New FBI data released this month showed that the United States experienced a massive wave of murders and aggravated assaults in 2020. Nationwide, the murder rate rose to levels not seen since the late 1990s.
Property crimes fell off year-over-year, perhaps as a result of people being more consistently at home to guard their possessions. Yet violent crime — murders and assaults, in particular — skyrocketed. As the Washington Examiner reported, every major city submitting data had seen a 20% to 25% increase in murders in a single year — the largest jump ever. More than 20% of those cities hit new records for murders that had not been reached since the 1960s.
Even worse, preliminary figures point to a problem that is getting even worse in 2021.
This troubling trend can be blamed in some part on two political factors. One is the advent of the soft-on-crime “progressive prosecutor” movement. This approach to coddling criminals has taken over several major U.S. cities.
Another major correlative factor, one that lawmakers can move to address immediately, has been the ideologically motivated defunding of police in various cities. So-called social justice activists have moved, sometimes through government and at other times through mob violence, to enact a strident and extreme anti-police agenda, which, instead of reforming the criminal justice system, would rather abolish it, equating its core function of crime-fighting with white supremacy and “systemic racism.”
Democrats keep turning to ineffective and irrelevant solutions such as gun control. But the only way to deal with a crime wave is to fund police forces fully and deploy them effectively. Where city governments err in this regard, allowing criminals to terrorize (disproportionately nonwhite) communities, state legislatures should step in and impose order.
Also, police must restore the policing practices, including the strict enforcement and prosecution of quality-of-life offenses according to the so-called “broken windows” theory, which very recently brought crime to the multidecade lows that the public has been able to enjoy now for several years.
None of this, it should be noted, means that the historic process of criminal justice reform, set in motion by former President Donald Trump, should be abandoned. On the contrary — if police are allowed to do their jobs again, it will result in more interactions between the police and those who make life less pleasant or more violent in communities across the country.
Criminal justice reform will be all the more necessary to make sure that punishments actually fit their corresponding crimes, that offenders are not prevented by the corrections system’s perverse incentives from changing their lives if they want to, and that police conduct themselves in a manner consistent with the public trust.
This latter will be the most crucial, to ensure that police treat people fairly, that they use force only when necessary, and that they use deadly force only as a last resort to preserve innocent life. Part of creating the incentive for guaranteeing the latter is that genuinely bad police, who are a small minority but still far too numerous, must no longer be allowed to hide from civil lawsuits behind the unfortunate doctrine of qualified immunity.
Qualified immunity, created by the courts in the early 1980s, was intended to protect public servants from frivolous lawsuits. In practice, it protects from liability malefactors in government and on police forces who egregiously violate citizens’ rights.
On a bipartisan basis, lawmakers and officials in New York City and in both red and blue states have moved to limit or abolish this doctrine in their own jurisdictions. The Supreme Court has also begun to nibble at the edges of its long-standing protections.
What could unite liberals and conservatives on such a cause? Reason’s Billy Binion explained it recently, giving examples and bringing receipts:
One necessary step in restoring order and cracking down on criminals will be a broader restoration of the public’s faith in police and corrections officials. Good officers already understand this and already behave accordingly. The elimination of qualified immunity will help keep the bad ones in check. It will also give cities and police departments the appropriate incentives to hire and train responsible and professional officers while letting go of bullies with badges who pose a risk of massive liability.
