Guest Post by Pat Buchanan
The daily reports of escalating violent crime, resulting in growing numbers of innocent wounded and dead, are inducing a fear for safety that is outstripping any fear of cops. And politicians are beginning to see the numbers shift and reacting accordingly. Consider a few of the crime numbers…
Within hours of Saturday’s shooting in Times Square where three bystanders, including a 4-year-old girl, were wounded, the two leading candidates to replace Mayor Bill de Blasio were on-site.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a retired captain of the NYPD, and Andrew Yang, who declared:
“My fellow New Yorkers … Nothing works in our city without public safety, and for public safety, we need the police. … My message to the NYPD is this: New York needs you. Your city needs you.
“New York cannot afford to defund the police.”
The rush of Adams and Yang to the scene of the shooting, and the messages they delivered, tells us something about the state of play in politics — and not only in the city of New York.
Liberal mayors and urban politicians who enlisted in the Black Lives Matter “defund the police” movement after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last May, appear to have caught a wave that is now receding.
In the streets of America’s cities, violent crimes are spiking to heights unseen since the 1990s. And, instead of “Defund the Police!” the insistent cry is, “Where are the cops?”
Atlanta is a case in point.
Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms just announced she will not run for a second term. While she listed issues and events that exhausted her energy, The New York Times suggests that Atlanta’s soaring crime rate made her vulnerable and Bottoms was looking at possible defeat.
Writes Richard Fausset of the Times:
“The most serious political threat that emerged for Ms. Bottoms in recent months was a phenomenon she had previously described as the ‘Covid crime wave.’ … Atlanta is struggling with a spike in violent crime, including a 58 percent increase in homicides last year…
“The mayor’s inability to get a handle on crime has become the central theme for two challengers,” one of whom is city council president Felicia Moore.
“‘Atlanta has a mayor that is more interested in things that happen outside Atlanta,’ Ms. Moore said in a recent statement, referring to Ms. Bottoms’s emerging national stature, including talk that she was rumored to be a possible vice-presidential candidate. ‘We need a mayor who knows the No. 1 job of any mayor is to keep our city safe.’”
So visceral is the public reaction to the crime wave in Atlanta that in Buckhead, a wealthy enclave in the northern section of the city, there is talk of secession and taking its tax base with it.
Why is crime rising and not only in Atlanta?
Among the reasons: the demonization and demoralization of police departments under constant fire for harboring “rotten apples” and rogue cops. Seen by cops as anti-cop, this campaign is generating police resignations, retirements and reductions in force.
The NYPD has lost 7% of its force and is in a recruitment crisis.
Large reductions in the number of cops have also been recorded in Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Atlanta. Then there is the “Ferguson Effect” where cops avoid aggressive policing for fear a mistake could cost them their reputation and career, or worse.
In a nation as violent as ours, with daily confrontations between cops and often aggressive and armed suspects, police errors are going to be made. There are going to be unwarranted and unnecessary shootings, woundings and even killings.
In any war, there are casualties and collateral damage, and that is true of America’s “war on crime” — another of our forever wars.
But the daily reports of escalating violent crime, resulting in growing numbers of innocent wounded and dead, are inducing a fear for safety that is outstripping any fear of cops. And politicians are beginning to see the numbers shift and reacting accordingly.
Consider a few of the crime numbers compiled by The Hill:
2020 witnessed more than 20,000 criminal homicides with a huge share of that spike occurring in urban America.
New York saw 150 additional homicides and 750 additional shootings in 2020 than in 2019. Chicago saw 274 more homicides and 1,435 additional shootings in 2020 than in 2019.
Los Angeles saw homicides rise 38% as shootings spiked 40%. Washington, D.C., ended 2020 with homicides up for the third straight year.
Killings in Philadelphia, where homicides have risen every year since 2016, almost reached 500, a 40% increase. In Louisville, homicides jumped 70%.
In Detroit, shootings and homicides rose for the second year in a row, increasing by 53%.
Homicides spiked for the second straight year in Minneapolis, to 84 deaths — the highest tally since 1995. Cleveland had its highest murder tally since 1982, after a nearly 40% jump in killings last year.
Houston hit 413 murders in 2020 — a 42% increase over 2019. Indianapolis saw a 40% jump in murders. For Denver, the murder increase was 50 percent.
Cops aren’t doing these killings. They’re doing their jobs trying to prevent these killings and apprehend the killers.
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The “war on drugs” fuels gang turf wars, which in turn fuels murders.
This is not rocket science. This is common sense.
Same was true during prohibition.
Make something illegal, the price goes up with the risk of getting it and providing it to the people who want it.
Then the peripheral crime by the people who are addicted to said drugs.
The Portugal model, while not perfect, is infinitely better than the one we have here.
You cannot legislate morality, no matter how much you may want to.
What you can do, is accept reality (and that’s where 99% of the people go right off the rails, now more than ever) and understand that there is always going to be people who use drugs, and not just pot.
Some may never develop a life-altering addiction that pushes them into crime
Some may overdose
Some may end up homeless
The goal would be to intercept people BEFORE their drug use pushes them into crime. Once a drug user enters the so-called “criminal justice system” their chances for recovery, in my opinion, goes way down, as they now have felonies on their record, making sustainable employment and housing very difficult, which can fuel hopelessness, depression, and more drug use.
There are not enough beds for people who want help, but apparently plenty of prison cells for those people.
If someone wants help, then long-term inpatient treatment is going to be necessary.
As long as we have prisons for profit, this will never change.
As long as we have a lack of real treatment options for those who need it and want it, the homeless crisis will continue, the murders will continue.
Welfare for the worthy needy should come before we throw away money at incorrigible bums.
What color is the sky in your world?
Boomers are fact and truth averse. Always have been. Maybe it’s not their fault, but that is what it is.
SOME Boomers.
But then so are some morons of every other generation.
“Boomers are fact and truth averse.”
Ken: Don’t know what age you are but I can say, without hesitation, that you are blisteringly stupid and a blithering idiot for making such a blanket statement. Evidently you are also easily manipulated and brainwashed, proof being how readily you fall into blaming instead of really looking at who is pushing what agendas and why. Keep on playing into the hands of TPTB, they need useful idiots like you to help with their agendas.
Now go take your nap and suck on your binkie, time for little children to leave the keyboard alone, you waste space with your childish comments.
Every Ken I ever met was a faggity, effeminate, douche. Every time. Maybe it’s not their fault, but that is what it is.
Sure, but the drug war isn’t the only reason bad people are bad. If all drugs were legal, criminals wouldn’t just start working regular jobs. Protection rackets don’t require any products or any customers. “You pay or I kill you” is sufficient. Look at Central America.
“You pay or I kill you”.
Oh, you mean like government?
Detroit, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Louisville: what’s the common thread here?
If you smell something funny when you walk down the street, you’re in Coon Town.
You look and see garbage all over the street, you’re in Coon Town.
Up and down the street there ain’t nothing but trash, nigger girls trying to get a nigger boy’s cash.
Then you even see a spook with a big moustache, in Coon Town.
On the corner there’s a nigger with a drink in his hand, that’s Coon Town.
Trying to bum a nickel from whoever he can, in Coon Town.
Don’t be surprised, you can make a bet, if you go back tomorrow he’ll be there yet.
He’s trying to get drunk and drunk he’s gonna get, in Coon Town.
Niggers never bother about going to work, in Coon Town.
They seem to think that work is for jerks, outta Coon Town.
They don’t do nothing but sleep and doze, he don’t wake until his eyes are tired of being closed.
It’s half a day’s work for him to scratch his toes, in Coon Town.
It amazes me to see the way they live, in Coon Town.
They do all the taking while we have to give, to Coon Town.
The White man worries, the nigger don’t care, cause at the end of the month his check will be there.
Every nigger earns his living off the old welfare, in Coon Town.
Every nigger earns his living off the old welfare, in Coon Town.
– Johnny Rebel
What throws and dumps trash on the sides of roads in White areas? Coons. Why do they do it? They do it because they consider it kicking a White man in the nuts: Take this Honky, eat my trash Bitches; our hood looks like shit so we crap in your hood. They are to stupid to care that Paybacks Are Going To Be Hell.
Or maybe they just have poor impulse control, poor understanding of cause-effect, and don’t have the same aesthetic appreciation for order? Maybe they should be kept on a preserve called Africa.
I am really starting to loathe this man who should have shut his trap years ago. Why should we listen to these failures?
I see no problem here. Move the troops out along with the departed tax base.
Man the borders of the suburbs with departed cops.
This article (from a lib) https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/anti-racist-messaging-is-failing-with-voters-so-why-cant-liberals-quit-it-opinion/ar-BB1gxbxn?li=BBnbfcL Points out that the main group of people who agree with anti-common sense ideas like defunding the police are white liberals who live safely distant from the consequences of their proposed idiocy. More fallout from the 19th Amendment.
Because large sections of people of color are too stupid to have ideas of any type. Of course it is liberal white folks dreaming this shit up. Like who else would it be?
Frankly speaking, I have little use for cops these days. They are the enforcement arm for the political and protected classes, they oppress and kill the innocent, arrest the innocent for not wearing masks but look the other way when BLM and antifa pukes attack old people.
Defund them, they are the enforcement arm for illegitimate politicians and their illegitimate agendas and the world is much better off without them.
The ones that are smart or have real smarts got off the plantation years ago. A fine example are the US blacks that have emigrated to Australia. I would say I have met close to 40 of them through work and social circles and not one of them struck me as a dumb, uncivilised kunt.
Articulate, mannered, industrious and quite dapper to say the least. It is from one of these guys that I heard this saying “the black man that leaves the plantation only leaves the niggers behind”.
“Backlash”? Sounds like some o dat rayssiss Honkey talk.
How about being culturally sensitive, inclusive and diverse by letting the vibrant inner city denizens settle this matter by themselves (and get those numbers up.) Coppers to coffee & donut stations; don’t put yourselves in harms way for goodness sake plus there’s that pension to be concerned about.
Auntie rather likes the Buckhead “secession” idea, but warns the second time around will be no cakewalk with Stacy Abrams on the prowl, muthafukka.
And I hope Ms. Bottoms reaps what she has sown. When she is out of office, of course.
Gee, who would have thunk that shutting down the countries economy would have any negative consequences. Big shithole cities ran by Democrats always make the news. I hate to say it, but certain groups of people live in these cities. I pointed this out to my kids.