One of the drivers for increased violent crime is the acceptance of the same by governmental authorities.
A video floating around recently on Twitter/X shows a black girl pounding a white girl’s head onto the pavement until the latter was unresponsive. The white girl was described as being in critical condition, obviously with some type of brain injury. I don’t know the background of the fight but the Missouri AG has promised to take action.
This video joins others such as the two young men in Las Vegas who intentionally rammed the bicycle of a retired police officer and killed him. Videos of youths wilding or thieves cleaning out stores in smash-and-grab fashion are unfortunately plentiful on the web. Crime is up in cities of all sizes, and criminals are often back on the street with little to no bail required. How many times—including the recent murder of Laken Riley—have we heard that the offender should still have been in jail for a previous offense or was released after having committed a violent crime, only then to commit murder?
One of the drivers for increased crime in the US is the ideological/political support for crime by some Democrats. The first time I witnessed this support was during the summer of 2020, when the George Floyd riots were in full bloom. Night after night, violent protests left buildings burned to the ground, bystanders and police wounded, and downtown areas left devoid of shoppers and tourists. What struck me about those riots was that the local and state authorities saw a political advantage to such activity. If one looks at riots and unrest from the past, state, local and federal authorities worked together to end violent activity and bring calm back to the affected areas. Whether it was the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 or the race riots in LA in 1991, the goal at all levels of political and police authority was to end the mayhem and then deal with the underlying issues.
But 2020 was different. Donald Trump was up for reelection. There is no question that groups like Antifa, BLM, and the like vote Democratic if they vote at all. If Democratic governors and mayors brought down the hammer on these people, it would be an attack on their own constituents and in a way help Donald Trump get reelected. These leaders left it to Trump to bring in the National Guard in places that experienced weeks of nightly rights, where police were often pelted with heavy projectiles. Tom Cotton encouraged the president to send in the troops, but Trump chose not to do so. The end result was the burning of public and private buildings, the death and injury of people who either opposed the rioting or found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Police were not given the full backing of their political leaders to end the violence, and with Floyd’s death, the police became the object of hatred, with accusations of racism. No officer wanted to spend his life in prison, so policing became weakened just when it was most needed.
Soros-backed DA’s let criminals out with no bail or reduced charges for violent acts that caused injury or destruction. By doing so, they encouraged rioters and thieves to simply continue their activities, knowing that the police were neutered and that the DA would let them go even if they were caught for burning down a police precinct or killing a retired policeman who was guarding a St. Louis store. California has institutionalized this practice by letting people steal hundreds of dollars worth of goods per store per day without worry of arrest or prosecution. They have allowed homelessness and associated open drug use and community degradation to grow. Governor Newsom did not blush to admit that he made the San Francisco homeless disappear prior to Premier Xi’s visit to the city. After the Chinese leader left, the homeless were returned and the locals again had to navigate their filth and needle-strewn sidewalks. Forty percent of local residents say that they want to leave.
I do not remember any case in the past where political points were more important than the safety and calm of a city. I was in Brooklyn shortly after the 1991 riot that followed a car driven by a Jew that ran over a black boy. A Jewish student was later stabbed and killed in Crown Heights. Mayor Dinkins, though black and a Democrat, told the police to put a lid on the violence. When I was in Crown Heights days after the mayhem, police were everywhere and the violence was over. The important part was that calm be restored and then an investigation and an appeal to better relations could be undertaken. And that’s what struck me in Minneapolis and Portland—the violence just continued, though there is no doubt that city and state police could have put it to bed in a very violent few hours with a curfew to follow. But officials were not opposed to the rioting, if it could hurt Donald Trumps’ chance at reelection.
What concerns me is that let’s say that Donald Trump and the Republicans win big in November. We will still have a situation in which state and local officials will not make the needed efforts to end lawlessness. Throw in an FBI that seems to preferentially investigate and prosecute those on the right, and we are back to The Who’s “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” There is no chance that Donald Trump will use federal forces to do the work of state and local police. So we will continue to experience drug stores being emptied out or citizens in New York being “randomly” attacked on the street. Until the voters in blue states elect tough-on-crime police chiefs, mayors and DA’s, the lawless state of America’s big cities is a problem without a solution.