As big-city liberal Democrats experiment with “criminal justice reform” such as low or no bail and defunding the police, their constituents must suffer.
ABC News on Wednesday offered a picture of how much.
A dozen major U.S. cities have set homicide records during 2021, with more than three weeks left in the year.
The list includes Philadelphia; Rochester, N.Y.; Toledo, Ohio; Columbus, Ohio; Baton Rouge, La.; Austin, Texas; Louisville, Ky.; Indianapolis; St. Paul, Minn.; Portland; Tucson; and Albuquerque.
In some cases, the previous record had stood for 25 or 30 years, or more. Portland’s homicide max was set in 1987.
But one set its record in 2019, and six more set their records just last year, as unrest roiled many major U.S. cities following the death of George Floyd, which led to alleged reforms that were intended to establish “equity” in criminal justice but were actually softening the policing of crime.
The carnage is proportional.
Philadelphia’s new record will top 500 slayings, while St. Paul set a new high mark with 35.
But all these cities have a common denominator: All 12 have Democratic mayors.
ABC News noted that two other cities – Milwaukee and Minneapolis – are on the brink of new record highs. They, too, have Democrats in the mayor’s office.
ABC noted that some cities are murder havens, even if they won’t set records.
New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Oakland and Washington, D.C., have collectively tallied nearly 1,900 murders this year as of Wednesday. All have Democratic mayors.
This bloodbath is happening, ABC reported, after “the nation saw a 30% increase in murder in 2020, the largest single-year jump since the [FBI] began recording crime statistics 60 years ago.”
ABC quoted some experts who wanted to attribute the skyrocketing violence in Democratic-run metros to the pandemic and its related mental stress.
Yet some stats in the report are telling.
“FBI crime data shows that the number of arrests nationwide plummeted 24% in 2020, from the more than 10 million arrests made in 2019. The number of 2020 arrests — 7.63 million — is the lowest in 25 years, according to the data,” ABC reported.
As Robert Boyce, a retired chief of detectives for the New York Police Department and an ABC News contributor, said in the report, “Nobody’s getting arrested anymore. People are getting picked up for gun possession and they’re just let out over and over again.”
Also, on average, according to a Police Executive Research Forum study, police departments are filling only 93 percent of their authorized positions.
They are battered by retirements and resignations.
“The retirement rate in police departments nationwide jumped 45% over 2020 and 2021. And another 18% of officers resigned, the survey found, a development which coincided with nationwide social justice protests and calls to defund law enforcement agencies following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers,” ABC reported.
To illustrate the frustration of those hired to keep a lid on this, ABC quoted Capt. Frank Umbrino of the Rochester Police Department.
“The community has to get fed up,” he said after his city broke its homicide record last month. “We’re extremely frustrated. It has to stop. I mean, it’s worse than a war zone around here lately.”
The question, though, is whether people in these violent areas will get “fed up” enough to break the decades-long stranglehold Democrats have had on power in their cities and give the other party a chance.
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