Democrats and media should stop ignoring people who are worried about crime
Zachary Faria
Democrats and their media allies do everything they can to ignore the impact of crime in Democratic-run cities. The result is that communities hurt the most by crime are ignored when things are going “well.”
That is the indication from a recent Washington Post/Schar School poll, which found that Washington, D.C., residents “feel safer from crime in their neighborhoods than they did this time last year.” That was the fact that the Washington Post decided to headline its write-up of the poll with, and an editor for the outlet shared it on Twitter, asking, “Crime? What crime?”
ANOTHER FELON RELEASED EARLY FROM PRISON SHOT THREE POLICE OFFICERS IN LOS ANGELES
“What crime?” would be a 32% increase in homicides compared to last year, along with a 32% increase in property crime and a 109% increase in car thefts. And, while the headline of the piece touts that “more than 3 in 4 D.C. residents feel safe,” the poll shows that crime is still the top issue for D.C. residents and that 66% of them are “very concerned” about gun violence, even if they feel safer than last year.
Left behind in this supposed victory lap, though, are the 22% of residents who do not feel safe from crime in their neighborhoods. That number is the same as it was in November 2019, which would lead many to conclude that it is good news, but why? Is it supposed to be considered a success that 22% of people in a given city feel that their lives and livelihoods are in danger every day?
In most cities, homicides are mostly confined to a few deadly neighborhoods. That is true for Washington, D.C., where most homicides occur in the south and southeastern parts of the city. To illustrate how locally isolated homicides can be in a city, Washington, D.C., has a population of over 700,000, and yet 70% of the city’s gun violence in any given year can be attributed to 200-500 identifiable people.
Herein lies the problem that plagues liberal media outlets. Journalists at these outlets conclude that Republicans are always “fearmongering” about crime because residents in some parts of the city feel safe, ignoring the residents in and near the city’s worst neighborhoods. That is how you end up with CNN’s Josh Campbell dismissing riots because he ate a breakfast burrito in peace, or CNN’s Brian Stelter dismissing crime in New York City and Los Angeles because Fox News held some events in safe parts of the city.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The high-crime areas, which are completely ignored by liberal media elites, are also disproportionately black. Black lives matter, we are told, only they don’t matter as much as covering for Democrats’ incompetence on the issue of crime.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from this poll should be the people in those neighborhoods, who are forgotten or dismissed in media discussions of crime because those areas are written off as crime havens that cannot be fixed. It is a failure of Washington, D.C., Democrats that 22% of city residents do not feel safe. That is where the crime conversation should begin.