The thing to do is reduce the police force to its smallest size in a decade.
This is the upside-down thinking of the nation's capital, Washington, DC. The Washington Post has the story:
The number of D.C. police officers in the District has fallen below 3,800, its lowest level in a decade, breaking a threshold that top District officials once warned would be dangerously thin in a city that continues to grow.
This a perfect match to the other sort of thinking going on in DC, to wit, that the thing to do when heroin usage and overdose deaths are spiking is to reduce the penalties for heroin dealers. That, however (plus reducing penalties for other wonderful drugs like meth), is the main thing sentencing reform, and particularly the SRCA, is about.
If there is some definition for this other than insanity, I'd love to hear it.
P.S. As you will see in the Post story, the increase in the DC murder rate since 2012 has been shocking. There were 13.9 murder victims per 100,000 population in 2012, compared to 23.7 today. That is a 70% increase in three years. As Kent has noted, perhaps the Brennan Center and other pro-criminal groups will be able to tell us why this just isn't all that bad.
Leave a comment