Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman can’t run away from his soft-on-crime allies fast enough.
Once a proud supporter of Black Lives Matter, Fetterman scrubbed every mention of the police-defunding movement from his website, just as Republican Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz was hammering Fetterman on crime.
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Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, however, doesn’t face the voters until next year. Despite the fact that over 1,000 people have been killed in Philadelphia over the past 20 months, Krasner insists that his decision not to prosecute most nonviolent crimes, including theft, is “working.” Exactly for whom is it working? When you see Krasner’s record, you realize he might be in earnest. His policy is “working” for the career criminals whom he views as victims of the justice system.
According to Gallup, 72% are dissatisfied with America’s current policies to reduce crime, and 80% say they worry about crime.
Voters know which party is to blame. According to a recent NBC News poll, Republicans enjoy a 23-percentage-point advantage over Democrats on the question of which party has better policies on crime. No amount of sophistry is going to change that.
Nationally, Democrats know that the nation’s rising crime rates are a political liability for the party, and they have a plan to fight back. Using recent tragedies such as the mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, they are attacking Republicans for being weak on crime (and even running ads to that effect) because they don’t support expansive gun control laws.
There are a couple of problems with this argument, and they begin in Krasner’s City of Brotherly Love. Since Krasner became the district attorney of Philadelphia, prosecutions for gun possession have fallen by half. This is not an accident — it’s deliberate.
“The notion that the way you’re going to solve shootings is arresting people for guns is missing the point,” Krasner recently said. “The way you solve shootings is arrest people for shootings. The way you solve homicides by gun is by solving homicides by gun.”
Krasner is correct that prosecuting people for shootings is a great way to reduce shootings. But if Democrats are arguing for more gun laws, and Democratic DAs such as Krasner refuse to prosecute those gun laws, then what is the point? Their own actions show that even they don’t believe gun laws reduce crime. In fact, they make crime worse because only criminals will possess guns. The only point of these laws is to harass law-abiding gun owners who, unlike criminals, will actually follow the law.
Krasner is not the only Democratic district attorney whose soft-on-crime policies are ruining cities and getting people killed. New York state’s bail reform laws have put thousands of violent criminals back on the street, leading to hundreds of re-arrests per month. Illinois, a state controlled by the Democrats, has also passed a bail reform law that will release thousands of violent offenders into the streets, and it has even barred police from removing trespassers on private property.
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Democrats in Washington can throw millions of dollars at police departments across the country. But it won’t do an ounce of good as long as Democrats control the district attorney’s offices in those jurisdictions.
The United States doesn’t need more money spent on police departments. It doesn’t need more gun laws that Democrats won’t enforce. What it does need are old-fashioned prosecutors who are willing to enforce existing laws, regardless of race. Until Democrats rid their party of soft-on-crime district attorneys, Fetterman and other Democrats will have very deservedly earned the widespread public perception that their party is hopelessly soft on crime.
