“A new report shows that Democrat policies in cities and counties are responsible for rising crime rates in ‘their otherwise red states,'” reports The Stream:
The Heritage Foundation today released a 19-page report titled “The Blue City Murder Problem” that includes analysis on crime data and explores who is responsible for rising crime throughout the U.S…“Those on the Left know that their soft-on-crime policies have wreaked havoc in the cities where they have implemented those policies,” authors Charles Stimson, Zack Smith, and Kevin D. Dayaratna, who are scholars in the Edwin Meese III Center for Judicial and Legal Studies at The Heritage Foundation, wrote in the report.
The authors continued:
It is not hard to understand why ‘reforms’ such as ending cash bail, defunding the police, refusing to prosecute entire categories of crimes, letting thousands of convicted felons out of prison early, significantly cutting the prison population, and other ‘progressive’ ideas have led to massive spikes in crime — particularly violent crime, including murder — in the communities where those on the Left have implemented them.
The “cities with the highest homicide rates include” such progressive bastions as “Chicago, with 304 homicides” and “Philadelphia, with 240 homicides,” as of this June. [Note: Updated data shows Philadelphia now has 451 homicides so far this year.]
“The report also highlighted that 27 of the top 30 cities with the highest murder rates as of June 2022 were run by Democratic mayors, except for Lexington, Kentucky, and Jacksonville, Florida, which are run by Republican mayors, and Las Vegas, which has an independent [progressive-leaning] mayor.”
Here is a link to the report: The Blue City Murder Problem
The report notes that 14 of the 30 cities with the highest murder rates have “[George] Soros-backed or Soros-inspired rogue prosecutors.” Soros is the largest donor to left-wing prosecutors, by a huge margin. For example, a prosecutor in one municipality received a staggering sum of money — $583,237 — from a “dark money” group bankrolled by George Soros. Partway through an election campaign, the Washington Post reported that Soros’s group had already pumped over $1 million into just two municipal prosecutor races in a single state, to replace moderate incumbent Democrats with leftist Democratic challengers in Democratic Primaries.
Some of the prosecutors include:
- New Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams
- Milwaukee County District Attorney John T. Chisholm
- Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby
- St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner
- Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner
- Cook County, Illinois, State’s Attorney Kim Foxx
“There were 2,554 homicides in those 30 cities through June 2022. In the 14 cities with Soros-backed rogue prosecutors, there were 1,752 representing 68% of homicides in the 30 top homicide cities in the United States.”
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.
