So yesterday, this article about my native Burlington, Vermont entitled
The Crime Wave That Wasn't by a left wing publication called The Baffler was shared with me alongside a query of my thoughts. It highlights our city council's 2020 decision to fire roughly one-third of the city's police force for racial justice purposes, as per the "defund the police" demand of many contemporaneous demonstrators, and claims that this action is popular and had no adverse consequences. I thought I'd provide my thoughts to everyone because this special kind of bull$#@! deserves a very public rebuttal.
My favorite part of the article was when the author offers the observation that "officers are responding to far fewer incidents than they once were" following a 33% reduction in officers. Imagine having fewer cops resulting in less law enforcement! Crime must be nosediving!
Which is why everyone except left wing publications like the Baffler seems to agree that the reductions were a mistake that helped no one in any way and they're getting reversed!
At another point, the author opines: "There were at least five homicides in Burlington in 2022, the most in decades, and shootings have become more common. But murders are up across Vermont, and indeed, across the country."
*sighs* Okay. I have to just accept that this willful ignorance of the obvious is the way woke publications like this reason. Let's just take a step back here for a minute and think about the larger situation at hand. Most of the period we're talking about here -- from 2020 to present -- has been the pandemic era. Did you know that we're almost unique in the developed world in seeing our crime rates RISE during the pandemic? Just about every other developed country out there saw their crime rates fall significantly during the pandemic era and it stands to reason: Covid restrictions meant people spending more time at home watching the kids and Netflix, which is time they weren't spending shooting up festivals and pushing people in front subway cars. The fact that America's murder rates rose AT ALL -- let alone by annualized double-digit percentages -- during that period where they'd previously been dropping, is pretty unique and remarkable in and of itself. The difference here is the events in and around the summer of 2020 and the new political climate that resulted. That didn't happen anywhere else in the world: only here. Whether the consequent upticks in murders, carjackings, arsons, drug overdose deaths, etc. etc. are the result of police defunding in Burlington, the elimination of cash-bail in New York, hard drug decriminalization in Oregon, the appointment of defense attorneys to prosecutorial roles in so many American cities,
a border that the United Nations has declared the deadliest on Earth...you know, whatever the specific case may be in a given location...the point is that they all have the same root, the same idiots behind them, all with private security of their own you'll notice, and those idiots here are dependent on passing off the blame for any one of their policies' failures onto the rest in order to disingenuously claim that no one of them in particular has had any adverse consequences. I've personally witnessed local thefts and arsons firsthand this last year, which is something I've never before seen in this area, and yes, it bothers me.
Burlington is currently rated as more dangerous on a per capita basis than 95% of American cities and that's very, very new. It was not like that at all before police defunding.
Here's a visual illustration of
American crime rates from 1990 to 2020. I highlight this to point out a few obvious things. First, that the steep drop in crime rates back in the '90s began, you'll notice, the year that the famous Clinton crime bill authored by Joe Biden was signed into law, putting huge numbers of additional cops on the streets. (Don't worry, Biden and the Clintons have all apologized.) Second, you'll notice that crime rates here display no correlation to poverty rates like progressives claim they do. For example, the U.S. crime rate fell drastically throughout the prosperous second half of the 1990s...and also steadily throughout the Great Recession and didn't begin increasing again until 2015, after the poverty rate had already begun dropping again. Finally, you'll notice that the two big crime surges of the last decade correspond to periods of especially high mobilization around Black Lives Matter and their causes. The picture is clear: conservatives are right; you reduce crime by enforcing laws and see crime surges by stigmatizing law enforcement. That's not very sexy, but sometimes the truth really is simple, straightforward, and obvious.
The idiots I was speaking of before are the people who advocate what's known as the "harm reduction" model of criminal justice. "Harm reduction" is an approach that calls for minimal law enforcement and offering unconditional aid to people who are harming themselves and/or others instead. Open air drug markets (or "safe injection sites", as progressives call them) are perfect examples of so-called harm reduction policies in action and their results are exactly what you'd expect them to be. Us dissenters to these programs refer to them as drug markets because legitimizing the use of deadly drugs is self-evidently their actual, transparent purpose, not helping people recover, or else their propaganda wouldn't look like this:
Anyway, the opposite of "harm reduction" is what we've, of course, traditionally had for most of my lifetime, but "harm reduction" is what we have now. The much-discussed age of mass incarceration is, in reality, over.
The prison population in this country has dropped by 30% of the last decade, and substantially faster among black, Hispanic, and Asian-Americans than among white people. The problem is that crime has risen by a proportional margin. That's because we haven't helped the formerly incarcerated reintegrate successfully into society so much as we've just stigmatized and generally reduced law enforcement in recent years. What we actually need is an in-between approach that one former addict has aptly called incarceration with intention:
If you were too lazy to view, this approach combines yes actually having laws, yes actually enforcing those laws too (BOO!, I know), and also approaching prison time at least partially as rehabilitation, giving people there recovery services that will help them change, heal, and reintegrate successfully into society upon release rather than just rot there with a bunch of like-minded people until then. But that, I'm sure, would be nuanced and complicated for people at publications like this to comprehend because it doesn't align with their actual ideal of maximizing personal freedom at any social cost.