The results are in: Tough-on-crime works, rogue prosecutors don’t

In the world of criminal justice reform, it became more popular for a time to claim that crime can be eradicated without punishment — that we don’t need police, we don’t need common-sense prosecutors or judges to hold violent and career criminals accountable.

It’s just not true. As we have seen again and again, crime and consequences meted out to criminals are inextricably intertwined.

When progressive politicians defunded police departments and progressive prosecutors refused to prosecute entire categories of crimes, crime rates — particularly violent crime rates — exploded.

Look at what happened in our nation’s capital. During the Biden administration, the perfect storm percolated to cause a crime catastrophe.

First, local elected leaders moved aggressively to defund the police. One D.C. city council member, Charles Allen, boasted that budget cuts to the police department would result in “the biggest reduction … I’ve ever seen.” He openly bragged that this would make the District more just, although he admitted that “racial justice won’t be achieved in a single budget.” Never mind that young black men are vastly disproportionately victimized by violent crime. For many radical self-styled reformers like Allen, the system is the problem, not the crime.

Next, the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney — the official who prosecutes most local crimes in the District of Columbia — effectively adopted many of the fashionable soft-on-crime policies that other rogue progressive prosecutors had been supporting. And the District’s locally elected city attorney, who prosecutes most juvenile crimes in Washington, declared that he would never prosecute a juvenile offender as an adult, no matter how heinous his or her crime. In his view, “Kids are kids.”

Guess what happened? Murders soared in........

© The Hill