If, as I believe is likely, Biden declines re-nomination and is replaced by California governor Gavin Newsome, we need to publicize the reality of liberal rule on the crime rate. A link to a good Frontpage article has already been posted. Here are some more:
Crime in California
California’s Looming Crime Catastrophe | City Journal The key article. This goes into why crime is going up, in particular, California’s recently-passed “Racial Justice Act”. [Everyone should subscribe to City Journal, the most important conservative publication in the US: [ Subscribe | City Journal ] This publication takes on the leftist academic “Social Science” mafia.
The liberal response – “It was even worse thiry years ago” What none of these liberal apologists mention is that crime started to decrease when California passed a very comprehensive “Three Strikes and You’re Out” law in 1994.
(The first true “three-strikes” law was passed in 1993, when Washington voters approved Initiative 593. California passed its own in 1994, when their voters passed Proposition 184[16] by an overwhelming majority, with 72% in favor and 28% against. The initiative proposed to the voters had the title of Three Strikes and You’re Out, referring to de facto life imprisonment after being convicted of three violent or serious felonies which are listed under California Penal Code section 1192." [ Three-strikes law - Wikipedia ]
But in 2012 California voters significantly weakened the 'Three Strikes" law, and guess what?
Liberal arguments:
“Instead of resurrecting the failed, incarceration-focused policies of the past, state leaders must advance strategies to reduce youth violence, strengthen families and communities, and target the longstanding structural barriers to opportunity — such as poverty and housing instability — that disproportionately impact Black, Latinx, and other Californians of color.” [What they never do is to provide any evidence that such ‘strategies’ have a serious impact on the crime rate.]
Neutral
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Note that the “crime rate” can appear to fall for two reasons:
(1) Fewer crimes are being committed.
(2) Fewer crimes are being recorded, because of pressure from liberal District Attorneys and others for the police to overlook crimes when they’re committed by members of the liberals’ “victim classes”, which has certainly been the case in California.
For those who want to read more deeply into the issue of crime, the go-to guy is the late James Q. Wilson. [ ]
Thinking About Crime
by James Q. Wilson | May 14, 2013
https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-About-Crime-James-Wilson/dp/0465048838/
"As crime rates inexorably rose during the tumultuous years of the 1970s, disputes over how to handle the violence sweeping the nation quickly escalated. James Q. Wilson redefined the public debate by offering a brilliant and provocative new argument—that criminal activity is largely rational and shaped by the rewards and penalties it offers—and forever changed the way Americans think about crime. Now with a new foreword by the prominent scholar and best-selling author Charles Murray, this revised edition of Thinking About Crime introduces a new generation of readers to the theories and ideas that have been so influential in shaping the American justice system. "
Reviews
“No one thought more insightfully about crime than James Q. Wilson.” – Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly
“In his influential book "Thinking About Crime,” as he so often did when thinking, writing or speaking about public policies, James Wilson was able to present his ideas and observations in such a way that they provoked and stimulated thought, debate, and action in new directions. He certainly did that for me throughout my career and this book was just one example." – Bill Bratton, former Chief of the LAPD and Police Commissioner for the New York City and Boston Police Department
“Thinking About Crime set the national crime-control agenda for a generation. Conditions have changed since: we have about five times as many people behind bars now as 1975. The debate has changed too. But forty years have not deprived Wilson’s thinking of its fine critical edge, or his ideas of their centrality.” – Mark Kleiman, Professor of Public Policy, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
“[Wilson] was that rare academic whose ideas could be put into action and improve the quality of life… The greatest evidence of his success surrounds usa resurgent city and thousands of New Yorkers who are alive today because of his radical solution to a tidal wave of crime.” – Rudolph Giuliani
“The most accomplished social scientist of the last half-century… Elegant in bearing, voracious for learning, eloquent in advocacy and amiable in disputation, Wilson was a prophet honored in his own country.” – George F. Will