WaPo: Democrats Are the Real ‘Tough on Crime’ Party

Republicans aren’t serious about crime, but according to the Washington Post’s Opinion Editor Alexi McCammond the Democrats are now implementing the real solutions to America’s crime problem. 

Yeah, right. 

Crime has become a hot political issue in the years since Democrats caved to the ridiculous demands of the George Floyd rioters, and in classic liberal fashion, they are now rewriting history and claiming to have the real solutions to reducing the social insecurity they caused. 

My latest @PostOpinions column is here — interviewed Gov. Kathy Hochul about Democrats’ approach to being “tough on crime” and how that might actually speak to what Black voters want https://t.co/svfnIJmzid

— Alexi McCammond (@alexi) April 8, 2024

It’s a story as old as the Roosevelt administration: cause a problem and then swoop in to impose a solution that leaves things worse than the status quo ante. 

Roosevelt came into office in the midst of an economic crisis, but as Amity Schlaes demonstrated in her wonderful book The Forgotten Man, Roosevelt’s policies extended the Depression by years. Johnson’s Great Society took a bad but improving economic situation for African Americans and created generational poverty, the destruction of the Black family, and enduring dependence on government handouts. 

During the insanity of the George Floyd “reckoning,” Democrats created the conditions for social chaos that has been gutting America’s cities. Soros prosecutors took over, police funding was cut, and bail “reform” flooded the streets with violent criminals. Biden’s border crisis exacerbated an already bad situation to the point where National Guard troops now patrol New York City’s subways. 

Now Hochul is crowing that she is suppressing crime. 

Thanks. You helped create that crime. Now, ordinary citizens are being searched as they enter the subway while uniformed troops greet them as they commute to work. Good job!

Reducing crime ranks among the top 10 issues for voters overall, according to Pew Research data, but there’s also a striking race gap: Sixty-eight percent of Black voters say it should be a top priority for President Biden compared to just 54 percent of White voters. This trend was also true in the 2022 midterm elections, when only one-third of White Democratic voters said violent crime was very important to how they would vote compared to 82 percent of Black Democratic voters.

No one understands the potency of this issue more than Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, who in 2022 ended up in the closest gubernatorial race in New York since 1994 after Republican challenger Lee Zeldin relentlessly campaigned on residents’ fears of violence. Since then, she has tried to recalibrate to help Democrats avoid similar attacks in 2024. Her decision last month to deploy the National Guard to New York City’s subway system for increased bag checks reflects a significant shift in how Democrats tackle crime.

Woo-hoo! 

Hochul insists that the root cause of crime is…Republican policies. Because of course they are. Guns, you see, are the real reason that mentally ill people are pushing people onto the subway tracks and people are getting harassed in the streets. Guns have caused migrants to harass New Yorkers, and guns are the agents of evil. 

Republicans love guns. As if self-defense is a good thing. 

“This should be an area where Democrats are leaning in,” Hochul told me. “Lean into the fact that Republicans are the ones who aren’t serious about public safety or fighting crime because they’re not serious about getting guns off the streets. … That’s a big difference between us.”

Sure, Republicans are the ones not pressing charges on gun crimes because that would create disparities since a disproportionate number of criminals who use guns are minorities.  

Alexi McCammond admits that many Democrats have been too lax on crime but that a liberal “therapeutic” approach can help solve the problem. Democrats should acknowledge that people don’t like crime, and then invest in mental health. 

No kidding. Mental health. Not for criminals, but for citizens who are afraid of crime. 

Other Democrats would be wise to watch Hochul’s almost therapeutic approach to politics and how she understands that when it comes to crime policy, your constituents’ feelings matter even more than the statistics proving that what you’re doing is working.

I would be more charitable to Democrats if they just admitted they were wrong and did not spend their efforts blaming Republicans for not adopting the idiotic policies that got us into this mess. 

This reminds me of the teachers’ unions who are demanding more money to solve the mental health crisis that they created in the first place by telling students that school doesn’t matter, that they are merely vectors of disease and that parents are their enemies. 

Give the unions more money, and they will fix the problems that they have caused. 

The obvious solution is to throw the bums out of power and let the adults who foresaw all these crises and warned against the Democrats’ “solutions” have a shot. It’s not that Republicans have all the answers–none of us do–but clearly we understand the actual causes and consequences of the problems in a way that Democrats don’t. 

But no, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. Instead, we will hear how all this chaos is the Republicans’ fault. It is we who are destroying Blue cities.