Gun violence is climbing in the nation's cities, marking a
likely end to the 20-year national decline in the crime
rates, because of changing laws that make it more difficult
for police to do their jobs, according to a
Wall Street Journal opinion piece.
"Crime is the worst I've ever seen it,' said St. Louis
Alderman Joe Vaccaro during a City Hall hearing earlier this
month, writes Heather Mac Donald, a Thomas W. Smith fellow
at the Manhattan Institute in her article.
In St. Louis alone, shootings are up by 39 percent,
robberies by 43 percent,and homicides by 25 percent.
St. Louis is not the only city seeing increases. According
to Baltimore police, gun violence in that city is up by more
than 60 percent over last year, with 32 shootings occurring
over Memorial Day weekend alone, making May the most violent
month the city has experienced in the past 15 years.
Homicides were up by 180 percent in Milwaukee by May 17,
over the same period from last year. In Atlanta, murders
went up by 32 percent by mid-May, and in Chicago, homicides
went up by 17 percent and shootings by 24 percent. New York
marked a murder rate rise of nearly 13 percent and gun
violence by 7 percent, and violent felonies in Los Angeles
went up by 25 percent, MacDonald writes.
Even worse, neighborhood level crime climbed even more, with
shooting incidents going up by 500 percent in New York's
East Harlem Precinct.
Just last year, though, the first six months of 2014 marked
a drop in violent crime nationally, with a 4.6 drop noted.
Mac Donald said the rise in crime may be because of the
growing unrest over the nation's police departments in
recent months, following the deaths of unarmed black men
including Ferguson's Michael Brown and Eric Garner in Staten
Island.
The deaths have brought riots, and the murders of police
officers has also gone up. Mac Donald notes that President
Barack Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder have
"embraced the conceit that law enforcement in black
communities is infected by bias," and the media is also
putting out a stream of stories about the "alleged police
mistreatment of blacks."
As a result, she said, almost any police shooting that
involves a black person "no matter how threatening the
behavior that provoked the shooting," brings angry protests,
and acquittals of police officers for using deadly force
often brings violence, with the result being what St. Louis
Police Chief Sam Dotson has called the "Ferguson effect."
This means police are backing away from enforcement activity
while the criminal element feels empowered, said Mac Donald,
pointing out that similar "Ferguson effects" are happening
nationwide as police scale back on proactive police actions.
"Any cop who uses his gun now has to worry about being
indicted and losing his job and family," a New York City
police officer told Mac Donald. "Everything has the
potential to be recorded. A lot of cops feel that the
climate for the next couple of years is going to be non stop
protests."
New York's pedestrian "stop, question and frisk" practices
have dropped by nearly 95 percent from 2011 after litigation
was filed calling the technique racially biased, she writes,
and "it is no surprise that shootings are up in the city."
New York and other cities are also taking aim at
"broken windows" policing that allows
officers to target lower-level public offenses, and Holder's
call to end "mass incarceration" on racial grounds has
resulted in more felons on the streets, she continued.
"Contrary to the claims of the 'black lives matter'
movement, no government policy in the past quarter century
has done more for urban reclamation than proactive
policing," Mac Donald claimed, as such policies have saved
thousands of lives while bringing in commerce and jobs to
once drug infested neighborhoods.
"To be sure, police officers need to treat everyone they
encounter with courtesy and respect," she said. "Any fatal
police shooting of an innocent person is a horrifying
tragedy that police training must work incessantly to
prevent. But unless the demonization of law enforcement
ends, the liberating gains in urban safety over the past 20
years will be lost."
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