The White House refused this week to blame leftist prosecutors in big cities for rising crime rates, claiming the solution to the recent crime wave isn’t increased prosecutions, but more support for law enforcement.
“I’m not going to attribute the reasoning [for recent crime] from here,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said, according to the Washington Examiner.
“What I’ll tell you is we have seen an increase in crime over the course of the pandemic,” Psaki said. “There are a range of reasons for that, and our focus is on what we can do to address it.”
Psaki said the White House is committed to providing additional funding for police departments, which is a welcome departure from the Left’s attempts to defund and even abolish law enforcement.
However, there is plenty of evidence that leftist prosecutors’ criminal justice reforms have enabled criminals. For example, the man who drove into the Waukesha, Wisconsin, Christmas parade, killing several people, had been released from prison on an “inappropriately low” bail that day because of the cash-bail reforms pushed by Milwaukee district attorney John Chisholm.
Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy pressed Psaki on this point, asking, “What good does it do if we’re going to give police departments extra money if they arrest bad guys, they bring them to jail, and then they’re not prosecuted, they’re just right back out on the streets?”
But Psaki deflected again, saying, “For specific cases, I’d point you to the local police departments or the Department of Justice.”
Another leftist prosecutor who has come under fire, Cook County state attorney Kim Foxx, has similarly deflected blame for the out-of-control theft and looting that has taken over Chicago, saying last year that her office isn’t “in the arresting business.” A Tribune analysis found that Foxx has dismissed more than 25,000 felony cases – including murder cases – during her tenure since November 2019.
