If you doubt what “woke” governing has caused simply look at what has happened to Portland, San Francisco or even relatively conservative, midwest Chicago in the last ten years. The governance of the Democratic Party (my lifelong party) has failed to deal with rising crime as criminals took the obvious hint that liberal prosecutors were not going to prosecute shoplifters who stole less than a thousand dollars worth of goods. The gangs descended. The spillover to skyrocketing carjackings and even murder rates is obvious. Walmart has abandoned Portland and Chicago’s Michigan Avenue has become a boarded up shadow of its former self. The homeless are in charge of what the downtowns of these cities have become because the adults supposedly in control refuse to enforce any of the necessary standards of urban life. Their schools are afraid to discipline students who disrupt the education of tens of thousands resulting in plummeting achievement levels while worthless DEI bureaucrats flourish. The Biden administration appears totally blind to what is happening opening the door to the return of equally insane Trump or Trump lite leadership. Democrats like JFK, LBJ or Scoop Jackson would be appalled.
Always a pleasure to read your analysis, Clifton. I fear though that there's too much focus on policy & policing, and not on what's driving people to commit crimes in the first place. The latest wave appears to mainly be driven by a small but significant enough percentage of young people within the black community. (If data shows otherwise, please let me know. If correct, a major factor between cities could simply be demographics rather than crime prevention strategies.) It has come at a time of historically low poverty and unemployment rates. Some may blame this on systemic racism, others on factors such as family structure & culture. Both can be true, but wouldn't necessarily explain a dramatic increase.
Since 2014 or so, these kids have been bombarded with a specific narrative from all levels of society: selective police confrontation videos, selective history, a simplistic wealth gap analysis, etc. Most intelligent adults have not even been processing this information with any level of complexity, let alone disadvantaged kids. In the words of Thomas Sowell in "The Quest for Cosmic Justice", long before this most recent movement, "those promoting visions of cosmic injustices as the cause of all the problems of black Americans have failed to understand the consequences of this vision for young blacks who do not have either the personal experience or the maturity to weigh those words against reality. The net result has been the development of an attitude of hostility to learning or to conforming to ordinary standards of behavior in society".
We certainly need to look at policy & policing for optimum crime prevention, but until a larger portion of society is willing to have a more honest discussion on race & inequality, there may not be much improvement.
There should be no ideological tug of war at all. That there is highlights how poorly served citizens are by their own govts. Ironically, it's the most vulnerable who are most affected as the numbers in city after city show. While DAs posture and preen, real people are being killed, robbed, carjacked, assaulted, and raped. Tell the minority victims what a great service is being done by prosecutors who refuse to prosecute. It's easy to stand on an ideological hill where there is zero chance of you dying on it.
While criminologists are apparently struggling to find a consensus for explaining the spike in crime, regular people have figured it out. Because it's not that hard of a question to answer. You will always, always, always get more of what you allow, encourage, subsidize, or tolerate. When repeat offenders are released almost immediately, odds are better than good that they will commit another crime, and that sorry scenario has played out time and again in one city after another. And when you demonize cops and sanctify criminals, you will start to lose officers and struggle mightily to find new ones. This played in out Memphis, where the black cops killed the black civilian in a scene that looked more like gang warfare than law enforcement.
Just how many people have to die to appease the gods of wokeness? We've gone from locking people up for non-violent petty crimes - Kamala Harris' reign as AG in California comes to mind - to violent criminals being set loose before the ink on their booking is dry. People do realize that, at some point, citizens will act where cops won't, right? There have been a few isolated incidents within the Chicago transit system. We just have not yet had the modern-day Bernard Goetz moment, but all roads lead to one. Then what? We gonna blame metal objects again? We gonna whine about vigilante justice?
Govt has no more fundamental role than public safety. Everything else trails in the distance. When people have a sense that the criminal holds a higher status than the law-abiding, you don't have a civil society any more. The ideological capture of the people who happen to run most of the big cities is playing out in real time, with devastating consequences and, ironically, the marginalized communities being among the biggest victims.
Clifton, you mostly carefully give names of victims and details of crimes but then airily throw out: “The guy who drove through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin and killed several people was sentenced to six life terms”. Oh yeah, that dude. And several generic anonymous people died. But there’s a clue in your sentence regarding the six life sentences. He killed six (uncelebrated) people and injured 62 others. This mass killing should have been given more coverage at the time. It’s of a different order than the other cases you more carefully cite.
Clifton, I understand that the vast majority of people in prison did in fact commit serious crimes.
Often I hear "too many people locked up" admonition without mentioning what they may have done to get them in prison, or even in jail.
So, my question is this: When there are debates, Do you find that people who want to abolish prisons, or lock up far fewer prisons, Are they honest about why many of those people may be there in the first place?
Dems optimized the ruin of blacks via abortions, black on black crime, welfare for fatherless households only, affirmative action for incompetence, completely failed urban schools controlled by teachers union, and endless war. Blacks suffer the most and are the most to blame for voting for government nannies rather than freedom. Slaves by another name. Reminds me of the Scots not voting for freedom from England because they were addicted to the gov dole. Sad for a once proud race.
Thank you Glenn for this article. Living in Minneapolis Ground Zero for the defund the police movement, I can tell you that the police recruitment will be difficult for many years to come. Because there are so few police on patrol the carjackings are out of control. The mayors of Minneapolis Saint Paul and Keith Ellison the Attorney General i’m trying to attack the problem by suing Kia the manufacturer of vehicles that don’t have antitheft safety on them and can be easily stolen using the TikTok method taught by the Milwaukee Gang Bangers. It’s gonna be a number of years before a crime is under control and Minneapolis. Uptown Minneapolis the shopping center has lost numerous bars restaurants and boutiques because of the crime situation where nobody with money is willing to visit this location anymore.
Why does Glenn think we are at or past peak woke? A cartoonist was just canceled for asking questions about a national survey poll results two speakers were attacked at universities this last week and a large city in the US just gave council support to giving black people 5 million in lump sum reoperations despite being a city that had no history of black slavery. Meanwhile across the Federal agencies and many state and corporate institutions the DEI blob continues to push itself into every corner of our lives without any sign of stopping.
I think Glenn and John and those who regularly are on this blog are showing they're out of synch with the 6 foot view of life and are maybe too tied to their class and institutional viewpoints. From way up in the high atmosphere of the ivory tower it may look like we are headed to peak woke but down in the trenches it's another day of gas(lighting) attacks and rhetorical bombardments.
Sorry, we are not close to peak woke. Revolutionary tactic have a long history of pulsing, applying pressure when possible and backing off to gain credibility when pressure is no longer possible. We are not in to the backing off phase. Sorry, the neo-Maoist are still fully in control.
Are Eric Adams declared efforts to combat crime mostly hype, or is it mostly that he’s running into the constraints of a progressive lock on the state legislature, and a bevy of recalcitrant local prosecutors and council members who are some combination of ideological true believers and acutely sensitive to the very narrow activist constituencies who determine who makes it through a very low-turnout NYC Dem primary? I was one of the relatively few lower income residents of the Park Slope area for several years. I know of two men who were part of a community group I belonged to who were mugged by teens while jogging in the park. And women in particular had to be extremely careful about going out in the mornings alone. But for a long time, common sense and basic situational awareness were about all one needed to stay safe. This attack and the response it has engendered locally (or lack thereof) exemplifies the kind of breakdown in social order and public safety people are living with. There is no plausible explanation for why the NYPD could not have found and arrested this menace to every park-goer. I’m guessing they knew that confronting him would be a major headache and he’d be right back out the same day, rinse and repeat. Even if they cared and I’m sure some officers did, arresting him would, in that ideological and policy climate, be all risk and no reward. Now, if someone had been there at the time and intervened in the least aggressive manner to try to protect this woman and her dog from the entirely unprovoked attack of a man who’d been seen in the park for months regularly menacing people, what would’ve happened to them? Without a swell of steady and sympathetic news coverage, they might well still be rotting in Rikers.
People lying about what they actually believe can flip back on a dime when it’s their family victimized. All of the sudden their preference falsification evaporates like fog in the sun.
Antifa is still getting political support for their violent quasi-military assault on the construction of a police training facility in the black run city of Atlanta. Probably have to take left wing political street violence more seriously to make progress…
"...it is notable that Ivan Bates, Baltimore's new state's attorney, wants longer sentences for gun crime offenders."
I hope this applies to *all* gun crime, and not just black gang members. Is he ready to jail white conservatives?
Please define "woke". Denouncing police brutality and historical inequity have been part of being 'a liberal' since the civil rights era.
If you doubt what “woke” governing has caused simply look at what has happened to Portland, San Francisco or even relatively conservative, midwest Chicago in the last ten years. The governance of the Democratic Party (my lifelong party) has failed to deal with rising crime as criminals took the obvious hint that liberal prosecutors were not going to prosecute shoplifters who stole less than a thousand dollars worth of goods. The gangs descended. The spillover to skyrocketing carjackings and even murder rates is obvious. Walmart has abandoned Portland and Chicago’s Michigan Avenue has become a boarded up shadow of its former self. The homeless are in charge of what the downtowns of these cities have become because the adults supposedly in control refuse to enforce any of the necessary standards of urban life. Their schools are afraid to discipline students who disrupt the education of tens of thousands resulting in plummeting achievement levels while worthless DEI bureaucrats flourish. The Biden administration appears totally blind to what is happening opening the door to the return of equally insane Trump or Trump lite leadership. Democrats like JFK, LBJ or Scoop Jackson would be appalled.
Always a pleasure to read your analysis, Clifton. I fear though that there's too much focus on policy & policing, and not on what's driving people to commit crimes in the first place. The latest wave appears to mainly be driven by a small but significant enough percentage of young people within the black community. (If data shows otherwise, please let me know. If correct, a major factor between cities could simply be demographics rather than crime prevention strategies.) It has come at a time of historically low poverty and unemployment rates. Some may blame this on systemic racism, others on factors such as family structure & culture. Both can be true, but wouldn't necessarily explain a dramatic increase.
Since 2014 or so, these kids have been bombarded with a specific narrative from all levels of society: selective police confrontation videos, selective history, a simplistic wealth gap analysis, etc. Most intelligent adults have not even been processing this information with any level of complexity, let alone disadvantaged kids. In the words of Thomas Sowell in "The Quest for Cosmic Justice", long before this most recent movement, "those promoting visions of cosmic injustices as the cause of all the problems of black Americans have failed to understand the consequences of this vision for young blacks who do not have either the personal experience or the maturity to weigh those words against reality. The net result has been the development of an attitude of hostility to learning or to conforming to ordinary standards of behavior in society".
We certainly need to look at policy & policing for optimum crime prevention, but until a larger portion of society is willing to have a more honest discussion on race & inequality, there may not be much improvement.
My only concern about the wraparound programs is that we need to make certain “first dibs” need to go to impoverished people who do nor commit crime.
There should be no ideological tug of war at all. That there is highlights how poorly served citizens are by their own govts. Ironically, it's the most vulnerable who are most affected as the numbers in city after city show. While DAs posture and preen, real people are being killed, robbed, carjacked, assaulted, and raped. Tell the minority victims what a great service is being done by prosecutors who refuse to prosecute. It's easy to stand on an ideological hill where there is zero chance of you dying on it.
While criminologists are apparently struggling to find a consensus for explaining the spike in crime, regular people have figured it out. Because it's not that hard of a question to answer. You will always, always, always get more of what you allow, encourage, subsidize, or tolerate. When repeat offenders are released almost immediately, odds are better than good that they will commit another crime, and that sorry scenario has played out time and again in one city after another. And when you demonize cops and sanctify criminals, you will start to lose officers and struggle mightily to find new ones. This played in out Memphis, where the black cops killed the black civilian in a scene that looked more like gang warfare than law enforcement.
Just how many people have to die to appease the gods of wokeness? We've gone from locking people up for non-violent petty crimes - Kamala Harris' reign as AG in California comes to mind - to violent criminals being set loose before the ink on their booking is dry. People do realize that, at some point, citizens will act where cops won't, right? There have been a few isolated incidents within the Chicago transit system. We just have not yet had the modern-day Bernard Goetz moment, but all roads lead to one. Then what? We gonna blame metal objects again? We gonna whine about vigilante justice?
Govt has no more fundamental role than public safety. Everything else trails in the distance. When people have a sense that the criminal holds a higher status than the law-abiding, you don't have a civil society any more. The ideological capture of the people who happen to run most of the big cities is playing out in real time, with devastating consequences and, ironically, the marginalized communities being among the biggest victims.
Clifton, you mostly carefully give names of victims and details of crimes but then airily throw out: “The guy who drove through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin and killed several people was sentenced to six life terms”. Oh yeah, that dude. And several generic anonymous people died. But there’s a clue in your sentence regarding the six life sentences. He killed six (uncelebrated) people and injured 62 others. This mass killing should have been given more coverage at the time. It’s of a different order than the other cases you more carefully cite.
Clifton, I understand that the vast majority of people in prison did in fact commit serious crimes.
Often I hear "too many people locked up" admonition without mentioning what they may have done to get them in prison, or even in jail.
So, my question is this: When there are debates, Do you find that people who want to abolish prisons, or lock up far fewer prisons, Are they honest about why many of those people may be there in the first place?
Dems optimized the ruin of blacks via abortions, black on black crime, welfare for fatherless households only, affirmative action for incompetence, completely failed urban schools controlled by teachers union, and endless war. Blacks suffer the most and are the most to blame for voting for government nannies rather than freedom. Slaves by another name. Reminds me of the Scots not voting for freedom from England because they were addicted to the gov dole. Sad for a once proud race.
Yes: Very sad and absurd. Crime way up.
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/chris-rock
Thank you Glenn for this article. Living in Minneapolis Ground Zero for the defund the police movement, I can tell you that the police recruitment will be difficult for many years to come. Because there are so few police on patrol the carjackings are out of control. The mayors of Minneapolis Saint Paul and Keith Ellison the Attorney General i’m trying to attack the problem by suing Kia the manufacturer of vehicles that don’t have antitheft safety on them and can be easily stolen using the TikTok method taught by the Milwaukee Gang Bangers. It’s gonna be a number of years before a crime is under control and Minneapolis. Uptown Minneapolis the shopping center has lost numerous bars restaurants and boutiques because of the crime situation where nobody with money is willing to visit this location anymore.
Why does Glenn think we are at or past peak woke? A cartoonist was just canceled for asking questions about a national survey poll results two speakers were attacked at universities this last week and a large city in the US just gave council support to giving black people 5 million in lump sum reoperations despite being a city that had no history of black slavery. Meanwhile across the Federal agencies and many state and corporate institutions the DEI blob continues to push itself into every corner of our lives without any sign of stopping.
I think Glenn and John and those who regularly are on this blog are showing they're out of synch with the 6 foot view of life and are maybe too tied to their class and institutional viewpoints. From way up in the high atmosphere of the ivory tower it may look like we are headed to peak woke but down in the trenches it's another day of gas(lighting) attacks and rhetorical bombardments.
Sorry, we are not close to peak woke. Revolutionary tactic have a long history of pulsing, applying pressure when possible and backing off to gain credibility when pressure is no longer possible. We are not in to the backing off phase. Sorry, the neo-Maoist are still fully in control.
Good article Glenn.
Someone who has been improved a bit by your courage and depth of commitment to greater truth.
Jack Davis
Meanwhile, in Brooklyn:
https://nypost.com/2022/10/08/park-slope-dog-killer-on-the-loose-after-multiple-sightings/
https://nypost.com/2022/10/15/police-close-case-into-prospect-park-dog-killer-owner/
Are Eric Adams declared efforts to combat crime mostly hype, or is it mostly that he’s running into the constraints of a progressive lock on the state legislature, and a bevy of recalcitrant local prosecutors and council members who are some combination of ideological true believers and acutely sensitive to the very narrow activist constituencies who determine who makes it through a very low-turnout NYC Dem primary? I was one of the relatively few lower income residents of the Park Slope area for several years. I know of two men who were part of a community group I belonged to who were mugged by teens while jogging in the park. And women in particular had to be extremely careful about going out in the mornings alone. But for a long time, common sense and basic situational awareness were about all one needed to stay safe. This attack and the response it has engendered locally (or lack thereof) exemplifies the kind of breakdown in social order and public safety people are living with. There is no plausible explanation for why the NYPD could not have found and arrested this menace to every park-goer. I’m guessing they knew that confronting him would be a major headache and he’d be right back out the same day, rinse and repeat. Even if they cared and I’m sure some officers did, arresting him would, in that ideological and policy climate, be all risk and no reward. Now, if someone had been there at the time and intervened in the least aggressive manner to try to protect this woman and her dog from the entirely unprovoked attack of a man who’d been seen in the park for months regularly menacing people, what would’ve happened to them? Without a swell of steady and sympathetic news coverage, they might well still be rotting in Rikers.
People lying about what they actually believe can flip back on a dime when it’s their family victimized. All of the sudden their preference falsification evaporates like fog in the sun.
Antifa is still getting political support for their violent quasi-military assault on the construction of a police training facility in the black run city of Atlanta. Probably have to take left wing political street violence more seriously to make progress…