there isn’t any.