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Democrats Pay a Political Price for Going Easy on Crime

Democrats Pay a Political Price for Going Easy on Crime

One reason Republicans were projected to make big gains on Election Day is that GOP candidates have highlighted crime, which has risen nationally in recent years and in some big cities has hit elevations not seen since the early 1990s. For anyone paying attention, however, the writing has been on the wall for some time now.

Earlier this year, voters recalled San Francisco District Attorney

Chesa Boudin

for his lax attitude toward prosecuting criminals.

Marilyn Mosby,

the top prosecutor in Baltimore—where homicides have topped 300 for each of the past seven years—lost her bid for re-election in July for similar reasons.

Philadelphia is on pace to surpass last year’s record number of murders, and state lawmakers have filed articles of impeachment against District Attorney

Larry Krasner

over his soft-on-crime policies. In addition, 2021 saw the election of mayors in Atlanta, New York and Seattle who all ran on public-safety platforms.

This history would seem to suggest that progressive criminal-justice reforms haven’t resonated with most voters, not even in some of the nation’s bluest precincts. In the past few years, we’ve conducted a natural experiment in defunding police departments, releasing prisoners before they complete their sentences, stripping judges of discretion in holding suspects until trial, and effectively decriminalizing so-called minor offenses such as retail theft.

The upshot has been lower morale among law enforcement, higher crime rates and more crime victims, particularly among the low-income minorities on whom violent criminals tend to prey. The Democratic Party’s embrace of Black Lives Matter activism has turned out to be not only bad policy but also bad politics.

Alas, not everyone has gotten the memo. As of Jan. 1, Illinois is poised to adopt some of the same policies that have failed so badly in other parts of the country. Chicago has long been the poster child for big-city crime run amok. Its homicide rate is roughly five times New York City’s and 2.5 times Los Angeles’s. “Overall crime is up 37 percent over 2021 and 20 percent over pre-George Floyd 2019,” reads a September report from Wirepoints, a local watchdog group. “Carjackings are set to hit nearly 2,000 this year, or one every 5 hours. And this year alone, 35 Chicago children have been murdered…

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