Woke law enforcement

Less than a year into a Democratic presidency and Democratic control of Congress, Democrats have managed to get sideways on just about all of the issues that Americans care most about, including inflation, immigration, and education.

But none of those miscues are likely to prove as costly as the issue of crime, where they are now being perceived as not just “soft” but idiotically and dangerously so.

The “law and order” issue always resonates most because it’s most directly relevant to the primary rationale for government—to provide the kind of security that allows human beings to live together in reasonably harmonious fashion, a circumstance more generally known as civilization. A government which fails to adequately provide such public goods loses support and, ultimately, legitimacy in the eyes of the governed.

For Democrats, who control the vast majority of elected offices in America’s large urban areas where the vast majority of our crime surge is occurring, this failure represents not just incompetence but the consequences of woke ideology run amok.

The central problem is that the Black residents who disproportionately reside in those urban areas and disproportionately vote Democrat also commit a vastly disproportionate percentage of the violent crimes therein (with the victims also disproportionately Black).

Rather than viewed as a complex problem that might be holding back Black progress, it has instead become a matter of entrenched orthodoxy among Democrats that such statistics reflect the “systemic racism” that pervades our criminal justice systems (a view which, somewhat implausibly, suggests that lots of whites commit crimes which go unpunished and lots of Blacks are punished for crimes they didn’t commit).

For Democrats the primary problem isn’t that Blacks commit too many crimes but that the police officers, prosecutors, and judges that arrest, charge, and sentence them are racist. To see it any other way, as with so much else involving the left and race these days, is to be complicit in the white supremacy project.

This woke ideological orthodoxy becomes fused with electoral opportunism when Democratic candidates seek votes, campaign funding, and newspaper endorsements by promising criminal justice reforms aimed at reducing such racial disparities. Those efforts to cleanse their realms of systemic racism invariably include ceasing to prosecute minor offenses, lowering the status of various criminal acts from felonies to misdemeanors, and reducing or even eliminating altogether the practice of cash bail for many offenders (on the grounds that prosecution of minor offenses produces prosecution disparities and Blacks are unable to make bail as easily as whites, that bail in particular criminalizes poverty). Fast-forward from all this to what happened in Waukesha two weeks ago, where the story moved (to the extent the media was willing to follow along) rapidly from the tragedy itself to why the perpetrator was free to commit it; more precisely, why a suspect with an alarmingly long record of felonies had been released just days before on just $1,000 bail, a circumstance flowing, as it turns out, from the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s long-standing desire to reform his county’s bail system in an allegedly less racist, more socially just fashion.

But what has been happening in Milwaukee County has also been happening in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Baltimore, Chicago and many other places.

In the words of The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel, “Crime is soaring nationally, after progressives spent years pushing to water down bail rules, forgo prosecutions, release prisoners, and even defund the police.

The governors, mayors and prosecutors who indulged these demands uniformly have Ds behind their names.”

Blaming Democrats for rising crime might seem simplistic but that doesn’t necessarily make it inaccurate, or any less the inevitable consequence of the takeover of so many American cities and their prosecutors’ offices by radical-left activists more dedicated to woke ideology than keeping their streets safe.

What the radical left saw postGeorge Floyd in the streets of America’s cities was “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests in response to pervasive police brutality and racism. What other Americans saw was an awful lot of looting, violence, and arson that had little or nothing to do with George Floyd.

What they also saw were Democratic officials who weren’t doing much to stop the mayhem and Democratic media figures who often condoned it.

To deny that many Democrats jumped on the “defund the police” bandwagon and more broadly demonized the police is dishonest, to pretend that it would have no effect on crime rates is simply obtuse.

At the least, it wasn’t difficult under such circumstances to figure out who sympathized with the police and who sympathized with the criminals.

Again, as with so much else, we come back to the clash between the first principles of the woke left and the first principles of the rest of American society—whereas the woke left begins with the assumption that everything about American law enforcement (and everything else about America) is racist and thus illegitimate and hence must be torn down, most Americans see our criminal justice system as an inevitably flawed (as all human creations tend to be) but necessary means of providing order and security.

Most Americans sympathize with the victims of crime. The radical left sees the criminals as the victims.