REPORTED BY: KYLEE ZEMPEL | JUNE 08, 2022
Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/08/democrats-yell-do-something-on-guns-but-their-prosecutors-and-policies-create-our-culture-of-crime/
Just as the humanitarian crisis at the border is the predictable result of the left’s open-borders policies, so our crime wave is a consequence of their anti-punitive philosophy of criminal justice.
KYLEE ZEMPEL
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Since a spate of recent shootings, Democrats led by President Joe Biden have been busy exploiting the tragedies to call for more gun control, go after the “gun lobby” bogeyman, and yell that we must “do something!” about firearm-related crime. They’ve been clear that they aren’t interested in talking about effective solutions that don’t involve gun-grabbing, so they probably also don’t want to talk about who’s responsible for America’s unsettling crime wave: the left.
Meanwhile, as of late Tuesday night, the Associated Press projected that San Francisco voters had handily recalled left-wing District Attorney Chesa Boudin, whose soft-on-crime policies wreaked havoc on the California city.
While a prosecutor recall might seem disconnected from an uptick in mass shootings and subsequent gun-control chatter, the two are intertwined. Just as the humanitarian crisis at the border is the predictable result of the left’s open-borders policies, our crime wave is the inevitable result of their anti-punitive philosophy of criminal justice. And the biggest culprits are progressive prosecutors like Boudin who champion Democrats’ policies and have been installed across the country after being bankrolled by left-wing radicals like George Soros and other groups.
Prosecutors Who Don’t Prosecute
According to a new report out from the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF), Soros alone has poured a staggering $40 million into prosecutor races to help elect 75 leftists that have contributed to the crime wave, and he’s just one of many billionaires working to destroy law and order, influence elections, control the media, and otherwise destroy the country.
The left and its skeptics continue to use guns as a scapegoat and say there’s no direct correlation between left-wing prosecutorial philosophies and crime, but the evidence suggests otherwise. According to the LELDF report, more than 40 percent of the roughly 22,500 homicides in 2021 — so more than 9,000 — happened in these 75 district attorneys’ jurisdictions, which accounted for more than one-third of last year’s violent crimes and property crime.
These DAs’ decisions produce consequences even in the areas they don’t oversee, however, since there’s nothing keeping released offenders in the prosecutors’ jurisdictions. Light sentences, low cash bail, and other slaps on the wrist send criminals right back onto their streets and those of their neighbors.
“These radical activists now preside over 72 million Americans and 40% of US homicides,” said LELDF President Jason Johnson, noting that Soros has already spent another $1 million to date this year to boost his preferred prosecutors. “Soros is using that campaign money and the hundreds of millions more for supporting organizations to quietly transform the criminal justice system for the worse, promoting dangerous policies and anti-police narratives to advance his radical agenda.”
The country saw the effects of progressive prosecutors up close over the last holiday season. The Waukesha parade murderer didn’t need a firearm. To kill six people and injure 62 more, he needed only a vehicle, a soft-on-crime district attorney’s office that let him out on a pittance of bail, and leftist policies that “guaranteed” offenders would kill people. It’s evil like that, enabled by leftist policy failures, that expose America’s crime problem as being so much bigger than a few psychopaths with guns.
Democrats’ Progressive Dream
But the rise in crime is much bigger than Soros and 75 district attorneys too. More fundamentally, it’s the predictable result of a long list of so-called leftist policy goals and beliefs that are prevalent not only among the radicals of the left, but also among the mainstream Democrat Party.
For a particularly grotesque example, look at cities in blue bastion California — particularly Boudin’s San Francisco, where the sidewalks are littered with used needles, passed-out junkies, and homeless encampments, and street sightings of human feces number in the tens of thousands each year. Facing an explosion in shoplifting, retailers in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Francisco were helpless to do anything but reduce store hours. As a Wall Street Journal article noted in October 2021, “Walgreens has closed 22 stores in [San Francisco], where thefts under $950 are effectively decriminalized.”
That little $950 tidbit is courtesy of Democrats’ woke Proposition 47, which more than doubled the amount a person could steal before facing a felony. In other words, Prop 47 reclassified felonies as no-biggie misdemeanors. Crime in the Bay Area has gotten so bad that even Democrat Mayor London Breed was forced to admit that the left’s soft-on-crime approach has led to “all the bullsh-t that has destroyed” San Francisco.
Meanwhile, in 2021, Los Angeles experienced its highest number of homicides in 15 years, and looters ran rampant on that area’s train tracks, with some railroad companies reporting a “160% increase in criminal rail theft,” and “approximately $5 million in claims, losses and damages” to the train companies alone.
The Left’s Culture of Crime
The crime wave isn’t confined to California, though. It’s swept through Democrats’ strongholds across the rest of the country too. As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd wrote in January, “New York, D.C., and Chicago all saw ‘record-high‘ murders in 2021 while Philadelphia; Portland, Oregon; Louisville, Kentucky; and Albuquerque, New Mexico, ‘had their deadliest years on record.’”
And let’s not forget the scores of rioters, looters, and vandals who went unpunished after the 2020 summer of rage that resulted in billions of dollars in damages. In fact, rather than condemn them, prominent Democrats including our very own Vice President Kamala Harris helped bail out of jail those who were caught. It was Minneapolis Democrats who voted to dismantle its police department in 2020, enabling a crime wave there. And Democrat lawmakers joined the chorus of those calling to “defund the police,” only stopping when they realized that abhorrent position could hurt them politically.
This approach to law and order is to say nothing of the left’s other principles that cultivate a culture of death, such as the celebration of snuffing out human life in the womb and exploiting children as sex objects.
It’s hard to take Democrats’ tired calls for gun control seriously anyway, given their debunked talking points and faulty logic. But it’s especially disqualifying for the left when you take into account all the lawlessness and violence they enable as hallmarks of their criminal justice platforms. If voters in far-left San Francisco can see it, it’s a safe bet the rest of the country can too. America’s culture of crime belongs to Democrats, and no amount of gun control can fix it.
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
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