If you oppose defunding the police, white progressives who want to defund the police will claim you are reinforcing “white supremacy” at the expense of “black and brown bodies.” But most black people do not agree with this, and do not want to defund the police.
The TheGrio/KFF [Kaiser Family Foundation] Survey of Black Voters asked black people,
Thinking about police departments in your area, do you think spending on policing should be increased, kept about the same or decreased?
The answers: 48% supported keeping it about the same, 34% supported increasing it, and only 17% supported decreasing funding. Similar results have been found in different surveys earlier this year.
Black Democrats are also much more concerned about crime than white Democrats. 82 percent of Black Democrats see violent crime as an important voting issue this year, compared to 33 percent of white Democrats, according to a Pew Research survey. As Pew Research Center notes,
Black voters are particularly likely to say violent crime is a very important midterm issue. Black Americans have consistently been more likely than other racial and ethnic groups to express concern about violent crime, and that remains the case this year.
Some 81% of Black registered voters say violent crime is very important to their midterm vote, compared with 65% of Hispanic and 56% of White voters. (There were not enough Asian American voters in the Center’s survey to analyze independently.)
Differences by race are especially pronounced among Democratic registered voters. While 82% of Black Democratic voters say violent crime is very important to their vote this year, only a third of White Democratic voters say the same.
Murders are rising because of the policies of progressive prosecutors. Killings have increased in Baltimore, where most killings are committed by people who previously were convicted of a serious crime, but who are no longer in jail due to their past lenient sentence. Progressive states and district attorneys have stopped prosecuting many violent juveniles — including killers in some cases — as adults, meaning that some teenage serial killers won’t be held beyond age 25. As a result, recidivism has gone up, increasing the crime rate.
Progressive Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner fails to prosecute most serious crimes, even when arrests are made. As Big Trial notes, “the percentage of criminal cases withdrawn or dismissed by the D.A.’s office has gone from 28% in 2014 under former D.A. Seth Williams all the way up to 67% last year under D.A. Krasner.” Meanwhile, the murder rate in Philadelphia has risen, breaking record after record.
Krasner fired experienced prosecutors who were good at obtaining justice for crime victims, as soon as he took office. As Big Trial notes,
When he first took office back in January 2018, Krasner’s first official act was to fire 31 senior prosecutors…The new Philly D.A., a career criminal defense lawyer who had never prosecuted a traffic stop, replaced the most senior prosecutors in his office with a combination of social justice warriors, former public defenders and woke progressives fresh out of law school.
The result was that criminals remained free to kill innocent people. 21-year-old Jailene Holton was shot to death by a man that Krasner’s office failed to convict of rape despite overwhelming evidence, such as text messages. Krasner’s office assigned an inexperienced recent hire who had previously interned in a public defender’s office to prosecute the case. He bungled the case, so the defendant walked free. Seven months later, that man shot Jailene Holton to death in a rage.
As Big Trial notes, “for Krasner’s prosecutors, winning a conviction in court is a rare event. The D.A.’s own Data Dashboard shows how inept the D.A.’s office is at obtaining guilty verdicts under Krasner. According to the D.A.’s own stats, the percentage of guilty verdicts won at trial have gone from 17% of all criminal cases in 2014 under former D.A. Seth Williams, all the way down to just 2% of all criminal cases prosecuted last year under D.A. Krasner.”
Under Krasner, Philadelphia’s murder rate spiked in 2020, hit an all-time high in 2021, then rose again in 2022. Philly has more murders than bigger cities like New York or Los Angeles. Yet when Krasner was asked “about the city’s crime surge,” he played it down, reports NBC News:
“We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness,” Krasner said. “We don’t have a crisis of crime. We don’t have a crisis of violence.”… Michael Nutter, a former Philadelphia mayor who is African American, erupted at Krasner, accusing him of dismissing the pain of Black residents who suffer from the violence.
Longer sentences don’t just keep criminals in jail where they can’t commit crimes. They also deter people outside of prison from committing crimes. For example, a study found that giving repeat offenders longer sentences deterred people who had earlier been released from prison from committing new crimes. It found that sentence enhancements for repeat offenders reduced the rate at which people committed murder, robbery, and rape. (See Daniel Kessler & Steven J. Levitt, Using Sentence Enhancements to Distinguish Between Deterrence and Incapacitation, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper #6484 (1998))
Yet many left-wing prosecutors have recently refused to seek sentence enhancements mandated by state law, such as three-strikes laws. Such refusals are probably increasing the crime rate. A 2008 Santa Clara University study found that longer sentences for three-time offenders led to “significantly faster rates of decline in robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft,” even after controlling for pre-existing crime trends and economic, demographic, and policy factors.
