The criminal carnage in America’s cities continued in New Orleans Friday night when six people in a popular nighttime recreational area were wounded in a mass shooting. The details have locals fuming about weak-on-crime city policies.
The shooting apparently was part of a long-running dispute between two groups, the key member of one of which had been a suspect in a double homicide last October and also already the subject of one (probably retaliatory) attempt on his life. This time the suspect, Nairobi Davis, was not so lucky, as he was wounded in the leg. (Alas, most of the wounded appeared to be innocent bystanders.)
Despite having been charged last October with two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder, Davis remained free on the streets. Jason Williams, one of several district attorneys nationwide backed by megadonor George Soros and marked by an antipathy to incarceration and leniency on defendants, had reduced his bond from $600,000 to $80,000 and then refused all charges against him.
Meanwhile, the city has long allowed its 911 emergency system to be mired in incompetence. (I know this from firsthand experience, having suffered through seemingly interminable waits for my call to be answered in a situation four years ago.) After Friday night’s shootings, reports are that it took 30 minutes for calls to 911 even to be answered, and four of the six victims reportedly had to be driven to the emergency room by bystanders tired of waiting for an ambulance.
Meanwhile, more than 90 people have been killed in New Orleans already this year, a rate of about 3 out of every 4 days in a population of under 400,000. By comparison, violent Chicago has a population seven times larger than New Orleans, but it has experienced fewer than twice as many murders. In other words, New Orleans’s murder rate is three-and-a-half times higher.
As my colleague Zachary Faria repeatedly notes in these pages, almost all of this huge hike in crime in recent years corresponds almost directly with the rise of policies of lenience against criminals and restrictions on police.
It is one thing, entirely laudable, to push alternative sentencing and rehabilitation (but not refusal to prosecute at all) for lesser offenders. But going light against violent offenders is not just counterproductive, but dangerously idiotic.
Back in the 1990s, when the original laws providing automatic life sentences for three-time offenders were passed, those laws applied only against violent offenders. And they worked very well. While rehabilitation is an enlightened approach for nonviolent nonrecidivists, it is long past time once again to “throw the book” at violent recidivists so they can’t wreak any more havoc on innocent life.
