☆ What's behind SJ's spike in murder rate?
With this week's South San Jose shooting and murder, SJ's murder rate is up 75% compared to last year at this time, according to the Merc. Heritage Foundation unearths key factors behind crime increases: Refusing to prosecute and punish violent offenders, releasing violent offenders under ill-conceived bail-reform policies, and hamstringing police departments.
The entirety of the American system of government rests on two very simple yet profound premises—that every human being is endowed by our Creator with natural and unalienable rights, and that the only just end of government is to secure these rights for its citizens. Unfortunately, far too often, ill-considered progressive policies not only fail to adequately secure Americans’ natural rights from criminals who would undermine them, but actively worsen the problem by making it harder for peaceable citizens to defend themselves. Here are four specific policies that routinely make us all less safe and that, after crime rates predictably rise, are then used as excuses from gun-control proponents to further restrict our right to keep and bear arms.
1. Refusing to Prosecute and Punish Violent Offenders
A majority of violent crimes (including crimes involving firearms) are perpetrated by a small and predictable number of serial offenders, many of whom are already legally prohibited from possessing the firearms they use to carry out these crimes. This is true in virtually every major city in the nation, irrespective of differences in geographic location, demographic makeup or local political leanings. One very effective way of combating violent crime, then, is to focus heavily on deterring and incapacitating these serial offenders who are disproportionately responsible for facilitating “gun violence.”
Enter the “progressive prosecutor” movement, a concerted and well-funded effort to essentially do just the opposite. These prosecutors are, in many respects, “non-prosecutors,” who don’t just undermine the rule of law, but actively facilitate lawlessness. Their pro-criminal, anti-victim policies include, among other things: declining to prosecute entire categories of criminal offenses, watering down felonies to misdemeanors, refusing to prosecute juveniles in adult court for homicide or other violent crimes and refusing to add sentence enhancements or allegations to indictment. In cities where progressive prosecutors “go rogue” and decide to simply stop enforcing the law to a meaningful degree, more members of that small subset of serial offenders remain out on the streets instead of in prison or are released back into the community far more quickly than their crimes warranted.
The effects of these progressive “de-prosecution” strategies have been universally and overwhelmingly devastating for public safety.
One recent study estimated that these progressive “de-prosecution” tactics are directly responsible for hundreds of excess homicides every year, including 70 excess homicides a year in Baltimore, 74 excess homicides a year in Philadelphia and 169 excess homicides a year in Chicago.
2. Releasing Violent Offenders Under Ill-Conceived Bail-Reform Policies
Hand-in-glove with the progressive- prosecutor movement has been a parallel effort in many left-leaning states and major cities to impose dramatic, “progressive” changes with respect to bail policy—that is, for determining which criminal defendants may be released back into the community while awaiting their trials or sentencing, and the conditions under which they may be released. These ill-conceived “reforms” are intentionally designed to increase the number of defendants who are eligible for pre-trial release, and to decrease the likelihood that a defendant won’t be able to post bond—most often by mandating inappropriately low bonds, or by eliminating cash bond altogether for many offenses, regardless of the defendant’s criminal history.
In addition to legislative or administrative reforms, some rogue prosecutors go even further by implementing their own intraoffice policies that effectively ensure that dangerous offenders won’t be detained for long, if they’re detained at all.
3. Demoralizing, Defunding and Hamstringing Police Departments
Law-enforcement officers play a key role in deterring, interrupting and investigating violent crimes so that offenders may be swiftly identified and brought to justice; however, when it comes to officers-per-capita and officers-per-homicide, Americans are significantly under-policed compared to the rest of the developed world. In recent years, this problem is increasingly aggravated by progressive-led calls for policing “reform.” As with liberal reforms on prosecuting criminals and releasing them on bail, progressive policing “reforms” are, in reality, largely calls to hamstring law enforcement’s ability to enforce any laws or identify, locate and detain people who break them.
To a substantial degree in many cities, these anti-police crusaders have gotten their wish. In recent years, several major cities cut vacant job openings within police departments, disbanded specialized units that focused on combating gun crime and began shifting funds from police departments to other social services. At the same time, high-profile and widespread efforts to demonize law enforcement led to higher rates of officer retirement and resignation and lowered recruitment rates to fill the rapidly depleting ranks of departments that were already understaffed.
As one might imagine, when police departments are understaffed, underfunded and experiencing low morale, the public suffers. In recent years, police response times have skyrocketed in many cities, even for the highest-priority calls, like those where a victim’s life is actively endangered. This is obviously detrimental to victims of violent crime, who are less likely to see law enforcement officers arrive in time to effectively intervene and who are more likely to sustain serious injuries the longer they wait for help to arrive. Higher response times also decrease the likelihood that a suspect will be arrested for the crime. This is partly because the suspect is less likely to be on the scene when officers arrive, but also because response times play a significant role in the public’s overall trust in the police. Witnesses and victims are less likely to cooperate with investigations when they don’t believe that officers will be able to keep them safe from retaliatory violence. All of this, in turn, decreases the already low likelihood in many cities that any particular offender will be quickly caught and sanctioned, and increases the willingness of would-be offenders to engage in criminal activity because they (reasonably) believe they can do so with impunity.
Read the whole thing here.
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