Soft-on-crime Democrats are failing victims and juveniles
Washington Examiner
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Three different stories from the nation’s capital in the past month highlight the acute dangers of treating criminal offenses too leniently. So-called Soros prosecutors and their allies are wreaking havoc on communities nationwide.
On Oct. 30, the Washington Post editorial board used the story of two Capitol Hill carjackings four weeks earlier, one involving Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), to urge major modification of Washington’s “no chase” policy that restricts police pursuits. Although a device in the Honda SUV owned by carjacking victim Stephanie Traub allowed the car’s exact location to be tracked, police merely watched the car’s progress on a laptop computer but said they were not allowed to intercept it.
Even in calling for police chases to be allowed again, though, the Washington Post still said there was a need to “find the right balance between empowering officers and ensuring guardrails prevent the overuse of force.” That’s nonsense. Lawmakers, police, prosecutors, and judges should stop hand-wringing about “balance” and spend their energies deterring, interdicting, and punishing criminals. That, not “social justice,” is their job. The failure to punish crime is unbalancing our society and culture.
When officials don’t, or aren’t allowed to, do their jobs, even criminals themselves may end up suffering. Two juveniles in Washington died during carjackings in the past week when they or their accomplices should have been in detention rather than on the streets reoffending. On Oct. 26, a girl died in a crash shortly after joining a group that carjacked a rideshare driver. Her 15-year-old half-sister, who allegedly led the carjacking and who had a lengthy record, had been sent home just days earlier despite pending robbery charges.
On Oct. 29, 13-year-old Vernard Toney Jr. was shot and killed while trying to carjack an off-duty federal security officer. Toney had remained on the streets even though he had already been arrested in May for his part in nine armed carjackings.
In Washington through Oct. 29, there had been 827 reported carjackings, twice as many as in the first 10 months of 2022 and six times as many as in 2019. Nationwide in the first half of 2023, motor vehicle theft doubled compared to the prior year.
Other violent crime has ticked down slightly nationwide in 2023 but only after rising by 50% in the previous decade. The tiny downtick, says criminal justice policy expert Sean Kennedy of the Maryland Public Policy Institute, is like moving from Mount Everest (29,032 feet) to K2 (28,251 feet) but still being a long, long way from sea level.
Kennedy says statistics show three interrelated factors are driving the high crime rates, essentially as “comorbidities”: lenient policies as in the district’s “no chase” rules, reductions in police numbers spurred by illogical responses to the death of George Floyd in Minnesota, and Soros prosecutors who refuse to prosecute “lesser” crimes while seeking lighter sentences and lenient bail policies even for violent offenses.
These results were predictable. When rules aren’t enforced, more people break them, and more often.
Rogue Prosecutors, a new book by former federal prosecutors Zach Smith and Charles D. Stimson of the Heritage Foundation, amply demonstrates the association between Soros prosecutors and serious crime rates rising. After international left-wing billionaire Soros paid for successful campaigns of extremist district attorneys, supposedly to stop “over-incarceration” and to combat “systemic racism,” crime rates began to spike almost immediately.
The correlation is stunning. Compared to the five-year averages before the Soros prosecutors took office in the eight major cities Smith and Stimson analyzed, eight cities with Soros regimes in the next five years saw “at least an additional 3,090 homicides, 3,580 rapes, 7,500 robberies, 14,800 motor vehicle thefts, [and] countless thousands of nonfatal shooting victims. … And of those 3,090 extra murders, over 75% of the victims were minorities.”
For comparison, similarly sized cities such as San Diego, where the far more diligent District Attorney Summer Stephan holds sway, have kept their crime rates flat.
It’s simple: Police should be able to chase and arrest bad guys. Prosecutors should bring them to trial. If juries find the suspects guilty, judges should punish them. Otherwise, our communities will not be safe.