(Deroy Murdock, Headline USA) Today’s explosion in violent crime parallels the return of 1970s-style inflation and gasoline lines.
Wide ties and polyester slacks can’t be far behind.
Criminals themselves are the root cause of crime—now and forevermore. But the thugs’ enablers, and sometime cheerleaders, are the root cause of nearly every contemporary American malady: the Democrat-Left.
Liberal Democrats concocted at least three rotten policies that have propelled the mayhem now tormenting Democrat-run cities plagued by the Left’s peanut-allergy-like aversion to law and order.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, the poster girl of the neo-Marxian Left, promised this about America, after police defunding: “It would look like a suburb.”
How is that working out?
In New York City, AOC and Black Lives Matter got what they wanted: Mayor Bill de Bolshevik and the City Council last year defunded the New York Police Department’s budget by $1 billion or 9.2%.
Year-to-date data find patrol strength down 1.6%. Transit cops are off 33.4%.
The result?
- Rape: Up 2%
- Felony assault: Up 8%
- Murder: Up 17.7%
- Shooting victims: Up 76.9%
- Shooting incidents: Up 77.4%
Just as the Republican-Right predicted a year ago, when the Democrat-Left slashes police-department budgets, calls officers racist and damns them to Hell, cops retreat. Criminals advance. And innocents get beaten, raped, shot and killed.
Democrat-mismanaged cities that defunded and denounced police now suffer the same miserable, thoroughly foreseeable consequences. Data are year to date:
- Los Angeles — Defunded 8.1%. Homicides up 23.6%.
- Minneapolis — Defunded 11.2%. Murders up 88%.
- Portland — Defunded 6%. Homicide offense up 900%.
Democrat-Left geniuses also hatched “bail reform.” Charging criminals cash bail is racist, insists the take-a-crook-to-lunch crowd.
So, unless cops nab a killer with a bloody machete in his fist and a bleeding corpse at his feet, they will arrest him, snap his photo for the scrapbook, and a judge—with hands tied by “bail reform”—will speed him on his merry way.
Alexander Wright, 48, was caught on camera Monday clocking an Asian woman in Manhattan’s Chinatown, knocking her unconscious. Like too many “white-nationalist” perpetrators of anti-Asian attacks, Wright is black.
“Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said Wright has been arrested 8x in the past year on charges including assault and arson,” Gotham’s Police Benevolent Association said Tuesday, via Twitter. “Whether this individual needs mental health services, jail time, or both, the answer CANNOT be to put him right back on the street.”
Cops complain that Wright was freed last week after chucking coffee at two NYPD officers, breaking a shop window and scratching a man’s eye.
Similarly, Jordan Burnette, 29, was captured on video pitching projectiles through the windows of a Bronx synagogue—one of several that police say he attacked.
Police arrested Burnette May 1 and charged him with 42 hate crimes. However, under “bail reform,” prosecutors could not request bond.
Regardless, Judge Louis Nock called “shattering of glass” a violent felony and set bail at $20,000.
Never mind! Judge Tara Collins reversed Judge Nock and turned Burnette loose. Seeing him walk surely emboldened local anti-Semites, who lately have hammered New York’s Jews.
The Democrat-Left also has created PINOs—Prosecutors in Name Only.
Chesa Boudin is San Francisco’s George Soros-funded district attorney. Boudin now stays busy not throwing books at crooks. His refusal to prosecute shoplifters who steal less than $950 contributed to the closure of 17 Walgreens stores in San Francisco.
In Los Angeles County, likewise, far-Left District Attorney George Gascon is flinging the jail cells open as quickly as the hinges allow.
“Gascon is releasing criminals before the officer finishes the report—literally—because of his no-bail policy,” a frustrated L.A. prosecutor told me.
Seventeen cities have approved no-confidence resolutions against Gascon, whom Angelenos have launched a campaign to recall.
The hoodlum huggers have Made Crime Great Again. This total disaster is brought to you by America’s ever-reliable disaster machine: The Democrat-Left.
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research. Bucknell University’s Michael Malarkey contributed research to this opinion piece.
