Last week progressive Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner told a local news anchor that his approach to crime, which involves not prosecuting criminals is “working.” The anchor noted that a thousand people had been killed over the past 20 months, with the city hitting the highest murder rate in its history. “It is working,” replied Krasner.
In an article published in today’s Daily Mail, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald observes, “Krasner apparently defines a policy as working when it contributes to the highest number of murders and the highest rate in the city’s history, a record number of carjackings, the routine looting of stores, and savage beatings of innocent pedestrians. Krasner has a knack for denying the undeniable.”
“Every time a left-wing prosecutor claims his policies are working, every time members of the mainstream media scoff at the idea that crime is out of control, they are essentially saying that black lives don’t matter.
It is black people who have borne the brunt of the recent crime surge.
In 2020, as anti-cop hatred swept the country following the death of George Floyd, an additional 3,400 black people were killed by gun homicide in 2020 compared to 2019, according to CDC data. The rate at which blacks died of criminal shootings increased 39.5 % from 2019 to 2020. Why don’t their lives matter? Black males between the ages of 10-24 died of shootings at 21.6 times the rate of white males in that age range in 2020; for males between the ages of 25 and 44, the black-white difference in the gun victimization rate was 16.7.
In Philadelphia, blacks are at least 85% of homicide victims, though they are 41% of the population. Krasner apparently defines a policy as ‘working’ when it contributes to the highest number of murders and the highest murder rate in a city’s history, a record number of carjackings, the routine looting of stores, and savage beatings of innocent pedestrians. In the first nine months of 2022, someone was shot, lethally or non-lethally, in Philadelphia every five hours; that rate accelerated between Memorial Day and Labor Day to produce a shooting victim every three hours. Those victims were overwhelmingly black.”
MacDonald points to Krasner’s non-prosecution policies as contributing to the increased violence.
“In 2022, 66% of violent felony arrests made by the Philadelphia police went nowhere, almost all withdrawn by Krasner’s office; 49% of illegal gun possession cases were likewise sent down the memory hole. Criminals got the message: Crime has few consequences.”
In his TV interview last week Krasner insisted that there is “absolutely no correlation between (a prosecutor’s) being progressive or traditional and the rate of crime.” Eight our of 10 of the most violent cities are “Trump Cities,” Krasner said. “We get to get real about this. Facts matter.”
“Facts do matter, and Krasner’s facts are as wrong as his policies. The 10 most violent US cities in 2019, the latest best available data, were Democratic strongholds: from St. Louis and Baltimore, in slots one and two, to Memphis and Cleveland, in slots nine and 10.
Among US cities with a population of a quarter million or more, the first 19 with the highest homicide rate in 2018 were run by Democrats; Republican-led Tulsa came in at slot 20. A minimum of 12 major cities broke their homicide records in 2021—among them Philadelphia, Portland, Austin, Baton Rouge, Rochester, NY, and St. Paul. All have Democratic mayors.
Krasner claimed during his interview that the homicide rate in 2020 was 40% higher in ‘Trump states’ than in ‘Biden states,’ an assertion presumably based on a study by the left-wing think tank Third Way. State homicide rates are not particularly revealing about crime policies, however. Crime and policing are intensely local matters, with wide variations across different geographical areas; no resident wondering about whether to move to a particular city looks up the state crime average.
The Third Way study made much of Mississippi, which the organization ranked number one in per capita murder rates. But the Mississippi average was driven by Jackson, a city run since 2017 by self-described socialist Chokwe Antar Lumumba. Upon election, Lumamba pledged to make Jackson the ‘most radical city on the planet.’
In 2020, Jackson’s homicide rate reached its highest point in its history. Jackson beat that record in 2021, with a jaw-dropping rate of 100 homicide victims per 100,000 population. By comparison, St. Louis’s homicide rate in 2019 was 64.54 murders per 100,000 population. Decriminalization policies in other cities, whether New Orleans, Chicago, or New York, coupled with Democrats’ rhetorical war on cops, are producing similar results.”
While the radical left cannot admit the truth, the public is experiencing it. And, as usual, the policies supported by folks screaming that “black lives matter,” are responsible for unprecedented losses of black lives.
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