The public is tired of coddling criminals
Quin Hillyer
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A new poll shows that the public, thank goodness, is coming to its collective senses by once again deciding that the way to stop crime is to punish it rather than excuse it.
More on the poll momentarily. It comes in this context: A temporary shift in the last decade away from that commonsense viewpoint — the one insisting that crime should be punished — was so disastrous that it almost completely ruined the wondrous reduction in crime from the 1990s and 2000s. Aided by massive financial support from radical Left billionaire George Soros, jurisdictions across the country in the 2010s elected prosecutors who won’t prosecute, local legislators who cut police forces and hobble their activities, and judges who won’t imprison convicts.
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Moreover, the liberal media misreported worthwhile efforts to change sentencing practices for lesser offenses. The salutary idea, especially for minor drug violations, was to provide alternative sentencing and rehabilitative services rather than prison time. The idea wasn’t to cease enforcement against misbehavior but rather to ensure that enforcement was commensurate and that the response promoted better citizenship rather than recidivism and disrespect for the law.
The media, however, portrayed and applauded the alternative-sentencing movement as a move to decriminalize lots of bad behavior, and credulous politicians rushed to repeal statutes that had made it illegal to do things such as commit vandalism or urinate in the street. And, in the backlash to isolated examples of bad policing (or of media frenzies over policing that turned out to be entirely justified), officials in major cities across the country began excusing even significant thefts and crimes that turned violent.
Alas, largeish segments of the public temporarily began to back these soft-on-crime nostrums. As recently as 2020, only 41% of the public told Gallup’s pollsters that the U.S. criminal justice system was “not tough enough” against crime.
The results of this leniency were stark, as crime rose precipitously nationwide. Rogue Prosecutors, a 2023 book by conservative Heritage Foundation scholars Zack Smith and Charles “Cully” Stimson, demonstrated a stunning and consistent correlation between the election of Soros prosecutors and huge spikes in major crimes in those very locations.
Now comes the well-merited reaction, back to common sense. A new Gallup poll shows that 58% of the public, up from that 41% just three years ago, think the nation’s criminal justice system is not tough enough on crime, with another 26% saying it is “about right,” leaving just 14% who think it is too tough.
The reaction is showing up not just in opinion polls but at the ballot box as well. The first major eruption against radical Left “prosecutors” came when famously liberal San Francisco voters removed District Attorney Chesa Boudin from office in a special June 2022 recall election. The counteraction picked up pace since then, and in the Nov. 7 elections this year, two more left-leaning jurisdictions, Allegheny County in Pennsylvania and Loudoun County in Virginia, defeated Soros-backed candidates. In Virginia, Soros prosecutor Buta Biberaj was the incumbent commonwealth attorney with a $1.1 million campaign war chest, but she still lost to challenger Bob Anderson, who raised only $70,000.
According to the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, the Pennsylvania and Virginia Democratic losses were at least the 13th and 14th Soros prosecutors who have “departed, resigned, been defeated or removed” in the past year and a half.
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“The great ‘criminal justice reform’ experiment has failed, and the public wants consequences for offenders,” said criminal justice researcher Sean Kennedy, president of an advocacy group called Virginians for Safe Communities. “Amid rising crime, we can no longer afford the luxury of leniency.”
The public knows Kennedy is right.