{"id":4056,"date":"2021-06-24T13:47:36","date_gmt":"2021-06-24T20:47:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crimeandconsequences.blog\/?p=4056"},"modified":"2021-06-24T13:47:36","modified_gmt":"2021-06-24T20:47:36","slug":"joe-bidens-senior-moment-in-trying-to-deal-with-surging-violent-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeandconsequences.blog\/?p=4056","title":{"rendered":"Joe Biden’s Senior Moment in Trying to Deal with Surging Violent Crime"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pres. Biden was older when he took office than Ronald Reagan was when he left.\u00a0 It’s not exactly a secret that older people can have problems with forgetfulness.\u00a0 Pres. Biden seems to be having such a moment in his attempts, summarized here<\/a> and here<\/a>, to come up with an answer to the dramatic rise in violent crime (a rise that started under his predecessor last year but has continued full throttle during Biden’s tenure).<\/p>\n

On the other hand, perhaps it’s not so much that Biden can’t remember how to deal with crime effectively\u00a0 —\u00a0 a project he helped advance as a senator 25 years ago\u00a0 —\u00a0 as it is that, given the radical leftward shift in the Democratic Party, he can’t afford<\/em> to remember.\u00a0 Instead, he has to pretend that the Left’s reality-free narrative\u00a0 —\u00a0 a jazzed-up version of the failed soft-on-crime policies of the Sixties and Seventies\u00a0 —\u00a0 is the answer.<\/p>\n

It isn’t.\u00a0 It’s pathetic.\u00a0 And it will cost lives, disproportionately\u00a0 —\u00a0 as is always the case with violent crime\u00a0 —\u00a0 black lives.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Once more, Paul Mirengoff is acute and merciless in taking apart Biden’s “program.”\u00a0 His PowerLine essay<\/a> starts off:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s now clear even to Joe Biden that the rise in violent crime poses a political problem for Democrats. The vote count in yesterday\u2019s New York City mayoral primary reinforces that realization.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Former NYC police captain Eric Adams, now a Borough President, holds a strong nine percentage point lead over the “progressive” second place finisher, Ms. Maya Wiley.\u00a0 Adams has promised more policing, not less.<\/p>\n

Biden is in a bind. The normal response to a violent crime wave is the one he embraced in the 1990s and that worked so well \u2014 more policing and tougher sentencing. But Biden, having just finished apologizing to the Democratic base for this embrace, can\u2019t go there again. He can\u2019t even advocate backing away from policies that constrain the police and put criminals back on the street.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And there you have it in a nutshell.\u00a0 It’s not like the answer to rising crime is a big mystery.\u00a0 Crime rose for an entire generation, from the early Sixties until about 1990.\u00a0 In the late Eighties, the country decided to do something about it.\u00a0 At the federal level, this was best symbolized by the bi-partisan Sentencing Reform Act, which inter alia abolished parole and established serious, mandatory sentencing guidelines in federal law.\u00a0 In the early Ninties, the trend largely continued with Bill Clinton and (who else?) Senator Joe Biden, then a key sponsor of the 1994 Crime Bill, and with the enactment of mandatory minimum sentencing laws.\u00a0 The states followed suit.\u00a0 In addition, many states and cities adopted the Giuliani-Bloomberg model of more police and more proactive policing.<\/p>\n

And then what happened?<\/p>\n

What happened was that crime fell by the largest amount over the shortest time in American history.\u00a0 In 1991, the murder rate<\/a> was 9.8 per 100,00.\u00a0 By the dawn of 2015, it was 4.4\u00a0 —\u00a0 a drop of slightly more than 55% (and one of the most successful, if least heralded, domestic policy achievements in American history).\u00a0 Other crimes, both violent and property crimes, also saw breathtaking reductions.<\/p>\n

It’s true that not all the astonishing shrinkage of crime was due to tougher policies.\u00a0 The aging of the Baby Boom bulge out of its most crime-prone years, and the massive proliferation of private security and surveillance, certainly also played a part.\u00a0 But more police, more aggressive policing, law-driven sentencing, and greater use of incarceration (for its incapacitating effects if nothing else) were driving the train.\u00a0 Thousands and thousands of lives\u00a0 —\u00a0 mostly black lives, since most murder victims are black<\/a>\u00a0 —\u00a0 were saved.<\/p>\n

So here’s the deal:\u00a0 We already know how to stem a rising tide of murder.<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 We did it with unequaled success for an entire generation, with Joe Biden (and Ronald Reagan and George Bush (41) and Bill Clinton and George Bush (43) and Ed Meese and many others) pitching in.<\/p>\n

But, as Paul notes, Mr. Biden is now in a political box filled with the failures of the Sixties and Seventies rather than the successes of the Nineties and Two Thousands:<\/p>\n

Thus, Biden will resort to the only item in the Democrats\u2019 toolbox he can try to pass off as an anti-crime measure \u2014 gun control.\u00a0The Washington Post<\/a>\u00a0quotes White House press secretary Jen Psaki as follows:<\/p>\n

The president feels a lot \u2014 a great deal of the crime we\u2019re seeing \u2014 is as a result of gun violence. You can expect he\u2019ll speak to that and his commitment to continuing to address gun violence and gun safety in the country.<\/em><\/p>\n

Well, yeah, a great deal of violent crime is the result of gun violence. But that doesn\u2019t mean speaking about guns will reduce the violence. Nor does it mean that passing more gun control legislation would do so. Nor, even if it could, would that effect take hold in the short term.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I might add that gun ownership increased much, much more over the two decades-plus of massive declines<\/em> in murder than it has over the last few years of increasing homicide.\u00a0 So it’s clear that simply the number of guns is not the answer.\u00a0 The answer\u00a0 —\u00a0 painfully obvious to those willing to look\u00a0 —\u00a0 is<\/em> sober policies to deal with the people who are using the guns to commit crime<\/em>.<\/p>\n

When Eric Dreiband, then an Assistant U.S. Attorney General, went to Minneapolis to meet with low-income minority group members fearful of rampaging gun violence, they didn\u2019t ask him for more gun laws. They asked for more policing.<\/p>\n

Of course. These folks may be poor, but they\u2019re not stupid.<\/p>\n

Eric Adams\u2019 seemingly successful campaign for mayor of New York City didn\u2019t neglect mentioning gun control. He is a Democrat, after all.<\/p>\n

But Adams\u2019 signature promise was more policing. By all accounts I\u2019ve read, this theme is what lifted him above his more liberal rivals.<\/p>\n

In the absence of effective policing, citizens must protect themselves. That\u2019s the main reason why gun sales reportedly are way up these days.<\/p>\n

Thus, quite apart from the fact that gun control legislation fails to address the real drivers of the violent crime surge \u2014 less policing and more criminals on the street \u2014 it may, on its terms, be an unpopular response.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bail “reform”\u00a0 —\u00a0 that is, the program immediately to return criminals to the street to continue their crime spree, largely or completely without any effective restraint\u00a0 —\u00a0 is also high on the list, but that’s grist for a future post.<\/p>\n

The Democratic left would like to abolish the police. Few Democratic politicians advocate going that far. Instead, they favor discouraging interaction between police officers and residents of high-crime (mostly Black) neighborhoods. If you can\u2019t abolish [policing], neutering it is the next best thing.<\/p>\n

In sum, the Biden\u2019s embrace of left-wing ideology leaves him and his party vulnerable and stranded on the issue of crime, even as that issue moves to the political forefront. All Biden and the [Democrats] can do is hope that the wave of violent crime recedes.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not likely to happen. Last year, the [Democrats] deluded themselves into believing that the crime wave was due to the pandemic and\/or unrest following the death of George Floyd. Now, they admit otherwise, as the Washington Post shows in this article<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I repeat:\u00a0 We already know how to reverse the upsurge in murder.\u00a0 We did it before, recently and stunningly.\u00a0 Joe Biden knows all about it, having been in the middle of it, and it’s not a “senior moment” that’s causing him to pretend he doesn’t.\u00a0 It’s the woke, race-huckstering ideologues in his Party\u00a0 —\u00a0 ideologues he seemingly no longer has the strength or will to control.\u00a0 This will be bad, or possibly disastrous, for his Party’s prospects next year.\u00a0 It will be even worse\u00a0 —\u00a0 and tragically so\u00a0 —\u00a0 for the thousands of crime victims who could have been saved had we only had the courage and the sense to return to what we know works rather than trot out in academic gibberish the evasions we know fail.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pres. Biden was older when he took office than Ronald Reagan was when he left.\u00a0 It’s not exactly a secret that older people can have problems with forgetfulness.\u00a0 Pres. Biden seems to be having such a moment in his attempts, summarized here and here, to come up with an answer to the dramatic rise in violent crime (a rise that started under his predecessor last year but has continued full throttle during Biden’s tenure). On the other hand, perhaps it’s not so much that Biden can’t remember how to deal with crime effectively\u00a0 —\u00a0 a project he helped advance as a senator 25 years ago\u00a0 —\u00a0 as it is that, given the radical leftward shift in the Democratic Party, he can’t afford to remember.\u00a0 Instead, he has to pretend that the Left’s reality-free narrative\u00a0 —\u00a0 a jazzed-up version of the failed soft-on-crime policies of the Sixties and Seventies\u00a0 —\u00a0 is the answer. It isn’t.\u00a0 It’s pathetic.\u00a0 And it will cost lives, disproportionately\u00a0 —\u00a0 as is always the case with violent crime\u00a0 —\u00a0 black lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"yoast_head":"\nJoe Biden's Senior Moment in Trying to Deal with Surging Violent Crime - Crime & Consequences<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.crimeandconsequences.blog\/?p=4056\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Joe Biden's Senior Moment in Trying to Deal with Surging Violent Crime - Crime & Consequences\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Pres. Biden was older when he took office than Ronald Reagan was when he left.\u00a0 It’s not exactly a secret that older people can have problems with forgetfulness.\u00a0 Pres. Biden seems to be having such a moment in his attempts, summarized here and here, to come up with an answer to the dramatic rise in violent crime (a rise that started under his predecessor last year but has continued full throttle during Biden’s tenure). On the other hand, perhaps it’s not so much that Biden can’t remember how to deal with crime effectively\u00a0 —\u00a0 a project he helped advance as a senator 25 years ago\u00a0 —\u00a0 as it is that, given the radical leftward shift in the Democratic Party, he can’t afford to remember.\u00a0 Instead, he has to pretend that the Left’s reality-free narrative\u00a0 —\u00a0 a jazzed-up version of the failed soft-on-crime policies of the Sixties and Seventies\u00a0 —\u00a0 is the answer. 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