It came as a surprise to no rational American that treating criminals as victims and showing leniency in the prosecutions of violent criminals would lead to more repeat offenders and higher crime rates. But there's another, less-covered result of the woke "social justice" movement that seeks to return dangerous criminals to the streets while declining to prosecute lesser offenses. As it turns out, the lack of consequences for criminals means there aren't as many snitches willing to help law enforcement go after bigger fish.
The phenomenon was covered by The Washington Times which reported "law enforcement sources say the criminal justice reform movement sweeping states, combined with policies of liberal prosecutors, leave them with fewer cooperating witnesses whom they need to crack homicide and other serious criminal cases."
As former police officer Paul Beakman explained, "Criminal justice reform is crushing investigations. I apprehended individuals on something minor, and they wanted to make a deal because they didn’t want to go to jail. Now we don’t have the snitch pool of low-level offenders willing to talk about bigger fish. It’s huge and it’s such a simple concept," he said.
Data in American cities where woke prosecutors have taken over and turned their streets into lawless melees back up the Beakman's assertion and show that murder case closure rates are decreasing — in part due to the loss of law enforcement's ability to flip small-time criminals into witnesses against larger organizations.
In New York City, the first quarter of 2021 saw police clear 86.2 percent of murder cases while the same period this year saw a lower clearance rate of 80.8 percent. In the nation's capital, the homicide clearance rate from January to July dropped from 65 percent in 2021 to 49 percent in the same period this year — meaning fewer than half of homicides in D.C. have been solved so far this year.
As The Times also explains, "Boston police solved 31% of their homicides through the first half of the year, the Tampa Police Department cleared 49% of its homicide cases, and officers in Dallas solved 54%," an apparent drop from their jurisdictions "finished 2021 with homicide clearance rates of 78% to 85%."
Other cities are seeing similarly troubling clearance rate decreases. Pittsburgh's dropped from 80 percent in 2019 to 48 percent in 2021 — the city only has a clearance rate of 29 percent through March of 2022.
It's all part of a nationwide trend that's seen clearance rates drop and more violent offenders remain free to continue their lawlessness.
The lack of clearance rates, due in part to the inability of law enforcement to use other offenders to turn on more violent associates, only leads to more homicides with rates continuing to rise across the country. And it all goes back to Democrats' radical policies and calls to defund the police. With lower clearance rates and higher homicide rates come lower conviction rates for the few suspects who are nabbed and prosecuted. A Morning Consult/Politico poll from February found that nearly half of Americans blamed spiking crime on the left's push to slash law enforcement budgets.
??In a Politico/Morning Consult poll from February 2022, 49 per cent of respondents blamed the rise of violent crime rates on defunding police departments.
— The New Statesman (@NewStatesman) June 8, 2022
A full 69 per cent thought that crime would decrease “a lot” or “some” if police departments were funded more.