Let’s skip the crime statistics and go straight to what resonates with people.
Such as what happened at Seattle’s Pike Place Market on Labor Day weekend. It was full of people, having a good time, when a man later identified as John Marcel Williams unleashed mayhem.
He “first punched a worker at a hotel near 1st and Stewart, then moved on to assault more people at Bacco Café,” a Seattle TV station reported in a story based on police reports (read it here).
A nearby business owner said, “I would obviously love to see more police officers and I would love to see them on the streets, doing patrols, making themselves really known.” No enthusiasm here for defunding police! That narrative is a chimera anyway, because nobody except a few vocal activists supports that idea; but I digress.
Williams served 56 days in jail under a plea agreement for that incident. Two days after getting out, he murdered a couple in their 50s in their south Seattle apartment, stabbing them a total of 160 times (see video below).
In its reporting of that incident, the TV station said, “Court records show Williams has at least 65 arrests out of California and four just this year in Washington state for attempted rape, property destruction, vehicle prowling, unlawful use of weapons and misdemeanor assault” (see story here).
At this point, I’m going “wow,” and you probably are, too. Why was he still on the streets.
If Williams is convicted of those murders — he was caught near the scene, covered in blood — he probably won’t be again. Washington doesn’t have a death penalty, but given his record, he’s an unlikely candidate for eventual parole. But people will ask why he wasn’t stopped before he killed someone.
Good question. Stories like this fuel “soft on crime” posturing, and are enough to get some people to vote Republican (although they shouldn’t, because there’s little evidence Republicans are better at preventing crime, and there are other reasons not to vote for them), which is what GOP politicians who demagogue crime issues are hoping for.
In America, you can’t take people off the streets just because they’re dangerous. Actually, that’s not 100% true, because Washington has involuntary commitment of sexual predators, which is how Spokane’s notorious “South Hill Rapist” was kept out of society after completing his prison sentence (details here). Committing mentally ill people adjudged a danger to themselves or others has a long history in American law.
But in the criminal sphere, people can only be locked up for specific crimes they’ve been convicted of, and sentences must be proportionate to the crimes, which is why Williams served only 56 days for the Pike Place Market assaults despite his lengthy rap sheet and obvious dangerousness. Actually, that’s not the whole story, as he got 24 months, but most of it was suspended under a plea agreement.
The role of plea agreements in the criminal justice system has been much debated, and is beyond the scope of this posting; but it’s fair to ask whether the prosecutor and judge shouldn’t have been tougher on this defendant, and why they weren’t.
Washington was the first state to enact a habitual offender statute, which are sometimes called “three strikes” laws (details here), but that’s not a panacea for cases like this one. That’s because “strikes” only apply to specified felonies, and you can’t incarcerate a habitual offender like Williams under those laws, no matter how many less serious crimes they commit.
Maybe there’s no silver bullet that can keep dangerous people off the streets. But there’s certainly a sense among some voters that the system isn’t trying hard enough, and that’s how you get “soft on crime” politics.