How do you know President Joe Biden is worried about his rock-bottom approval ratings? He has finally been forced to address the massive rise in crime rates that is occurring on his watch.
The long-belated renunciation of his party’s “defund the police” message came just after a police funeral at which Manhattan’s soft-on-crime Democratic prosecutor was excoriated by the widow. Better late than never, perhaps — but Biden’s attempts at political deflection will not actually stop crime.
The message he chose — the same cynical, disingenuous message on crime that Democrats adopted the last time it was a major concern in the early 1990s — demonstrates that the current crime wave will continue until a whole lot of Democrats are thrown out of office.
Speaking at a forum in Manhattan, Biden again called for draconian gun control laws. They were a combination of the laws that criminals already bypass and ignore, universal background checks, and crackdowns (on the “iron pipeline”) that are more rhetorical than real.
Biden’s speech followed a long tradition of Democratic crime speeches in which criminals are coddled and inanimate objects are blamed for the crimes those criminals commit. Indeed, it reminds one of the early 1990s, when then-President Bill Clinton blamed crime on gun owners and proposed midnight basketball as the answer.
Beyond the facial absurdity of that position, Biden’s approach has at least one fatal logical flaw. One cannot plausibly blame guns for a sudden spike in crime if the supply of guns remained constant. There has been no sudden surge in the availability of guns above and beyond what was there in, say, 2019, 2015, or even 2012. So gun availability cannot explain the sudden spike in shootings in New York City, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, and other major cities.
Biden, or whoever writes his speeches and makes his decisions for him, does not seem to have thought any of this through.
So what’s the real cause of the increase in crime? There are many things, but here’s a clue as to one: A small handful of major Democratic-run cities accounts for much of the increased national murder tally. People are not experiencing the crime wave in Boise — they are experiencing it in Baltimore.
In cities where the violence of summer 2020 occurred, and in those where “defund the police” ideology has led to poor policy choices, experienced officers have quit, and those who remain have backed off of the tactics that previously kept the streets safe. After all, why put your life on the line to save people and prevent crime when you’ll only be blamed and demonized for it — and some liberal prosecutor will just let the criminals go anyway? The internet makes it much easier to check the want ads for sheriff’s deputy positions in small-town Montana.
And speaking of so-called progressive prosecutors, this is another new factor that helps explain the problem. Democrats who take a radical pro-criminal stance on crime have been elected as district attorneys in multiple major cities, with their campaigns often funded by George Soros.
Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner is an instructive example. His method for dealing with criminals is simply to reduce and drop the charges against them and release them back on the streets to re-offend as soon as possible after the police pick them up. The results speak for themselves — Philadelphia just set an all-time record for murders last year.
Krasner, San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin, Los Angeles’s George Gascon, Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg, and many others carry a distorted idea of criminal justice reform that is causing crime to spike by treating incarceration as a bigger problem than crime.
Biden himself is making matters much worse. He has instituted a policy that prevents the deportation of career-criminal illegal immigrants, letting them stay in the United States unless they are convicted of the most serious crimes. The result is a much larger population habituated to breaking into houses, defacing public buildings with swastikas, driving while drunk, and otherwise making life in the U.S. more dangerous and less pleasant than it has to be for citizens.
When you put more criminals on the streets, whether illegal immigrant criminals or red-blooded American criminals, guess what happens? More crime!
Biden’s speech is a reminder of how completely out of touch he is with reality. He had to give this speech to cover his own backside because the crime problem threatens to unseat hundreds of Democrats in national, state, and local races this November.
Ah, yes — we knew there was a silver lining somewhere.
