Just Go Ahead and Lie, ACLU Edition

by · Jul 27, 2020 1:18 pm

In my last post, I noted that, when the sentencing reform crowd runs out of room to distort language, they just flat-out lie.  The example I gave was New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who claims, in the face of an astonishing surge in NYC murders, that the City is “safer.”

The ink was barely dry on that post when I saw, courtesy of Sentencing Law and Policy, an entry about an ACLU report out today, July 27.  The ACLU makes the following assertion (emphasis added):

Nearly every county jail that we examined [in 29 big cities, not including New York] reduced their population, if only slightly, between the end of February and the end of April. Over this time period, we found that the reduction in jail population was functionally unrelated to crime trends in the following months….We found no evidence of any spikes in crime in any of the 29 locations, even when comparing monthly trends over the past two years. The release of incarcerated people from jails has saved lives both in jails and in the community, all while monthly crime trends were within or below average ranges in every city.

Did I mention something about a flat-out lie?

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When Fudging Language Won’t Work, Just Go Ahead and Lie

by · Jul 26, 2020 10:31 pm

In my last post, I noted how anti-police arson, rock throwing and assault have become, in the magical language of criminal justice reformers and their allies in the press, “‘intensified’ peacefulness.”  There are times, though, when even a seemingly infinite willingness to mangle the meaning of language won’t get the job done.  When this happens, there’s a ready solution:  Lie.

Enter noted criminal justice reformer, Mayor Bill de Blasio.

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Violence Gets a New Name

by · Jul 26, 2020 9:40 pm

The new name is “mostly peaceful.”  That’s the phrase the media use to describe the five or ten minutes Antifa and other thug groups take to organize themselves before they begin the evening’s “entertainment” of arson, rock throwing and assault in one major city after the next.  But sometimes the, uh, peacefulness “intensifies.”

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Guess What? The COVID Releases Are a Scam.

by · Jul 24, 2020 5:10 pm

Here’s the headline from the piece in today’s WSJ by my friend Sean Kennedy, a Visiting Fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute:  You’re More Likely to Catch Covid at Home Than in Jail.  The sub-head is:  Early release policies have had no effect on transmission behind bars. But they have contributed to a crime wave.  I thought these two paragraphs were particularly revealing:

While hundreds of millions of law-abiding Americans were on lockdown this spring, progressives were demanding that criminals be allowed to go free. So far, almost 100,000 inmates have been released from prisons and jails around the country—with more to come. It can be no coincidence that crime is on the rise in states where these mass releases took place….

Some savvy jailbirds saw a golden opportunity to win their freedom. Inmates at North County Correctional Facility in Castaic, Calif., sought release by deliberately infecting themselves with the coronavirus. At least 21 of 50 prisoners who were caught on video drinking hot water from the same cup eventually tested positive for Covid-19. It isn’t clear whether they got their wish.

Early Release Keeps the Morgue Busy, Part II

by · Jul 23, 2020 5:59 pm

Underincarceration and the drumbeat for “sentencing reform” that lies behind it are the catalysts for tragic and avoidable murder.  No humane society should tolerate such a thing, but ours does, routinely, simply to genuflect to demands by criminals and their swooning spokesmen to treat them as if our behavior were the problem, not theirs.

This is false, foolish, immoral, and lethal.  Here’s the latest example.

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The Facts on Operation LeGend

by · Jul 23, 2020 3:27 pm

On Wednesday July 22 President Trump announced that the Justice Department would be sending hundreds of additional federal agents into major cities, in an attempt to reduce the number the shootings and violence that has escalated in recent in weeks, and compensate for weak local governments.

“We will never defund the police. We will hire more great police. We want to make law enforcement stronger, not weaker. What cities are doing is insanity.” Continue reading . . .

Harvard’s Delusional Take on Policing

by · Jul 23, 2020 1:27 pm

A well-regarded history professor at Harvard, Jill Lepore, recently wrote this in New York Magazine (emphasis added):

One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles.

Anyone spot something amiss here?

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Hobbling Cops and Shortening Sentences

by · Jul 22, 2020 3:54 pm

Over the past several years real law enforcement leaders, not appointed chiefs in liberal cities or George Soros-funded DAs, have been warning that giving in to demands by Black Lives Matter and progressive politicians for sentencing and policing reforms would result in more crime.  President Barack Obama used his pen to begin these reforms, releasing thousands of drug dealers from prison,  backing off federal prosecution of dealers for new crimes,  implementing “catch and release” on our southern border and initiating federal consent decrees to handcuff police in big cities like Chicago, supposedly to reduce racially-biased policing.  By 2019, many of the most populous states had adopted some form of sentencing reform, cutting sentencing for most crimes,  shortening or eliminating enhancements for repeat felons and reducing or eliminating bail.  In the face of intense pressure by local politicians, activist groups and a complicit media,  Police departments have backed away from progressive policing, particularly in minority urban areas.

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Circuit Courts Divided on Trump’s Sanctuary City Grants

by · Jul 20, 2020 3:43 pm

Last Monday, the Ninth Circuit scaled back a nationwide order that blocks the Trump administration from cutting off grants to sanctuary jurisdictions after finding that the mandate should only apply in California.

Nicholas Iovino of Courthouse News reports that the new verdict comes after a 2017 lawsuit brought by San Francisco. The city sued the Justice Department after the Trump Administration announced plans to make jurisdictions ineligible for the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program, unless they gave immigration agents unrestricted access to local jails, and provided 48 hours’ notice before releasing undocumented immigrants from jail. California joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff, and later passed it’s own separate set of “Sanctuary State” laws in October 2017.

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