I think crime has already been studied by many smart people and there aren't that many mysteries left.
A percentage of the population is going to be criminal, that percent varies from society to society. The criminal element will re offend. If you lock up recidivists, there is less crime. The USA is a violent society and we need lots of prisons.
I do wish prisons were much more humane, I don't wish for my daughter to be riding light rail in front of another Decarlos Brown. Democrats, well intentioned though we might be, have elected many prosecutors and passed legislation, that allows very violent criminals into our midst, we will pay a price for that as well we should.
Whenever the Democrats talk about "smart" this or that, I prepare myself for something stupid dreamed up by a committee of depressed, idiotic, arrogant suburban collegiate liberal women in their late 20s or early 30s. If it's "smart on crime," I review the location of my guns.
Or how about being tough on meaningless word salads and smart on results that provably, statistically reduce real crime?
An honest start would be for Democrats, who have wisely receded from their politically ruinous "Defund the Police" mantra, to concede that illegally entering this country does constitute a criminal act punishable by the full force of the law. And worry less about these illegal border crossers being accurately called "illegal aliens" and more about the consequences of this illegality upon innocent, law-abiding American citizens.
The root cause of crime is criminals. Locking them up removes them from the generally poor neighborhoods they prey on, gives the decent people living there room to breathe, and increases their opportunities to succeed.
Mandatory minimums and three strikes laws didn’t come out of nowhere they were a direct response to judges who kept putting career criminals back into society.
Your “negative polarization” accusation against Trump is pure projection. By 2016 we were seeing the negative impacts of the left leveraging the “hands up don’t shoot lie” to undo the successful work of the 90s get tough on crime legislation. The public at large was upset that crime was getting worse. The Democrats kept pointing to numbers showing it wasn’t as bad as it was in the 80s while ignoring that it was substantially worse that it was in recent history (sound familiar). Trump at worst threw the baby out with the bath water.
This piece unintentionally gets to the heart of what’s wrong with the modern Democratic Party: Your far more interested in finding a slogan that will allow you to push your luxury belies than you are in acknowledging let alone fixing the severe consequences they inflict on the very communities you keep claiming you want to help.
The solution to crime is robust enforcement of “broken windows policing” with a local force that’s rooted in the community it serves and knows who the decent people are and which miscreant is thug who needs to be drug downtown vs a wayward kid who needs taken home to face punishment.
Rarely does a DNC speaker say the quiet part out loud. Pay no attention to carjackings and migrant murder and rape, because we know what is really important. Once a voter stops laughing, they realize a DNC Speaker would never make such a public proclamation, if she wasn't sure most Dems agree with her.
Had the DNC Speaker honestly finished her statement, she would have admitted crime is rarely a Dem priority, because like lousy public schools, it seldom personally effects the Dem ruling class. Moreover, Dem empathy for those they consider to be academically, financially, politically and morally inferior, seems to shrink each day. The apathy is mind blowing. Watching a young woman butchered on public transport, like a scene in a horror movie, did not seem to effect many Dems at all, except to the extent they worried the brutality might effect race relations or future elections.
Inexplicably Dems do not look at the stabbed young woman and see their own daughters, sisters, nieces or friends. The only rational explanation for that, is many ruling class Dems know few people in their sphere, who routinely utilize public transport. For many, the murder appears to be akin to watching someone die from a lack of oxygen on Mars. The scene is just not a possibility in their daily lives, and those of their loved ones.
If Dems cannot muster concern or empathy for the US poor and middle class most effected by crime, they might want to consider the electoral ramifications. Cameras are now omnipresent in US life. Crime is increasingly digitally recorded. The Charlotte stabbing would have barely been noticed, had it not been recorded. Now imagine how irrelevant voters will consider carjackings and migrant crime, when they watch the video.
"Watching a young woman butchered on public transport, like a scene in a horror movie, did not seem to effect many Dems at all,"
I am 99.999998% you have no proof this is true. However, if you want to cite sources that document, with any statistical or scientific rigor, how many Dems (you'll need to define what you mean by that term, btw) saw the incident in question, and then subsequently recorded their thoughts on the incident, and determined that most were "unaffected" by it, I would be delighted to be proven wrong.
We'll need to see how many dems continue to vote for "soft on crime" candidates as opposed to "tough on crime" candidates. I know how they vote in my town, and it's not logical. Hey, that's democracy. Better than the alternative.
DOJ is reporting over 200 illegal firearms have been taken off the street since Trump stepped in. Hopefully the criminals who were possessing them are being punished to the fullest extent the law allows. That’s my idea of “gun control”.
Many times when I read of an arrest, the priors include felon with a gun, which in all states and federal law is years in prison. I'd imagine if every felon arrested with a firearm were in jail, our jails would be a lot more full and we'd have a lot less crime. Anti gun Dems mostly look upon the issue of win against the other side, not reducing deaths and crime.
Is it win against the other side or religious doctrine? I can quote Bill Clinton as to it being a loser issue. Democrats sometimes get seduced by polls with stacked questions. I watch behavior with only one month in the last in the last 72 showing less than one million new gun sales. Some months were much higher. So Americans bought about 100M new guns since COVID. This doesn't count legal private sales and various forms of illegal trafficking. Data is tricky because all sales are not subject to NICS checks and all NICS checks are not associated with sales. I expect another spike after this week.
Gun ownership actually use to be more widely spread across US households, when more of the US resided rurally. Now less US homes have guns, but many more homes have multiple guns.
Many of us old enough to be ancient, remember attending high school in the 80s in small, rural schools. Half the trucks in the school parking lot had rifles in them, for shooting competitions or boys hunting after school. Most were unlocked, with the keys in them. Cannot imagine anyone ever underwent a background check. The idea anyone would steal a gun, let alone shoot someone else with them, literally, did not exist.
Now I live amongst upper middle class professionals who buy guns, like fancy wine glasses. They often have impressive degrees and wealth to match , but a Texas upbringing. Different guns for different reasons. Their gun rooms would often be a comfortable 3rd bedrooms in NYC or SF. Steel doors and security systems store them safely.
Background everyone, add Red Flag laws. As we saw in Minnesota with very strict gun laws, just don't expect it to do much good. Cannot imagine anyone willing to shoot up school or Charlie Kirk, would care if their gun is legally purchased.
I went to high school in the 60's. I remember all those pickups. Before I could drive, we'd ride our bikes off with our .22s. None of us got shot in my community.
I don't believe those surveys about gun ownership. I am certainly not going to tell some rando doing a survey that I own guns and there are millions who share that view. The NSSF has surveyed gun dealers and the general finding is that significant numbers of the recent spike are people buying their first gun and they are buying for protection. The fastest growing segments of gun owners are women and minorities not old white guys filling their safes.
Bill Clinton would have been a highly successful president but for his choices of the women in his life. He was moderate, smart, charming, and well-spoken.
Democrats, the party of false narratives like Ferguson and George Floyd. Do they have one crime reform that has withstood the test of time? No. The Dems have never had a program that has worked to reduce crime in a meaningful way. That’s why we still have bad parts of town and false “joy” that crime has been reduced but not enough to make it satisfactory to the innocents it is meant to protect. Democrats are the party of failed to reduce crime experiments. Which costs to many a price they shouldn’t have to pay. All those years, all those programs and we still have horrendous videos of an innocent young woman being needlessly slaughtered while doing something as simple as riding a subway or light rail.
It sure hasn't helped that for the last 20 years, Democrats have been AWOL in protecting free speech on campus, particularly conservative speakers. Even at a so-called "conservative" school like Grand Canyon University, Ann Coulter had to cancel an appearance due to death threats. How many Arizona Ds condemned that? Zero. They celebrate when conservative speakers were banned.
When they could not do so with violence, they used the apparatus of the university itself to ban them. I worked at a midwestern private U for 30 years. We had ZERO conservative speakers brought in by the University's "speakers committee." I finally secured enough private money to bring in Walter Williams, then Victor Davis Hanson, before the Department, concerned it wasn't having a "say" in who was coming in, shut it down.
Yes, I'm not sure why anyone would not want a violent criminal locked up. If they're locked up, they can kill other criminals in prison, but not my friends or family. People want to feel safe. They will vote for the party that is in favor of putting violent criminals (and all serious criminals) in prison. They won't for the party who inexplicably wants to defund the police and get rid of prisons.
Progressives would like a motto focusing on " serious on safety." It's so "them."
Everybody else wants Tough on Crime. It sounds tougher.
I can (and have) improved my "safety" by carrying a gun. Others do it by locking shelves in their stores or having home cameras. It is a motto that makes it MY responsibility to solve the problems for myself.
No-cash bail. That sounds like a recruitment sign for electing Republicans. Where is the feeling of "safety" in that?
Democrats need to be tough on crime. Period. Get criminals off the street. Don't make me need to carry a gun.
Good slogan, “Serious About Safety”. Now a list of what this means: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.
A start might be campaign to get all party leaders and elected Democrats on board. No. 1 should be ‘.It is never acceptable to celebrate a death.’ A recent YouGov.poll in Newsweek found “a sharp partisan divide over reactions to political violence with 89% of Republicans more likely than to say it is ‘always’ or ‘usually’ unacceptable to celebrate the death of a public figure versus 11% of Democrats said it is ‘always’ or ‘usually” acceptable to celebrate their death.
A first part in No. 1 if a party leaders can’t not celebrate a death, they might be urged to start with being silent during a public moment of silence to recognize a death.
Shouting Erupts on House Floor During Moment of Silence for Charlie Kirk
Democrats should campaign on “more police and better pay for police” in order to “fight crime everywhere”. It probably won’t make a difference because the whites on the right believe the diverse people on the left (blacks, browns, Hispanics, Asians, gays and tran) are responsible for the crime. It’s basically white extremism from the right that gets them elected. They’re not likely to give up the issue that elects them. In time when the diverse population out-numbers the whites significantly the US can govern democratically.
I think crime has already been studied by many smart people and there aren't that many mysteries left.
A percentage of the population is going to be criminal, that percent varies from society to society. The criminal element will re offend. If you lock up recidivists, there is less crime. The USA is a violent society and we need lots of prisons.
I do wish prisons were much more humane, I don't wish for my daughter to be riding light rail in front of another Decarlos Brown. Democrats, well intentioned though we might be, have elected many prosecutors and passed legislation, that allows very violent criminals into our midst, we will pay a price for that as well we should.
As with so many other things, with crime at least 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. Democrats have come to favor 100% of the criminals.
The main problem with “smart on crime” is that the Democrats abandoned it. “Cashless bail” is not smart on crime and neither is “defund the police”.
Whenever the Democrats talk about "smart" this or that, I prepare myself for something stupid dreamed up by a committee of depressed, idiotic, arrogant suburban collegiate liberal women in their late 20s or early 30s. If it's "smart on crime," I review the location of my guns.
Or how about being tough on meaningless word salads and smart on results that provably, statistically reduce real crime?
An honest start would be for Democrats, who have wisely receded from their politically ruinous "Defund the Police" mantra, to concede that illegally entering this country does constitute a criminal act punishable by the full force of the law. And worry less about these illegal border crossers being accurately called "illegal aliens" and more about the consequences of this illegality upon innocent, law-abiding American citizens.
The root cause of crime is criminals. Locking them up removes them from the generally poor neighborhoods they prey on, gives the decent people living there room to breathe, and increases their opportunities to succeed.
Mandatory minimums and three strikes laws didn’t come out of nowhere they were a direct response to judges who kept putting career criminals back into society.
Your “negative polarization” accusation against Trump is pure projection. By 2016 we were seeing the negative impacts of the left leveraging the “hands up don’t shoot lie” to undo the successful work of the 90s get tough on crime legislation. The public at large was upset that crime was getting worse. The Democrats kept pointing to numbers showing it wasn’t as bad as it was in the 80s while ignoring that it was substantially worse that it was in recent history (sound familiar). Trump at worst threw the baby out with the bath water.
This piece unintentionally gets to the heart of what’s wrong with the modern Democratic Party: Your far more interested in finding a slogan that will allow you to push your luxury belies than you are in acknowledging let alone fixing the severe consequences they inflict on the very communities you keep claiming you want to help.
The solution to crime is robust enforcement of “broken windows policing” with a local force that’s rooted in the community it serves and knows who the decent people are and which miscreant is thug who needs to be drug downtown vs a wayward kid who needs taken home to face punishment.
Great comment.
Rarely does a DNC speaker say the quiet part out loud. Pay no attention to carjackings and migrant murder and rape, because we know what is really important. Once a voter stops laughing, they realize a DNC Speaker would never make such a public proclamation, if she wasn't sure most Dems agree with her.
Had the DNC Speaker honestly finished her statement, she would have admitted crime is rarely a Dem priority, because like lousy public schools, it seldom personally effects the Dem ruling class. Moreover, Dem empathy for those they consider to be academically, financially, politically and morally inferior, seems to shrink each day. The apathy is mind blowing. Watching a young woman butchered on public transport, like a scene in a horror movie, did not seem to effect many Dems at all, except to the extent they worried the brutality might effect race relations or future elections.
Inexplicably Dems do not look at the stabbed young woman and see their own daughters, sisters, nieces or friends. The only rational explanation for that, is many ruling class Dems know few people in their sphere, who routinely utilize public transport. For many, the murder appears to be akin to watching someone die from a lack of oxygen on Mars. The scene is just not a possibility in their daily lives, and those of their loved ones.
If Dems cannot muster concern or empathy for the US poor and middle class most effected by crime, they might want to consider the electoral ramifications. Cameras are now omnipresent in US life. Crime is increasingly digitally recorded. The Charlotte stabbing would have barely been noticed, had it not been recorded. Now imagine how irrelevant voters will consider carjackings and migrant crime, when they watch the video.
"Watching a young woman butchered on public transport, like a scene in a horror movie, did not seem to effect many Dems at all,"
I am 99.999998% you have no proof this is true. However, if you want to cite sources that document, with any statistical or scientific rigor, how many Dems (you'll need to define what you mean by that term, btw) saw the incident in question, and then subsequently recorded their thoughts on the incident, and determined that most were "unaffected" by it, I would be delighted to be proven wrong.
We'll need to see how many dems continue to vote for "soft on crime" candidates as opposed to "tough on crime" candidates. I know how they vote in my town, and it's not logical. Hey, that's democracy. Better than the alternative.
The original and continuing antidote was gun control. That has failed as policy and antidote but Democrats desperately cling to it.
DOJ is reporting over 200 illegal firearms have been taken off the street since Trump stepped in. Hopefully the criminals who were possessing them are being punished to the fullest extent the law allows. That’s my idea of “gun control”.
Many times when I read of an arrest, the priors include felon with a gun, which in all states and federal law is years in prison. I'd imagine if every felon arrested with a firearm were in jail, our jails would be a lot more full and we'd have a lot less crime. Anti gun Dems mostly look upon the issue of win against the other side, not reducing deaths and crime.
Is it win against the other side or religious doctrine? I can quote Bill Clinton as to it being a loser issue. Democrats sometimes get seduced by polls with stacked questions. I watch behavior with only one month in the last in the last 72 showing less than one million new gun sales. Some months were much higher. So Americans bought about 100M new guns since COVID. This doesn't count legal private sales and various forms of illegal trafficking. Data is tricky because all sales are not subject to NICS checks and all NICS checks are not associated with sales. I expect another spike after this week.
Gun ownership actually use to be more widely spread across US households, when more of the US resided rurally. Now less US homes have guns, but many more homes have multiple guns.
Many of us old enough to be ancient, remember attending high school in the 80s in small, rural schools. Half the trucks in the school parking lot had rifles in them, for shooting competitions or boys hunting after school. Most were unlocked, with the keys in them. Cannot imagine anyone ever underwent a background check. The idea anyone would steal a gun, let alone shoot someone else with them, literally, did not exist.
Now I live amongst upper middle class professionals who buy guns, like fancy wine glasses. They often have impressive degrees and wealth to match , but a Texas upbringing. Different guns for different reasons. Their gun rooms would often be a comfortable 3rd bedrooms in NYC or SF. Steel doors and security systems store them safely.
Background everyone, add Red Flag laws. As we saw in Minnesota with very strict gun laws, just don't expect it to do much good. Cannot imagine anyone willing to shoot up school or Charlie Kirk, would care if their gun is legally purchased.
I went to high school in the 60's. I remember all those pickups. Before I could drive, we'd ride our bikes off with our .22s. None of us got shot in my community.
I don't believe those surveys about gun ownership. I am certainly not going to tell some rando doing a survey that I own guns and there are millions who share that view. The NSSF has surveyed gun dealers and the general finding is that significant numbers of the recent spike are people buying their first gun and they are buying for protection. The fastest growing segments of gun owners are women and minorities not old white guys filling their safes.
Bill Clinton would have been a highly successful president but for his choices of the women in his life. He was moderate, smart, charming, and well-spoken.
As I recall, he said that gun control caused him to lose Congress in 1994.
Democrats, the party of false narratives like Ferguson and George Floyd. Do they have one crime reform that has withstood the test of time? No. The Dems have never had a program that has worked to reduce crime in a meaningful way. That’s why we still have bad parts of town and false “joy” that crime has been reduced but not enough to make it satisfactory to the innocents it is meant to protect. Democrats are the party of failed to reduce crime experiments. Which costs to many a price they shouldn’t have to pay. All those years, all those programs and we still have horrendous videos of an innocent young woman being needlessly slaughtered while doing something as simple as riding a subway or light rail.
How about "New Math?"
It sure hasn't helped that for the last 20 years, Democrats have been AWOL in protecting free speech on campus, particularly conservative speakers. Even at a so-called "conservative" school like Grand Canyon University, Ann Coulter had to cancel an appearance due to death threats. How many Arizona Ds condemned that? Zero. They celebrate when conservative speakers were banned.
When they could not do so with violence, they used the apparatus of the university itself to ban them. I worked at a midwestern private U for 30 years. We had ZERO conservative speakers brought in by the University's "speakers committee." I finally secured enough private money to bring in Walter Williams, then Victor Davis Hanson, before the Department, concerned it wasn't having a "say" in who was coming in, shut it down.
Yes, I'm not sure why anyone would not want a violent criminal locked up. If they're locked up, they can kill other criminals in prison, but not my friends or family. People want to feel safe. They will vote for the party that is in favor of putting violent criminals (and all serious criminals) in prison. They won't for the party who inexplicably wants to defund the police and get rid of prisons.
Great article and history.
Progressives would like a motto focusing on " serious on safety." It's so "them."
Everybody else wants Tough on Crime. It sounds tougher.
I can (and have) improved my "safety" by carrying a gun. Others do it by locking shelves in their stores or having home cameras. It is a motto that makes it MY responsibility to solve the problems for myself.
No-cash bail. That sounds like a recruitment sign for electing Republicans. Where is the feeling of "safety" in that?
Democrats need to be tough on crime. Period. Get criminals off the street. Don't make me need to carry a gun.
Good slogan, “Serious About Safety”. Now a list of what this means: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.
A start might be campaign to get all party leaders and elected Democrats on board. No. 1 should be ‘.It is never acceptable to celebrate a death.’ A recent YouGov.poll in Newsweek found “a sharp partisan divide over reactions to political violence with 89% of Republicans more likely than to say it is ‘always’ or ‘usually’ unacceptable to celebrate the death of a public figure versus 11% of Democrats said it is ‘always’ or ‘usually” acceptable to celebrate their death.
A first part in No. 1 if a party leaders can’t not celebrate a death, they might be urged to start with being silent during a public moment of silence to recognize a death.
Shouting Erupts on House Floor During Moment of Silence for Charlie Kirk
Democrats should campaign on “more police and better pay for police” in order to “fight crime everywhere”. It probably won’t make a difference because the whites on the right believe the diverse people on the left (blacks, browns, Hispanics, Asians, gays and tran) are responsible for the crime. It’s basically white extremism from the right that gets them elected. They’re not likely to give up the issue that elects them. In time when the diverse population out-numbers the whites significantly the US can govern democratically.