With America experiencing the largest single-year increase in homicide ever recorded in 2020, and data indicating another double-digit increase last year, it appears that many politicians including the president are confused about the cause.  During a New York  visit with the Mayor Eric Adams last week, President Biden pledged to address the city’s out-of-control crime with help in getting illegal guns off the streets.  Adams, a former cop, along with mayors in Baltimore, DC, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and St. Louis among others believe the most effective approach to violent and property crime is to try and remove guns from the hands of criminals.  Rebecca Rosenberg of Fox News has this piece discussing the fallacy of focusing on the weapon rather than the progressive policies that have enabled criminals to stay on the streets and prey upon the public.   Cully Stimson, a former prosecutor and senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation calls the focus on “gun crimes” a red herring.

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In 2019 rich liberals, most of whom do not live in Southern California, including George Soros (New York), Patty Quillin  & husband Reed Hastings (San Francisco), Elizabeth Simons (San Francisco), M. Quinn Delaney (Oakland), Cari Tuna (San Francisco), Susan Pritzker (Oakland), Kaitlyn Krieger ( San Francisco), Nicole Shanahan (San Francisco), Dorianna Blitt (New York), Anne Devereux (New York), and Anne Rosenbaum Irwin (San Francisco), gave $12.4 million to George Gascón’s campaign for Los Angeles District Attorney.  Immediately after taking office, Gascón announced that he would not be prosecuting most property and drug criminals and that most arrestees would be released without bail. He also pledged to seek the shortest sentences possible for criminals convicted in Los Angeles County, including murderers, rapists and other violent offenders.  While progressive state sentencing reforms (read reductions) along with Governor Newsom’s pandemic emergency orders for inmate releases and zero bail had been fueling crime increases before Gascón was elected, his new policies exacerbated this trend.  The Los Angeles County Sheriff reports that homicides increased by 94% and auto thefts by 59% over the past two years.  News footage of the daily “smash and grab” robberies across LA and the recent Beverly Hills home invasion and murder of liberal philanthropist Jaqueline Avant and the brutal killing of UCLA student Brianna Kupfer in exclusive Hancock Park, both by habitual felons, was a reality check for LA area liberals.

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Progressive California District Attorneys who have chosen not to prosecute offenders who commit so called “low level” crimes are violating the state Constitution according to Hasting’s law professor Zachary Price.  In a piece published in SCOCA blog, a joint project of the U.C. Berkeley and Hastings Schools of Law, Professor Price asserts that while district attorneys such as San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin and Los Angeles DA George Gascón ran for office promising not to prosecute drug users and small-time dealers, trespassers, shoplifters, traffic offenders and those resisting arrest among others, the state constitution

specifically limits local district attorney discretion by imposing an affirmative duty on California’s attorney general “to see that the laws of the State are uniformly and adequately enforced.” And although state law provides for elected district attorneys in each county and obligates them to “attend the courts, and within his or her discretion . . . initiate and conduct on behalf of the people all prosecutions for public offenses,” the state constitution requires supersession of local prosecutorial functions when the attorney general determines that local enforcement is inadequate.

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Imagine your five-year-old daughter was being wheeled into surgery to have a defective heart valve replaced.  What would be the most important qualification for the surgeon about to cut her open?  Would it be the doctor’s race or gender?   When the hospital’s chief administrator decided that it was more important that the members of surgical staff “looked like the community” than their level of competence, he put your daughter’s life at risk.  As a parent, if I suspected that this was the case, I would choose a different hospital.  The U.S. Supreme Court is the last word on what constitutes law in our country.  The exercise of this sweeping power has and will continue to have life-altering consequences on the millions of people who live in America.  What then, should be the most important qualification for the selection of a Supreme Court Justice?  Heather MacDonald’s compelling piece in the City Journal exposes the absurdity of elevating race, gender or any other criteria beyond competence, integrity and temperament governing the selection for membership on the nation’s highest court.  By limiting the selection of the next justice to a black woman, MacDonald notes that President Biden is “rendering 98 percent of all possible candidates beyond consideration because they lack `qualifications’ that have nothing to do with judging.”

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Investigative reporter Andrew Kerr’s piece in yesterday’s Washington Examiner exposes the corruption behind the curtain of Black Lives Matter (BLM), the nation’s most influential social justice organization.  BLM was founded in 2013 by black activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, in response to the acquittal of Hispanic neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman after the fatal shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin in self defense.  The movement gained national exposure after the August 9, 2014 shooting death of black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.   BLM immediately launched protests which turned into several weeks of riots, with businesses looted and set on fire. The St. Louis Chief Financial Officer estimated a total cost at $20 million.  Months later a grand jury and the Obama Justice Department concluded that the shooting was in self defense.  By the May 25, 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the group had amassed several million in contributions and had a worldwide network of chapters and affiliates.  Within five days of Floyd’s death BLM coordinated protests occurred, almost simultaneously, in 2,000 cities in 60 countries.  Many of the protests, especially in over 200 U.S. cities, devolved into riots with government buildings and businesses burned, police officers, bystanders and reporters attacked, and widespread looting and violence.  In the end the “mostly peaceful” protests took 25 lives and cost at least $1 billion in damage.   So how did BLM get the money to finance these protests and where did it go?

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