Predictably, the Trump Administration’s federal takeover of Washington DC is already bearing fruit.
According to local reporters on the ground, the city has gone 11 days without a single homicide, carjacking’s are down 83 percent, robberies 46 percent, car thefts 21 percent and overall violent crime has fallen by 22 percent.
While there’s a few reasons to take what the administration says with a grain of salt these days, I have no doubt that the presence of more uniforms on the streets of our nation’s capital have made an immediate difference.
Like it or not, more suits on the ground means less crime, a reality that leftists seem intent on denying.
Which is understandable, since the Trump Administration has threatened to replicate this process across other blue cities and embarrass them in their own backyards.
At best, progressives have a misguided view of crime and homelessness, and honestly, you really can’t blame them.
For decades Democrats and media outlets have misdiagnosed the mechanics of crime and misrepresented the face of homelessness. Some of that is purposeful and some of it is simply an unwillingness to confront the truth and speak it plainly.
Broadly, criminality is a problem of nurture and opportunity.
While it may be true in some cases that people steal because they’re hungry or initiate robberies because they’re in dire financial straits, this represents the totality of criminal activity in the single digits, if that.
Most people do bad things because they come from backgrounds that make allowances for that behavior.
And even good, God fearing households produce kids that will naturally act out and see what they can get away with because that’s human nature.
Progressives then assume that injections of government money, activities, community centers and the like will fix the problem.
Thus, in the literal sense, liberals believe that idle hands are the devil’s playthings.
But here’s the thing, just as you ought not bargain with the devil, you ought not try to bargain with criminality.
Once people begin behaving badly in so- ciety, you have to do something decisive about it.
A society does not have to tolerate criminality and its citizens don’t have to put up with living in fear of their neighbors.
Reducing crime and making places safer requires societies to be proactive and realistic, not idealistic, about making things better.
Realistically, you can’t fix a generation of homes that are already broken and you can’t spend enough millions to get bad elements to straighten up and do the right thing.
It’s a case where prevention truly is better than the cure and as has been the case in DC, the best preventative measure is more law enforcement on the ground. Just as the credible threat of deterrence works on the foreign policy front, so too will it work on the home front.
Most people aren’t willing to risk doing something criminal if the boys in blue are a constant presence. Most are also dissuaded from engaging in BS if they know that their city has a zero tolerance policy and harsh penalties for nonsense.
Even in our imperfect world, that simple combo is a tried and true method for maintaining order and making cities and municipalities safer.
The issue of homelessness is also an area where the liberal mindset is just as detrimental to society as its views on crime. While the average liberal has their hearts in the right place, they often misdiagnose homelessness and view it through a Hollywood movie lens.
Will Smith’s “The Pursuit of Happyness” is a one in a million story that represents an infinitesimal survey of the homeless population.
Unlike Chris Gardner, whom Smith played in the movie, most of the “un-housed” are people that have lost everything through addiction and mental illness, with the worst case being a combination of both.
Alarmingly, far too many become accustomed to living on the streets and refuse to return to polite society and all its rules and responsibilities.
More often than not, homelessness is just one symptom of all the ills going on in a person’s life.
As such, trying to defeat it via injections of cash and even free housing is treating the symptoms rather than the root cause.
Thus, the best course of action is to forgo “housing first” policies and pursue involuntary commitments, however cruel that might seem.
On the racial front, the Democrat’s protest to Trump’s move is especially strange, given that Washington DC is mostly African-American.
It wasn’t that long ago that we had an entire movement focused on the plight of African-Americans in America.
You might remember it.
It was called the Black Lives Matter, a social revolution that was meant to put the well being of Black people at the forefront of the American mind. Moreover, it was meant to improve the lives of Black people across America and free them from persecution and hardship.
It goes without saying that the movement focused largely on the perceived injustices that Blacks faced from white Americans, law enforcement and the American Justice system.
Oddly, the movement often left out the most immediate threats that blacks face from one another in our own communities.
If Black lives mattered, and I have a personal stake in thinking that they do, then everyone would be on board with having more law enforcement in their communities, since it ought to go without saying that Blacks ought to be able to live without fear of their neighbors the same as anyone else.
Just so we’re 100 percent clear, no bootlicking ought to be tolerated.
Advocating for a dedicated police presence in your neighborhood doesn’t mean that the police get to act with impunity.
If the George Floyd riots taught us anything, it’s that at the end of the day, the police are arms of the state and are loyal to them first. Which is to say, they require checks and balances and vigilance from the public, the same as our expansive government.
At the same time, it’s difficult to hold rogue officers accountable when citizens purposely agitate police, and are blatantly disrespectful in hopes of instigating a massive lawsuit and payday.
That’s counter intuitive, dangerous and, worse, a fast track to have your neighborhood abandoned by law enforcement in areas where their mitigating presence is needed the most.