South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg has solved all the crime in his city and is now ready to clean up America. Actually, the crime rate in South Bend has exploded under Mayor Pete, but the candidate still feels ready to take his failed leadership to the nation's capital.
In an interview with the Des Moines Register editorial board on Thursday, Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg shared his ideas on how to handle, or at least how not to handle, people found by police to be in possession of illegal drugs.
"I think I developed much more in the direction of criminal justice reform," Buttigieg said. "I would not have said even five years ago, that what I believe now, which is that incarceration should not even be a response to drug possession."
Asked to elaborate if he meant he would not incarcerate anyone for possession of any kind of drug, the candidate answered, "That's right."
"We have kids in South Bend who have grown up with the incarceration of a parent as one of their first experiences," Buttigieg reasoned. "That makes them dramatically more likely to wind up themselves having an encounter with the criminal legal system."
Instead of listening to Rudy Giuliani, who knows a thing or two about bringing down crime rates, the mayor has chosen to listen to left-wing academics whose ideas never work in the real world.
While lamenting the cost of incarceration, Buttiigieg proposed drug courts and diversion programs aimed at rehabilitating people battling substance abuse problems -- because, you know, that should be cheap, given the cost of health care and all.
At least as a mayor, Buttigieg could only screw up a single city. In the White House, he could ruin an entire country.