By Rick Manning
Murders are up 50 percent since mid-2019 in major cities and Democrat catch and release policies are squarely in the voters crosshairs.
The same Democrats who embraced the Black Lives Matter defund the police mantra now find themselves having to defend the results of emasculated police forces unable to recruit new officers to enforce new laws which have turned many local jails into turnstiles. In many major cities and counties like New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, San Francisco, Chicago and the Washington D.C. suburban counties of Fairfax and Loudoun prosecutors have been elected promising to end mass incarceration are changing local laws by refusing to enforce them. In doing so, they are creating havoc on the streets.
At the same time many of these Democrat controlled jurisdictions have implemented an experiment known as cashless bail, where bail is not required to release a person arrested for a variety of misdemeanors and non-violent felonies. This effectively puts the person arrested back on the streets before the police officer who arrested has finished the paperwork associated with the arrest.
The results have been disastrous.
In California, a 2014 state voter initiative that made theft of up to $950 a misdemeanor combined with prosecutors who refuse to seek jail for “petty” offenses has been adding even more fuel to the fire.
Businesses like Walgreens are shutting down stores in San Francisco as mobs of looters work together to strip stores bare in brazen mass thefts knowing that the District Attorney won’t prosecute even if the police find and arrest them.
And the public has had enough. The radical, Chesa Boudin, narrowly elected as San Francisco DA under a controversial ranked choice voting system in 2019 was recalled in June of this year. A response by one of the most liberal electorates in the nation to a crime wave and violence that has beset the once beautiful jewel on the Pacific Ocean.
In Loudoun County, Virginia, commonwealth attorney (county prosecutor) Buta Bitaraj has faced a barrage of criticism over decisions ranging from failure to prosecute domestic violence cases to lying to the Court to secure a six month plea deal for a nineteen year old criminal who had burglarized twelve homes over ten days in northern Virginia and seeking to jail the father of a high school girl who was raped by a male student who claimed to be transgender in a case that made national headlines, and mishandling domestic violence cases. Voters are currently seeking to recall Bitaraj who’s razor-thin election victory in 2019 was credited to an $650,000 infusion of campaign cash from a George Soros funded superpac.
And New York City which had enjoyed a run of twenty years with very few homicides due to then Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s criminal interdiction policies has found itself back in the sewer of despair as murders have skyrocketed. The City’s subway system is becoming known as the murder express with more homicides on the system in the past three years than in the previous eleven years combined. Major crime in the Big Apple has jumped by 37% this year alone as the poison fruit of the left’s war on police wreaks havoc.
On a national level, the Biden open border policies have allowed Mexican cartels to flood our streets with fentanyl laced drugs resulting in a 50 percent rise in drug overdose deaths since 2019. Drug death increases were jump started due to the isolation resulting from isolation resulting from the Covid lockdowns combined with China’s dumping of deadly Fentanyl into our country in partnership with the cartels.
And Americans know that the criminal justice system is being broken at their expense.
While polling doesn’t list crime as the number one issue with inflation holding that spot, the right track/wrong track questions which measures how people feel about the direction of the country shows a whopping 40.5 percent more people saying America is on the wrong track than the right one.
If you need any other proof that Americans are voting on the crime issue, just try to find national Democrats pushing their anti-police, pro-criminal agenda. What was once a cacophony of noise demanding ‘criminal justice reform’ and ‘defunding police’ has become a whisper as criminals run amok and more people die as a result.
As Democratic politicians are about to find out, catch and release is great for fisheries management, but it is dangerous criminal justice policy.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
