Many of America’s cities are plagued by crazy people randomly attacking innocent strangers. Some illustrative examples:
In July 2019, a Seattle vagrant threw coffee on a toddler two days after getting out of jail for a previous assault. This individual already had 14 assault convictions and “dozens of other convictions [for] property crimes, drug possession and theft,” the Seattle Times reported at the time (see story here). Why was he still on the streets?
In February 2021, a Seattle TV station reported that businesses are fleeing because downtown is unsafe for their employees and customers (see story here).
In June 2021, Seattle judges demanded the removal of a homeless camp adjacent to the courthouse (photo below) because the area was unsafe for employees and jurors. A month later, a man tried to rape a female county employee in a courthouse restroom (see story here).
In February 2022, a stranger hit a woman in the head with a baseball bat in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood (see story here).
In New York City, deranged psychopaths push commuters off subway platforms onto tracks in front of oncoming trains (see, e.g., story here). In November 2021, a man with 44 prior arrests — including 16 in one day! — violently assaulted a woman (story here). Last week, a homeless man followed a woman into her apartment where he stabbed her 40 times with a kitchen knife. “Prosecutors say he was out on supervised release for three open cases, including one where he allegedly punched a stranger on the subway,” Yahoo News reported (see story here). His bail should have skyrocketed after the second one.
The people who do these things are nuts, and it’s nuts to send them back to the streets. Kinder and gentler doesn’t work on them. When things like this are happening, almost every other day it seems, talk of defunding police and eliminating bail inequities are political losers. Voters want to be safe from these predators.
This was demonstrated in the November 2021 Seattle municipal elections, when the city prosecutor candidates were a law-and-order conservative Republican and a public defender who “ran on a platform of decriminalizing poverty, community self-determination, green infrastructure, and ending homeless sweeps” (according to Ballotpedia, here). The Republican won by a wide margin — in liberal Seattle.
Democrats will not get anywhere with voters by arguing the system is unfair to this or that disadvantaged group. They can’t ignore this. They should shift their focus to doing law-and-order the right way, and their liberal supporters should get behind this. Otherwise, voters will fire them and hire Republicans who’ll do it with bad policing and flawed justice.
