Washington Examiner
In 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions warned that the United States was experiencing a surge in violent crime, deserving a forceful response. He called for a restoration of law and order. He was ridiculed for this by the same liberal newspapers that today have abetted and enabled a shocking rise in violent crime.
Sessions was right. New crime data from the FBI bolster the point he was making. Violent crime surged just as he said, and in fact, he probably had no idea how bad things were going to get.https://www.consumersadvocate.org/embeds/v1?pcuid=c0bf287c7330
What Sessions hadn’t counted on was a lockdown that dissolved the civilizational bulwarks against barbarity and crime and a surge in anti-police ideology.
The “defund the police” movement that President Biden and Democrats backed in 2020 is now having precisely the results that anyone could have predicted. Those paying the price for their left-wing stupidity are black people, who comprise a vastly disproportionate number of murder and violent crime victims.
Then there are the lockdowns. If you remove from the sidewalks all the families out shopping, the workmen grabbing cups of coffee, the businessmen on lunch breaks, and the merchants with their eyes out on their streets, you surrender the streets to the ne’er-do-wells. This is what broken-window policing theory taught us: Good foot traffic crowds out the bad. Take away the good foot traffic, and you get the bad.
Also, taking away sports, school, concerts, and community of any sort for millions of young people is bound to breed bad behavior.
New FBI data shows the alarming trend is for real. In 2014, the U.S. hit a modern low in the number of murders. But by 2020, the largest U.S. cities were slipping back into the bad old days — some back to 25 years ago, when rampant violence was simply accepted as an unavoidable part of modern urban life.
In 2020, the murder count in the U.S. reached a 23-year high of more than 20,000, according to the FBI data. And the rise was quite sudden. In 2020, U.S. cities larger than 1 million in population had an increase in murders greater than 30% year over year. Unfortunately, this surge has not ended. Portland, Oregon, the site of some of the worst anti-police violence and rioting last summer, saw a twentyfold increase in murders committed during the first two months of 2021 over the same period during the prior year. Portland is not alone in this regard.
The U.S is on the cusp of experiencing the late 1960s all over again — the arson and violence and hollowing out of cities — but worse. The new FBI data shows that even as property crime continues to fall, likely due to security technology and the disappearance of cash, violent crime and murder especially are on the rise. Human life is as cheap as it has been in decades.
Fortunately, the public has recent experience with a workable model of safety. People know better than to accept this new normal. If only they are willing to tell the anti-police crowd to pound sand, they can keep their cities vibrant and safe.
Right up to 2019, violence remained at a manageable level. This is what is possible when political correctness is kicked aside and good police are allowed to do their jobs.
No one wants to see more Walter Scotts being shot unarmed in the back, nor more George Floyds dying in custody, nor more Eric Garners killed by out-of-control officers enforcing nitpicking unjust laws. But they also don’t want to see law enforcement paralyzed by the blindly anti-police ideology that has taken over newsrooms and Democratic Party headquarters across the nation.
There is nothing anti-racist about coddling the criminals who terrorize black America on a daily basis. The enablers involved in this movement, many of them lily-white newspaper owners and editors, are creating a new generation of black crime victims who do not deserve to suffer in this way.
This nation’s cities are great places, and they can be made so again. Police must be given the support they need to put down a new class of violent criminals who have found a way to take advantage of weakness. The costs of lockdowns need to be acknowledged and weighed against their diminishing benefits.
It is up to Biden to keep the forces of political correctness at bay, to tell the COVID-19 authorities that there are other threats to human life, and to restore law and order in a way that is just for everyone.