‘Law and order’ should be more than a GOP slogan

Two friends of mine were robbed recently outside their co-op building in Chicago. Suddenly I was alerted once again to the horrors of the city’s surging crime rate.

News that the crime wave rolling through cities nationwide had penetrated my circle of friends triggered an emotional trauma from a holdup on a vacation in the 1970s. My boiling inner rage over the incident never went away.

A lot of us became complacent during the welcome dip in violent crime in the 1990s. It lasted until about 2014 and, despite some upticks, violent crime remains lower than the early 1990s. The national rate of 758 incidents per 100,000 in 1991 slid to 398 per 100,000 when the pandemic began. But those statistics bring little comfort to victims of crime or to their families and friends.

So, while much of the nation is transfixed by the Jan. 6 committee hearings, the successful recall of San Francisco’s progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin has renewed or energized calls elsewhere for legal recall of prosecutors.

Discontent with crime rates in Chicago has brought similar talk about recalling Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, which is not the sort of thing her party, the Democrats, want to be talking about as the midterms approach.

Foxx and Boudin are part the “progressive prosecutors” movement. Their goals sound worthy enough. Reducing mass incarceration and eliminating abusive policing tactics are popular goals. But it’s not easy to attack the

“root causes” of crime, as Boudin found in San Francisco, when the public feels awash in a crime wave, including car break-ins, carjackings, open-air drug dealing and homeless people sleeping and relieving themselves en masse on otherwise city streets.

“I’m proud this city believes in giving people second chances,” said San Francisco Mayor London Breed in a clash with Boudin. “Nevertheless, we also need there to be accountability when someone does break the law.”

Boudin denounced her funding request for a police crackdown plan as “knee-jerk” and “shortsighted.” The voters, in a remarkably low-turnout election, appeared to have other ideas.

With Boudin ousted, Republicans feel further emboldened to make “soft on crime” a major issue this fall, while many of them go soft themselves on investigating the attack on law and order by supporters of President Donald Trump at the U.S. Capitol. They’re accusing Democrats of wanting to “defund the police,” though that call is only coming from a small feather of the party’s left wing.

Democrats need to push back on that. Hard. As a report from the centrist Democratic group Third Way finds, Democrats have been funding police in the 25 largest Democratic-run cities at a pace that actually surpasses spending rates of Republicanrun cities on a per-person basis.

In other words, as the center-left Third Way puts it, Republicans talk more about funding the police than actually doing so.

Party politics aside, city dwellers need to deal with the crime problem without creating more problems. We need to build bridges, not drive wedges between the police and the public they are assigned to protect and serve, especially in low-income communities of color that need good policing the most — without abusive practices.

Nor can police and prosecutors, regardless of party, fail to prosecute shoplifting and other property crimes that seem like no big deal. Studies over the years find that it’s not the length of sentencing that serves as a deterrent to crime as much as the certainty of being punished.

If we take that simple reality too lightly, the lawbreakers aren’t the only ones who get punished. We all do.