The Progressive Crime Wave
By Matthew Vadum
After two decades of falling crime rates nationwide, rising levels of intense cop-hatred across America appear to be contributing to a spike in violent crime in major cities, according to leading scholar Heather Mac Donald.
The “most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months,” writes Mac Donald, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Some of the anger in the streets that has turned into rioting and looting sprees is concocted, bought and paid for by radical anti-American financier George Soros. Much of the rest of it has been inspired by the community organizer in the White House and his minion, the former Attorney General Eric Holder. The mainstream media has been playing a supporting role, turning every police shooting of a person of color into a cause célèbre, regardless of the circumstances leading to the shooting.
“Gun violence in particular is spiraling upward in cities across America,” Mac Donald contends.
“In Baltimore, the most pressing question every morning is how many people were shot the previous night,” she writes. “Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years.”
Mac Donald continued:
In Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% by May 17 over the same period the previous year. Through April, shootings in St. Louis were up 39%, robberies 43%, and homicides 25% … Murders in Atlanta were up 32% as of mid-May. Shootings in Chicago had increased 24% and homicides 17%. Shootings and other violent felonies in Los Angeles had spiked by 25%; in New York, murder was up nearly 13%, and gun violence 7%. Those citywide statistics from law-enforcement officials mask even more startling neighborhood-level increases. Shooting incidents are up 500% in an East Harlem precinct compared with last year; in a South Central Los Angeles police division, shooting victims are up 100%.
Many of these murder victims are black Americans, Mac Donald said last week on Sean Hannity’s TV show.
These are the black lives that should matter to the Al Sharptons of the world. When the police back off, innocent black people get killed. And my speculation — and I don’t know this for sure, but we’ve been enduring nine months of really extreme anti-cop hysteria that is premised on the falsehood that the police are the biggest threat facing young black men today.
That police are the greatest threat to young black males is not supported by the evidence but police officers respond to public pressure like members of any other profession. Cops are “hearing the message that when they engage in proactive policing, they are abusing the community,” she said.
