Some ideas of the soft-on-crime crowd are simply misguided, but some are so bizarre as to make one question their sanity. Christopher Rufo has this article in the City Journal, with the above title, on one of the latter variety.
Serving as a cop in America is harder than ever -- and it comes down to respect. A deficit of respect for the men and women in blue who daily put their lives on the line for the rest of us is hurting recruitment and retention and placing communities at risk.
Minority communities bore the brunt of the crime wave and vocally criticized what they considered inadequate law enforcement. In 1967, the Harlem-based Amsterdam News editorialized that the city "can't get rid of crime by ignoring or compromising with it" and called for "restoring the legitimate, unbiased use of firearms by our police." The local chapter of the NAACP said, "It is not police brutality that makes people afraid to walk the streets at night" and demanded an end to "the reign of criminal terror in Harlem." In a 1968 report, [Vincent] Cannato writes, the civil-rights organization asked for "greater police protection in Harlem, harsher criminal penalties for murderers and drug dealers, and 'vigorous' enforcement of the city's anti-vagrancy laws."
Bloomberg's apology (again, like Biden's) ignores the role that proactive policing played in driving down crime. By exercising their authority to initiate contacts with citizens--in some cases, by legally detaining, questioning, and, yes, frisking those whom they reasonably believed to be involved in crimes and armed--NYPD officers significantly deterred crime in the city's most troubled precincts (which had large minority populations). This was the finding of a 2014 study, which addressed an important limitation in the earlier assessments of stop-and-frisk. Those assessments focused on citywide crime numbers, though many of the NYPD's stops were concentrated in high-crime neighborhoods. With a more "microlevel" analysis, the 2014 study found that NYPD stops-and-frisks had significant, albeit "modest," effects on crime.
The maxim "if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth"* often serves our opponents well. In the case of the Big Lie about the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, though, it may be unraveling. Candidates' lies about that incident are so clearly contrary to the now-well-known facts that even left-leaning media are calling them out on it. William Saletan reports for Slate:
Last week, in a Democratic presidential debate, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro read a list of black Americans killed by police violence. Alongside Laquan McDonald, Walter Scott, and Eric Garner, Castro named Michael Brown, who was shot dead five years ago in Ferguson, Missouri. Several of the current Democratic candidates have accused the officer who shot Brown of murder. Brown's death was a tragedy, but it wasn't a murder. When Democrats claim it was, and when they refuse to correct that mistake, they cast doubt on their commitment to truth. And they undermine the cause of criminal justice reform.
The claim is not merely false. It is one of the most destructive lies in recent history. For a candidate to repeat it is beyond inexcusable.
The researchers found that white police officers were no more likely to shoot minority citizens than non-white officers were. If anything, black police were more likely to kill black civilians, because police tend to be drawn from the communities they work in. The best predictor of the race of killed civilians, they found, was the rate of violent crime in the place they lived. In areas with high rates of violent crime by African-Americans, police were more likely to shoot dead a black person. In areas in which white people committed more crimes, police were more likely to shoot white people.
The Home Depot in Oakland is having problems with homelessness and crime, and it's gotten so bad that the hardware chain may shut the store unless the city can curb the thefts and clean up the tent and RV camps that dot the area, City Councilman Noel Gallo said.
Both the Sacramento County D.A.'s Office and the California Attorney General's Office announced that neither will pursue charges against two Sacramento police officers who were involved in the 2018 shooting death of Stephon Clark. Both the Sacramento County D.A. and the Attorney General found that the "officers believed they were in danger when they shot and killed Clark." The DOJ's report can be found here.
In 2018 and 2019, 62 law enforcement officers were killed by gunfire while in the line of duty. Officer Natalie Corona just started her career with the Davis (California) Police Department when she was shot and killed by a man who rode up on a bike as she was investigating a minor traffic accident. She was 22 years old. Sergeant Steve Hinkle had been with the Sullivan County (Tennessee) Sheriff's Office for 27 years when he was shot and killed as he was conducting a welfare check. He was 67 years old. Just a few days ago, Officer Nathan Heidelberg was shot and killed while responding to a residential burglar alarm in Midland, Texas. He was 28 years old. Like these three, 59 other men and women were killed by gunfire while carrying out their duty to serve and protect over the last 15 months.Over the last quarter of a century, the United States has seen historic drops in crime--most famously in New York. These gains, once thought impossible, were achieved largely through dramatic innovations in policing, especially the adoption of an approach that stressed order maintenance in communities, data- and intelligence-gathering, and a problem-solving approach to crime and disorder.
In recent years, however, antipolice sentiment has risen in the U.S., sparked in part by a series of tragic, high-profile police-involved killings in major cities but also by the work of critics, mostly on the left but also on the libertarian right, who argue that targeted policing aimed at public disorder is coercive, hostile to community life, and often racist. These critics see such policing as the antithesis to what they call community policing. The arguments that have gained popular currency among police critics have essentially blinded them from seeing that the sort of aggressive policing that they object to can actually be an element of a community-policing model.
The increasingly widespread view that community policing and order-maintenance efforts are at odds represents a fundamental misunderstanding. In reality, the proactive policing that New York first undertook in its subway system under then-transit police chief William J. Bratton in the early 1990s--informed in significant part by Broken Windows theory--was a core element of community policing. Indeed, the very behaviors that residents wanted more heavily policed called for exactly the sort of approach that many modern community-policing advocates now decry.
Mr. Kelling says one problem is that his critics often don't understand what broken-windows policing is. Some complain that it makes criminals of young African-American men over minor infractions. Others conflate it with tactical approaches such as "zero tolerance" or "stop and frisk."* * *
With California's Legislature and Governor hell-bent on passing as much pro-criminal, anti-victim, anti-law-abiding-people, anti-law-enforcement legislation as they possibly can, I have begun to wonder if there is any bottom. Is there any depth below which they will not sink? Is there any depth below which the voters will wake up and vote the bums out?
