DC Council bill would invite massive hike in violent crime
Washington Examiner
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When even Washington, D.C.’s leftist mayor, Muriel Bowser, thinks the D.C. Council is getting dangerously lenient on crime, wokeness has clearly gone too far.
The council is expected to vote on Tuesday to override Bowser’s veto of a bill to penalties for serious crimes such as home invasion thefts, carjacking, and homicide. It would mean a city that militantly restricts the gun rights of law-abiding citizens would lighten the punishment of convicted felons who carry guns illegally or commit crimes with them.
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The bill would eliminate life sentences and most mandatory minimum sentences and reduce maximum penalties even for major crimes so judges could not lock especially heinous offenders away for long.
One provision would allow people charged with mere misdemeanors to demand jury trials. This, as U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves predicts, would lead to a “tripling or quadrupling” of jury trials. The understaffed court system would suffer extensive backlogs, giving violent criminals more time out on bail while awaiting their own cases.
Other key officials opposed to the bill include Washington’s city administrator and its police chief, numerous advisory neighborhood commissioners, and victims’ rights advocates. They have a good reason. While the bill includes a tendentious 42-page “racial equity impact assessment,” its supporters’ concerns about incarceration rates of nonwhite people do not seem to be matched by concern about the disproportionate percentage of crime victims who are nonwhite. Voluminous statistics show that letting violent criminals back on the street will create more black and Hispanic victims.
To put it bluntly, the council’s bill is nuts. The rest of the nation is recoiling from the rise in violent crime that has followed woke efforts at mass “decarceration.” But the nation’s capital is still caught up in the fantasy that letting bad guys go free will help matters. The district’s crime rates have skyrocketed, and the city’s police union complains vociferously about council members pushing weak-on-crime policies.
The left-wing madness extends far beyond the D.C. Council. All across America, reasonable attempts to avoid overincarceration for minor offenses spawned foolish moves to give a pass to more serious crimes. Prosecutors and judges elected with millions of dollars of donations from uber-leftist billionaire George Soros refuse to do their jobs. Police budgets were slashed in the wake of the Minneapolis death by police of drugged-up counterfeiter George Floyd.
The results have been predictable. Driven by bad public policies, especially in big Democratic-run cities and in states run by liberal supermajorities, the worst sorts of violent crimes have grown vertiginously in recent years. Criminals commit murders, rapes, and aggravated assaults 25% more than they did a decade ago. The post-Floyd spike in murders was especially horrifying, with the national rate growing by an astonishing 30% in 2020 alone.
As put by Manhattan Institute fellow Rafael Mangual, “we have lowered the ‘transaction cost’ of committing crimes, while we have raised the transaction cost of deterring crime.” That is the sort of arithmetic that leads to disaster.
The D.C. Council ought to listen to Bowser on this issue — and to the police chief, the U.S. attorney, and the victims of crime. It should step back immediately from the brink of this ideological folly.
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