April 23, 2024
We all remember the incident back in 2020 when George Floyd was wrongly killed by a Minneapolis police officer during an arrest. What followed was a manic anti-police movement resulting in “defund the police” efforts in many places in the country, and cases where funding for police operations were reduced.
We have also seen soft-on-crime prosecutors refuse to prosecute many people charged with crimes; no-bail policies that released those accused of crimes, many with multiple previous charges, back onto the street without having to post bail; and violent protests against police departments that resulted in much damage to public and private property, but relatively few people held to account for their criminal behavior.
How police should react to various situations involving crimes was then “re-imagined,” and new ideas about dealing with crime appeared. While some advocated doing away with police altogether, another idea was that of using “soft police,” where social workers, rather than trained uniformed officers, would deal with crimes and criminals.
Mariame Kaba is described as an American activist, grassroots organizer, and educator who advocates for the abolition of prisons, and all police.
At about the time the George Floyd riots and protests began, Kaba had published an article in The New York Times in which she wrote: “As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm. People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation.”
She suggests that the problems of safety and justice can be solved by spending more taxpayer money on housing, food, and education, rather than making people pay a price for breaking the well-known and sensible laws.
In the years since this soft-on-crime approach began, crime has increased substantially across the nation, particularly in blue cities and states where this foolish philosophy exists.
One example of this was reported by the FBI. From 2019, before the soft-on-crime mentality appeared, to 2020, following the Floyd death, the national murder rate jumped by 30 percent, the largest single-year increase in history.
Many of us, likely most of us, understand that the system that has been in effect since the origins of the United States of America actually is the more sensible and successful system.
A fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Rafael Mangual, showed the fallacy of not enforcing laws in the traditional way. Police presence, he said, often is all that is needed to deter crime. But removing criminals from the street is also a needed action.
“If a police officer makes an arrest and removes an active offender from the street, if that’s someone who was committing 10, 20, 30 felonies a year,” he said, “that individual being in custody spares the community the crimes that would have otherwise been committed.” Makes sense, doesn’t it?
“In the city of Chicago, the typical homicide suspect has 12 prior arrests,” he continued. “One in five [homicide suspects], 20 prior arrests, these are not just individuals who are being locked up for the first offense and having the key thrown away.”
And he added that crime will always be with us, but removing or reducing the successful practice of having a police presence is “irresponsible.”
As for the public perception of the crime problem, a Gallup poll from last November shows that among both Democrats and Republicans, the number who believe that crime is a serious problem is at the highest point since Gallup started reporting it in 2000.
Predictably, the left responded to the perception of crime being a serious problem, saying it is just a “moral panic.”
But this “moral panic” is the result of seeing what the soft on crime idea has produced: murders, robberies, rapes, assaults, and more.
The Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald understands the fallacy of these current trends towards crime. She noted how criminals have become more brazen and the commission of many kinds of crimes exploded.
Focusing on the increase in retail crimes that the left-wing scholars ignore, she said, “Our criminal justice elites have decided that they would rather subject the property of honest businessmen to mass expropriation than to apprehend and punish looters, because doing so has a disparate impact on minority criminals.” And, she correctly said that these crimes are “not crimes of necessity, they are crimes of opportunity.”
In the criminal mind is the attitude, “if I won’t be punished, why not rob the store?”
“This is not a normal state,” she said. “It is due to a failure of will. The will to enforce the values of civilized society.”
“It is not a ‘moral panic’ to be concerned about the lawlessness that has broken out since 2020, it is realism,” MacDonald said.
After years of being horrified with what has happened, the public is finally supporting a return to sensibly dealing with crime. Perhaps things will soon begin to change. Cities like San Francisco and Washington, DC have begun to make changes. And not a moment too soon.
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