If you want to buy toothpaste, soap, or laundry detergent at the Columbia Heights CVS, good luck. The shelves are bare. But if you exit the store and walk outside, you can buy all of those items, with cash only, from street vendors.
Asked last week if her administration was making any effort to see if all the items the street vendors were selling were legally obtained, Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser casually explained, “Oh, well the law has changed. I don’t know if you are aware but the council has decriminalized vending. So you can do what you want in terms of vending.”
This comment did not sit well with District of Columbia Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, who responded by claiming that vending without a license was still a “civil penalty” and that it was still illegal to sell stolen items.
The DC Police Union then responded to Mendelson, noting that the law Mendelson voted for explicitly says “street vending has been decriminalized and the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) is excluded from street vending enforcement.”
And it is true: The Street Vendor Advancement Amendment Act of 2023 which Mendelson voted for not only explicitly decriminalized street vending, making it subject to only civil penalty, but also forbade the police from enforcing the statute.
If police are not allowed to enforce the law under threat of criminal penalties, how are they supposed to ensure that the goods street vendors are selling outside Washington, D.C., stores weren’t just stolen from those same stores?
This is not the first time Washington, D.C., has decriminalized something in the name of social justice just to see results be far worse than intended. In 2018, Washington, D.C., decriminalized fare evasion on Metro, making it a civil penalty just like the city did for street vending. Not only did fare jumping on Metro explode, but so did other crimes. When the law fails to attach meaningful penalties to wrongdoing, people naturally assume they can get away with even more wrongdoing. That is exactly what happened with the decriminalization of fare evasion and it is what is happening with store thefts and street vending now.
This idea in Democratic Party circles that you can decriminalize something without expecting a massive jump in the harmful behavior you are decriminalizing wouldn’t be so worrisome if it were just confined to cities controlled by the Democratic Party.
Unfortunately, we have a Democratic president who has applied the same decriminalizing logic to the border. Instead of enforcing the law and denying migrants who illegally cross the border entry into the United States, Biden just gives them a cellphone and releases them into the country with a pinky swear promise they will check in with authorities when asked.
With no noticeable penalty attached to illegal entry, it should not be a surprise that record numbers of migrants are illegally crossing the border every month.
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Back in Washington, D.C., however, Mayor Bowser, to her credit, recognizes that the street vendor decriminalization law has to change. Responding to a reporter who asked why police weren’t investigating street vendors selling obviously stolen goods, Bowser replied, “I’m glad you raised it though, because it has to change.”
Washington, D.C.’s street vendor laws do need to change, as does the equally lax policy of Biden on the southern border.