Crime or Punishment: The Victim or the Criminal, A Choice
This week, I would like to talk about crime. Crime is bad! Well, I guess that does it!
Okay, Okay, while I would hope that most of us would agree that crime is bad, unfortunately the discussion may be, well…more “nuanced”. I think that most things are nuanced, in other words not as black and white as we would think or hope. In the area of crime, however, nuance to most of the law-abiding community means trouble.
In this election cycle, we are barraged with so much to be worried about: inflation, climate change, Jan 6th, Ukraine, Biden, Trump, school boards, taxes, drought, forest fires…sigh…shall I go on?
Despite all of these very important issues, I would suggest that the most important and immediate issue which should demand our undivided attention in this election is crime, and more importantly, what are we going to do about it.
We hear every day that crime is exploding. There are unprecedented numbers of murders and assaults. Drug use and crime associated with it is commonplace. Stores are closing due to uncontrollable shoplifting. In Colorado, we are the car theft capital of the country. Yay us! We are number 1!!!
Crime and how to deal with it has become a daily concern for all of us. We are either victims or hear from friends and neighbors we know who have become victims. Our cars are stolen or vandalized. Our houses are being violated. We feel unsafe because we are unsafe.
Safety for ourselves and our families is one of our most basic needs. The need for safety is why we have a system of laws and massive number of public servants who enforce those laws to protect us to keep us safe from people who would do us harm. When lawlessness prevails and society breaks down, we are in various states of fear. We look around for physical threats. We don’t let our loved ones go to certain places or go alone. We take our valuables out of our cars. We lock our mailboxes. We scan our porches for packages and bring them in before they can be stolen. We fear for our friends and family members who do not live with us and who we cannot personally protect. We are afraid…every day.
If you, a family member, or a close friend is a victim of a crime, you never fully recover. It is not “just money”. It is being violated. We no longer feel safe and will never feel safe again.
A Little History
Crime has been an issue since the beginning of time. I would suggest for the purposes of this discussion that we only go back to late 1980’s when crime was running rampant in our cities. This was the time of the crack cocaine epidemic in urban neighborhoods. New York City and other urban areas were dangerous places to be.
Rudy Giuliani was elected Mayor of New York on the promise to fight crime. He instituted the “broken windows” program which punished offenders who committed low level crimes such as graffiti, public urination, and jumping subway terminals to get free rides.
As part of this tough on crime policy was a program to stop and frisk individuals which was based on the US Supreme Court case of Terry vs. Ohio and were called “Terry stops”. The premise was that police officers would use their judgment and experience to stop individuals who looked like they might have weapons and may be engaged in criminal activities. Another example of the tough on crime initiatives of the time that pervaded the country was in California where the legislature passed the 3 strikes rule that if one was convicted of three crimes, the individual was automatically sentenced to long prison terms. In 1994, mandatory federal sentencing guidelines were issued to rein in soft on crime judges. The war on drugs was in full force.
There are claims that these tough on crime initiatives did not work. They did not eliminate all crime, but crime did decrease. For instance, recidivism was down not necessarily because criminals decided to change their ways but because they were in jail rather than on the streets. It is tough to steal three cars in one day if you are still in jail as a result of stealing the first one. We never won the war on drugs but with knowable consequences, some were deterred from criminal conduct. Remember the phrase “if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.” Perhaps not all but definitely some decided that they did not want to do the time.
The Pendulum Snaps Back
In the early 2000s, there was a push back claiming that anti-crime policies were adversely affecting individuals in minority communities. The defense to these charges were that minorities were stopped more often because the police were focusing on areas that had the most crime, and the most crime victims which were in poor, minority neighborhoods.
This criticism was not completely unfair since it appeared that even in high crime areas, stop and frisk tactics were overused such that many innocent blacks were inappropriately stopped and, in their view, harassed.
This resistance to anti-crime policies occurred at the same time as the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombing when increased security protocols were being instituted at airports. Young Muslim men were targeted for search and detention. Despite the fact that the terrorist threat to US citizens came almost exclusively from young Muslim men, we objected to their being singled out (profiled) due to their ethnicity which many, reasonably concluded, was unfair.
Social justice reform advocates pushed the claim that racial minorities were being treated unfairly because the number of minorities adversely affected by tough on crime initiatives were greater than their numerical representation in the overall population. Their goal was to reduce the percentage of minority males being arrested or incarcerated for crimes in order to match those percentages of other racial groups.
The theory was that if a racial or ethnic group was overrepresented in the criminal justice system, it could only be as a result of societal systemic racial discrimination over which the criminals had no control, and therefore they had no responsibility for their own actions.
In the early 2000s, there also was a movement that combined Libertarians and those that wanted to use marijuana that advocated that the possession and use of marijuana was a victimless crime that should be ignored. If drug use and possession were decriminalized, it would result in a reduction of crime and depopulation of our jails for the overall good of society. The public and policy makers ignored the predictable consequences of increased marijuana use which soon resulted in other hard drugs joining marijuana for decriminalization. It also ignored the likelihood that crimes would have to be committed to fund many of the drug users addictions.
However, despite the decriminalization of drug possession and use, the abandonment of racial profiling and stop and frisk practices, and the general removal of harsh sentencing laws, there was no decrease in criminality or a change in the racial composition of criminals.
Social Justice Reformers Double Down and Things Go from Bad to Worse
Failing to reform perceived racial inequity by overturning drug laws and policing practices, social justice reformers doubled down on new efforts to achieve racial balance. The thinking was if only criminals (particularly relatively new criminals) were kept out of the justice system, they would not associate with hard core criminals who otherwise would teach them bad habits. It was thought that if placed in jail, these individuals would be subsumed into the criminal culture by their cellmates, kind of like an Oliver Twist scenario.
The “stay out of jail” program were accomplished by a series of diversion programs as well as simply reducing the penalties for crimes, some of which were appropriate but were generally overused. If in the past, stealing a car was a felony for which one would go to jail, their answer was simply to reclassify it as a misdemeanor for which one would not go to jail or if one did, not for long. Essentially the thinking was, the way to reduce serious crime would be to simply reclassify it as not serious. Individuals would not have to suffer the stigma (or deterrent effect) of being a felon simply because what they did was no longer a felony. The rights and interests of victims particularly for property crimes were ignored.
A new generation of reform prosecutors who agreed with this approach were elected on social justice platforms that emphasized that criminals would be treated with compassion and not jailed due to the circumstances in their lives that led them to committing crimes. It wasn’t their fault. In addition to the legislative reduction of the severity of criminal acts, these prosecutors would plead down criminal charges from felonies to misdemeanors to minimize the effects on the offender. Criminals did not suffer the consequences for their acts. If they were arrested, they wouldn’t be prosecuted. If prosecuted, they would spend little time in jail.
While there obviously are anecdotal stories of individuals who turned their lives around due to being given 2nd/3rd/4th chances, for the majority of criminals, they were wrong. Instead of leading criminals to become law-abiding productive members of society, failure to impose stiff consequences on their criminal activities encouraged them to increase their crimes because the risk of failure was so low if nonexistent.
For example, when it was determined that shoplifters should not have to suffer the stigma of a conviction for shoplifting, shoplifting was no longer considered a big deal. Store employees were more likely to be at risk from being assaulted by the shoplifters they were trying to stop or sued for wrongful detention. Stores to protect their employees and themselves simply decided to just take the losses as a cost of doing business, and we have more shoplifting. Now we see shoplifters brazenly go into stores with bags and just clean out the shelves.
Not everyone in the justice system was going along with this approach. The police were still arresting and preparing individuals for prosecution while encountering more and more difficulties. Then the George Floyd murder happened in Minneapolis.
Policemen of all types were vilified. Physical attacks on the police escalated during the violence of the “mostly peaceful” BLM/Antifa riots in the summer of 2020. Police officers were and continue to be targeted for assassination. Consequences for resisting arrest and running from the police have become practically nonexistent. Therefore, fighting with individuals who are being apprehended, has become routine. Running from the police increased. In our little community, the number of people who ran from the police rather than stop increased 100% from 2020 to 2021. Lawsuits against officers threatened their families and their financial stability.
Without the backing of municipal leaders, many of whom vocally advocated to defund the police or cripple their ability to do their jobs, police officers retired or quit in droves. Applicant pools dried up. We hear it all the time. Who would want to be a police officer these days? Well, a lot of police officers did not. Police departments became understaffed below what was needed to minimally protect the community making it even more likely that criminal activity would be successful. In some locations, there were so few officers on shifts that there weren’t enough to provide backup when there was a serious incident. Call response times skyrocketed from 5 minutes to 15 minutes if they came at all.
Elections Matter. The lines between those who believe that criminals have been mistreated due to societal factors and those who want to prevent crime and protect the victims are real and stark.
Despite the undeniable increase in crime, progressives still believe that the way forward is more social workers and mental health professionals who will be tasked to talk their way into convincing those to refrain from future criminal activity.
There is a stark choice to be made. Will we approach crime as an unacceptable offense against our community and design policies that have consequences to protect individuals in the community or shall we decriminalize conduct and hope to solve root consequences that are believed to cause antisocial behavior?
We can continue to elect representatives who will do nothing different with the result being (in my humble opinion) increased crime, increased drug use, and increased gun violence, forcing us to stay in our homes for our own safety. We will be forced to choose between giving up our property and accepting violence to ourselves and our families or buying guns to protect ourselves, our property and our neighbors with what could be tragic results.
I do not advocate for the return of stop and frisk, racial profiling, or mandatory sentencing. The soft on crime legislators are not evil people, just horribly mistaken as to incentives for the human condition. Someday we may be able identify and remedy the root causes of crime; poor upbringing, mental health, lack of education, a genetic predisposition, but in the meantime, we must elect those who believe that those who steal and hurt people have to know with certainty that there will be adverse consequences for their actions. Otherwise, people being people, they will continue to steal and hurt us.
The choice for us is not nuanced, but clear.