Yeah, soft on crime policies, soft on criminal policies, bail reform, and all the other stuff sounds great in theory, but, doesn’t work out so well in practice when it’s your own city, right, Democrats? (Link for NY Times behind firewall version here)
Democrats Face Pressure on Crime From a New Front: Their Base
(skipping the first few paragraphs for the meat)
In Democratic strongholds like Maryland, a rise in violent crime has pushed the party’s candidates to address the issue of public safety in newly urgent terms. Even before the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, reignited the debate over gun control, day-to-day gun crimes and other acts of violence were rattling the American electorate.
Long seen as a political wedge for Republicans to use against Democrats, crime is increasingly a subject of concern within the Democratic Party and the big cities that make up much of its political base.
And from Baltimore and Atlanta in the East to San Francisco and Seattle in the West, the candidates and elected officials pushing the party to address crime more aggressively are largely people of color. Candidates are motivated not mainly by fear of Republican attacks, but rather by mounting outcry from the Black, Hispanic and Asian American communities bearing the brunt of a national crime wave.
Democrat cities like Seattle used to be pretty safe. Neighborhood Scout is a great resource, and Seattle used to be in the mid to upper 20’s, like most bigger cities. The higher the number, the safer the city. Seattle has now gone down to a 2. That’s worse than Chicago, which is a 10. Baltimore has recently gone from a 1 to a 4, with the police working hard to protect the middle class neighborhoods now.
Alarming trends have changed the political conversation. In Baltimore, the city is on track to record more than 300 homicides for the eighth straight year, along with a rise in carjackings, robberies and other serious crimes. Concerns about police misconduct in the city have not evaporated seven years after the killing of Freddie Gray in police custody ignited protests and rioting, but persistent violent crime has pushed voters’ tolerance to the breaking point.
Those developments have transformed the Democratic Party’s discourse on matters of law and order, forcing the party to balance its determination to overhaul the criminal justice system with the imperative to protect its most loyal voters from a tide of violence.
Well, that sounds like they are doing it simply for votes, rather than as their duty to protect the citizens.
On the other side of the country, Mayor Bruce Harrell of Seattle, a moderate Democrat who defeated a left-wing opponent last year, placed rising crime and a shortage of police officers at the center of his candidacy.
Harrell, who was inaugurated in January as Seattle’s second Black and first Asian American mayor, said voters of color in his city responded to a message of making the police more responsive but not “militarized or racialized” — an allusion to the heavy-handed and often discriminatory tactics favored by law-and-order mayors of the past.
Democrats, he said, need to understand that many voters cannot embrace the rest of their agenda if they do not feel safe. “Every community here demands safety,” Harrell said.
Harrell has been actually facing a lot of pushback from the loony tunes base in his quest to reform the reform, to make Seattle safe. The base is fine with the original soft on criminals reform as long as it is in Those Neighborhoods, rather than their own.
Baker has promised to declare a state of emergency in Baltimore and pour state police resources into the city. In early May, he unveiled a television commercial vowing to “stop the slaughter of young Black men” in the city and decrying what he called the state’s indifference to crime victims there.
“Because they’re Black, nobody gives a damn,” Baker says in the ad.
That would be Wes Moore, a Democrat candidate for governor in Maryland. And, he’s right: Democrats do not care about blacks in cities. The uber-white leftists think they are helping minorities with their crime policies, when they only make it worse. And, really, Dems have never cared about blacks. This is the new version of their KKK policies. They just changed tactics post Civil Rights legislation.
Anyhow, it’s a long, long piece. Will Dems finally push for law and order? Or freak out when politicians actually push for crime reduction?
Read: Surprise: Democrats Facing Pressure On Skyrocketing Crime From Their Own Base »
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