The FBI’s 2020 crime report paints a dismal picture of America. The agency recorded the highest-ever murder spike last year, with a 30 percent increase in homicides over the previous year. Overall, America in 2020 endured nearly 5,000 murders. The murder wave affected most major cities and drove a 5 percent increase in violent crime overall.
The bloody rampage hasn’t ended this year, with the murder rate expected to exceed last year’s high. One of the worst aspects about this crime wave is that many of the murders remain unsolved. Philadelphia’s homicide clearance rate stands at a meager 47 percent, Chicago’s 2020 rate was 44.5 percent, and St. Louis’ 2020 rate was 36 percent.
It’s a bleak picture that should inspire greater support for law and order. But leftists are taking the opposite message. They still insist there is no real spike in violence and that any rise in murders can be blamed on police. No matter how ugly the landscape gets or how obvious it is that leftist policies have spiraled out of control, the Left will maintain course. In the face of crises, leftists will insist their policies just need to be tried harder.
This is apparent when it comes to crime. We’re often greeted with headlines such as this from NBC: “‘Overall crime decreased in 2020’ in the U.S., report finds.” That report was compiled by a left-wing think tank, yet it still received coverage as an unvarnished fact. The NBC reporters smugly declare that there is scant evidence for a “crime wave,” but they do make this one important caveat: “The study shows that homicides went up last year, but it found the category to be an outlier.” Just an outlier! The families of murder victims will be thrilled to know that jaywalking went down significantly, so the crime problem isn’t anything to worry about. It’s just the minor crime of murder that’s increasing, no biggie.
The denial of a crime wave fortifies leftist beliefs that what is most important is criminal justice reform and defunding the police. We will somehow have safer cities with more criminals and fewer cops on the streets. Even those who admit that America is experiencing a crime wave insist we must carry on with the crusade against law and order.
Conservative-in-name-only David French recently pleaded with his NeverTrump readers that we must resist the urge to crack down on criminals. French, at least, concedes we should have police, but says we cannot lock up criminals for too long because incarceration is racist and harms the criminals themselves. “Vengeance is unjust,” French says.
Urban liberals are also stating their preference for more crime and disorder at the ballot box. A proud socialist won the Democratic Party’s primary for the Buffalo mayoralty on a platform of defunding the police and providing greater leniency for criminals. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner won his party’s primary by a large margin to secure reelection, even though experts believe his light-on-crime policies have turned the city into a hellhole. It’s not just liberal reporters and commentators who think less enforcement is the answer to crime.
This same strategy applies to the border crisis. Month after month we see record-breaking numbers of illegal aliens crossing over. We just witnessed 30,000 mostly Haitian migrants cross over into America in broad daylight, believing they would be granted asylum. Thousands more are expected to make the same journey and there’s no sign the Biden Administration wants to do anything to stop this ongoing flood.
The images of thousands of Haitian migrants nonchalantly crossing the Rio Grande to enter America should’ve shaken up the administration and pushed them to do something about this problem. Instead, the administration made it harder for Border Patrol to do its job. After video emerged of Border Patrol agents confronting migrants while on horseback, the entire Democratic-Media Complex shrieked. These images evoked slavery, as Kamala Harris asserted. Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said it was even worse than slavery. Joe Biden vowed to make Border Patrol pay for doing their jobs. Other condemnations by Democrats and pundits were similar in their nuance and level-headedness.
But it wasn’t just mere rhetoric Democrats spouted. They also sought to change policy. Even though the Biden Administration faces a border crisis caused in part by lax enforcement standards, officials decided to make the Border Patrol’s job more difficult by banning the use of horses. These four-legged creatures are too hateful to be seen on the border. Now Border Patrol agents can only corral migrants while on their own two legs.
Biden’s liberal allies are also putting more pressure on the administration to let these migrants stay. They want one of the few immigration enforcement mechanisms still in place, Title 42, to be eliminated so future migrants can’t be deported promptly. This would encourage more illegal immigrants to come on the premise they can get their foot in the door without getting deported. Many leftists cried foul over Biden deporting any Haitians at all, with the administration’s envoy to the beleaguered Caribbean state resigning in disgust at this basic level of law enforcement.
No flood of migrants will ever convince Democrats to give up on open borders. It will just convince them to escalate and argue more aggressively for open borders. The same goes with their response to the crime wave. The rising body count somehow justifies a greater commitment to criminal justice reform.
If nothing else, Democrats are at least consistent in their contempt for order. Unfortunately, they are not consistent about the safety and sovereignty of the American people. They care vastly more about foreigners and criminals than they do about law-abiding citizens. No matter how bad the situation gets in our country, the Left will never lose sight of their true priorities—and those priorities do not involve us.