The effects of the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020 continue to resonate long after the movement and its corruption have faded into the background.
The Northwest Community Bail Fund in Seattle was created in 2018, but it saw an increase in funding of nearly $2.5 million after the death of George Floyd inspired Democratic politicians, liberal celebrities, and other delusional people to donate to bail funds across the country. With that large pool of money, the group decided to start posting the bail of even more criminals.
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What did the group consider when freeing criminals? Race, “gender status,” and “impending loss of job,” among other things. What did it not consider? Criminal history or propensity for violence.
As you can guess, this decision had lethal consequences.
The group posted bail for Kylan Houle, who had “well over 20 criminal convictions” and had failed to show up to court more than 50 times. Houle had a history of violence. The Northwest Community Bail Fund posted his bail in December 2021 and again in January 2022. In May 2022, Houle went on to allegedly shoot and kill 62-year-old Damon Allen after breaking into his home.
It’s always the violent career criminals you least expect.
According to the Wall Street Journal, nearly 52% of people the fund has bailed out have failed to appear in court since mid-2020, which is far more than the 22% of no-shows that weren’t helped by the fund. Along with that, 20.6% of the fund’s defendants were later charged with a new felony in Kings County, Washington’s most populous. According to the Wall Street Journal, “the fund has posted bail on behalf of defendants after arrests for child rape, death threats, residential burglaries, hate crimes and assault with a deadly weapon, among other serious offenses.”
This is the “reform” that was pushed throughout the summer of 2020 and has bled into state legislatures in places such as New York in recent years. The reformers aren’t trying to balance due process and concerns about how the system affects poorer people with keeping the community safe. They view the criminal justice system itself with disdain and think that it is best that any criminal is let out as soon as possible, regardless of how dangerous they are or the criminal record they have accumulated.
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These effects are going to go far beyond the defunding and refunding of police departments. Fringe bail groups were granted the means to free violent criminals, and they have taken advantage. The same mindset that guides them now guides several Democratic state legislators and Democratic district attorneys, leaving communities even more unsafe. That is what “criminal justice reform” has brought to communities like Seattle.
