Murders Are Up, and the Left Has Rediscovered Policing

By Luther Ray Abel

Monday, September 04, 2023

 

There are few things more damaging to individuals and their interconnections, few things that more endanger community, than crime. And there’s little else more exhausting than the left-wing rediscovery of seemingly self-evident truths.

 

German Lopez reports for Vox:

 

Last year, the US’s murder rate spiked by almost 30 percent. So far in 2021, murders are up nearly 10 percent in major cities. The 2020 increase alone is the largest percentage increase ever recorded in America — and a reversal from overall declines in murder rates since the 1990s.

 

American policymakers now want answers on this surge. One approach has good evidence behind it: the police.

 

There is solid evidence that more police officers and certain policing strategies reduce crime and violence. In a recent survey of criminal justice experts, a majority said increasing police budgets would improve public safety. The evidence is especially strong for strategies that home in on very specific problems, individuals, or groups that are causing a lot of crime or violence — approaches that would require restructuring how many police departments work today.

 

On the one hand, we shouldn’t take for granted that policy-makers in America’s cities are coming around to the necessary role of policing. On the other, it’s abominable that cities have taken this long to acknowledge the obvious — and hundreds of Americans are dead who might otherwise be alive.

 

Does the slowly growing realization mitigate the unnecessary deaths? Obviously not. It’s not possible to undo the level of stupidity necessary to say that violence erupts from anything other than an inherently fallen creature. Elected office is not a governance simulator or a place to stash an idiot kid or an unemployed grad student. Democrats wonder why Republicans win on law and order. Well, it’s because Americans like to know that they and their families can leave the house and return in one piece to their unmolested possessions.

 

Looting, burglary, and physical violence are the rule in too many locales. Adding police and deputizing them to effect arrests of lawbreakers (and actually incarcerate them) is a start, but anarchy’s legacy will play out for years. Trust in civic institutions that stood by while citizens were beaten and robbed in daylight won’t recover with a few hires.

 

These city organs drank the sugar water of decarceration for years while tumors grew — chemo is going to be devastating in its own way while leaders try to save the city’s body.