Missouri Democratic congresswoman Cori Bush drew a lot of attention when she was asked by CBS why she spends freely on private security while trying to defund the police for everybody else. “Suck it up, and defunding the police has to happen,” was the Squad member’s inartful, defiant defense of the protection she, and only she, is deserving of. But an earlier part of her rambling answer was more instructive: “You would rather me die? Is that what you want to see? You want to see me die? You know, because that could be the alternative. So, either I spent $70,000 on private security over the last few months, and I’m here standing now and able to speak … or I could possibly have a death attempt on my life.”
That sentiment is why “defund the police” was blamed for losing Democrats support in the last election: Most people believe themselves entitled to some level of security regardless of whether they’re in Congress, especially at a time of rising violent crime.
As such, the clip was seen as a gift to Republicans. But elements of the GOP have also been seduced in recent years by the depolicing siren, and the story of how tough-on-crime politics became a victim of its own success is tangled up in an often-bipartisan thirst for cost-cutting and reform.
Last year, over 20,000 Americans died violently at the hands of other Americans. That represents a 25% increase in homicides over the previous year and the largest single-year increase in this country’s history (since we started collecting data). And murders continue to climb in 2021, increasing another 21% this year over 2020 and 33% over 2019 figures in America’s big cities.
Some are faring worse than others. Killings are up 50% in Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, and Austin, while in lawless Portland, murders have tripled in the past 12 months compared to the same period in 2019 and 2020.
Similarly, aggravated assaults (especially shootings) are rising at record rates.
The question is, why? Politically, progressive wonks and Democratic hacks twist themselves into knots to avoid tying criminal leniency with the anti-police protest movements in the wake of the 2020 police killing of George Floyd.
Since the riots, police, often under orders from local officials, have stood down. A study by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund across 10 major cities found that police activity (arrests, stops, and searches) declined by 48% since last June.
Austin, Texas, cut its police budget by a third, and murders in the first seven months of 2021 exceeded all of 2020. Similar defunding of police, which in practice often means cutting overtime pay and reducing new hires, has yielded such similar and terrible results that antifa’s favorite mayor, Portland’s Ted Wheeler, is reversing some of his own police budget cuts and reconstituting an anti-gun-violence squad.
Meanwhile, progressive prosecutors have taken over the chief law enforcement jobs in almost every major American city over the past five years. While there are about 2,400 elected prosecutors in the United States and only about 75 “social justice” district attorneys, they have authority over 50 million people. And they are set on “transforming justice” from Los Angeles, where George Gascon stopped pursuing gang and hate-crime enhancements, to Philadelphia, which is freeing gun-toting criminals at a record clip.
With their campaigns financed with millions from left-wing megadonors including George Soros and tech titans, the progressive DAs have facilitated a breakdown of order. In Kim Foxx’s Chicago, rioting-related charges are subject to a “presumption of dismissal.” By decriminalizing most theft, shoplifting has gotten so bad under San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin, a former Hugo Chavez speechwriter and the son of Weather Underground militants, chain retailers such as CVS and Target are fleeing the city or closing their doors at dark.
Republican officials clearly see crime as a way back into power, by saddling the Democrats with the blame for the historic rise in violence. Mike Berg, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, made that plain in July, saying, “Democrats across the country spent the last year defunding police departments, so they shouldn’t be surprised when voters hold them responsible for the spike in violent crime.”
As a sound-bite strategy, it has a strong appeal. But the Republican Party’s record over the past two decades may complicate its efficacy.
It began with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, led by then-President Brooke Rollins. The right-leaning think tank had an idea for budget-conscious Texas legislators: Close prisons, divert the offenders to less costly programs, and save millions. Texas did, closing 10 prisons and actually spending less, adjusted for inflation, than it did in 2005. The prison population fell, while Texas added 7 million residents.
Suddenly awash in cash from the libertarian superdonor Koch brothers and their network, the TPPF’s Right on Crime project and its allies took their show on the road.
The pitch was alluring. By getting “smart on crime” by slowly and invisibly ending the drug war, sending offenders to treatment, and forgiving youth-age crimes, the Texans persuaded rock-ribbed Republicans that it was financially prudent and politically shrewd.
The best part of the whole gambit was that it appeared to be working. Crime was in a free fall. From 2005 to 2019, violent crime in the Lone Star state dropped by 25%. But, crucially, it did that everywhere. That did not stop the reformers from tooting their own horn — and getting glowing press coverage.
But it was a mirage. Just like the rest of the country, Texas’s violent crime, especially homicides, spiked in 2015 and 2016 and stubbornly refused to disappear.
The strange bedfellows of right-left criminal justice reform rolled on. As the Koch network built up Right on Crime and gained a foothold in conservative establishment organizations such as the American Conservative Union, Soros & Co. ran a parallel funding operation. They viciously opposed one another on everything from energy and education to tax policy, but they found common cause on criminal justice.
The most interesting and high-profile success of the odd couple came in 2018 when President Donald Trump granted clemency to Alice Marie Johnson, a “first-time nonviolent offender” serving a life sentence for drug charges. It perfectly encapsulated the GOP’s schizophrenia, since just three months earlier, Trump suggested the death penalty for drug dealers, saying that “if we don’t get tough on drug dealers, we are wasting our time.”
Johnson had a key ally in the celebrity Kim Kardashian, who pleaded with the president to release Johnson. Kardashian had the ear of son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, a criminal justice reformer. And Kushner had help from a new member of the Office of American Innovation: Brooke Rollins, who had left the Texas Public Policy Foundation to work in the administration.
The two spearheaded a federal prison reform bill, the First Step Act of 2018, that allowed for early release of federal felons and scaled back mandatory minimums for drug crimes. It sailed through the GOP-controlled House, 358-36. In the Senate, hard-liners put up a tougher fight (behind closed doors mostly) before being rolled 87-12. The unstoppable force of criminal justice reform had no immovable object in its way.
The 2020 campaign for president took on a “through the looking glass” feel after that. The man who wanted to put the (now-cleared) Central Park Five to death bragged about his federal reforms in every venue he could.
On the other side was Joe Biden, who made his career on being the Democrats’ strongest voice against drugs and violent crime, who put out a criminal justice plan during the primaries that would eviscerate the laws he wrote back in the 1990s.
Yet the tide, post-Trump, would appear to be turning. New York’s radical bail and discovery reforms in 2019 were met with unified GOP opposition as law enforcement and elected district attorneys slammed the new law. Elsewhere, Republicans and conservatives have woken up from their reform-induced slumber. After reducing penalties for theft led to a shoplifting spree in Oklahoma, business owners and advocates are rallying to repeal the reforms.
But the anti-police riots and disturbing and historic spikes in violence have roused the public’s attention. Even the Biden White House recognizes the political liability its allies have created. In June, Biden rolled out a gun violence plan — though with few serious elements.
But how did America go from then-Sen. Joe Biden’s remark in 1983, “Violent crime is as real a threat to our national security as any foreign threat,” to a Trump-Biden competition over easing incarceration? By winning the “war on crime” that President Richard Nixon declared first as a candidate in 1968. Homicide in 2019 was less than half what it was when Biden called crime a national security threat. Your likelihood of being robbed or burgled fell by 66%.
Biden and like-minded leaders including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton took the fight seriously, investing in police, prosecutors, and prisons. Rudy Giuliani took office in 1993 with New York City tallying 2,000 murders a year. Four years later, the NYPD cut that number to 600 and to under 300 by 2018 — an astounding result. This year, the Big Apple’s body count will hit more than 500.
But why did we change tack? Short memories and magical thinking. Policing and prisons are expensive and, sometimes, brutal. But they worked — saving as many as 40,000 lives in New York City alone over the past 30 years (if homicide numbers didn’t drop) and hundreds of thousands nationwide.
The reason people forgot the “bad old days” is because of how good, and seemingly permanent, the good times were — 25 years with nearly uninterrupted low crime.
In that way, the forces of “law and order” were victims of their own success. And the rising number of victims nationwide suggests that success is on the verge of being squandered entirely.
Sean Kennedy is a writer and public policy expert focusing on crime, justice, and urban policy. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, City Journal, CNN, and the Chicago Tribune, among others.
