OPINION:
For two years, we have endured what the media has described as efforts to defund, reform or otherwise neuter the police, executed initially by rioters and riff-raff in the streets and later by local prosecutors funded by people (George Soros) who are actively hostile to the United States.
But that anti-policing frame of reference is not quite right. Most of those engaged on these issues from the left are not primarily anti-police.
They are pro-criminal.
“Prosecutors” who are the tip of the spear of this pro-criminal movement include district attorneys in San Francisco (Chesa Boudin, the son of not one but two cop killers), New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Boston. They have different names and backgrounds, but their pro-criminal approach is uniformly the same.
They stopped asking for cash bail or, in some cases, any bail at all. Pre-trial detention is out entirely. Felonies are treated as misdemeanors, and many are not prosecuted at all. Prosecutors — who have pledged to uphold all of the laws – have specifically listed the laws they won’t enforce.
In these cities, trespassing is now OK. Resisting arrest — the single best predictor of officer-involved shootings — is legal. Minors can use drugs and alcohol legally. Drug possession? No problem. Driving without a license? Don’t worry about it. Shoplifting? As long as you steal less than $950 at a time (the Californians did that to themselves in a proposition in 2014).
Prostitution? Not an enforcement priority. Public intoxication? Enjoy! Closing jails and not building new ones? Groovy. Possession of a machete? You do you.
In short, these “prosecutors” are working for the criminals, not for the law-abiding citizens.
They believe that the legal system is irredeemably and structurally racist, imperialist or whatever. By setting criminals free to prey on citizens, these people believed they had done their part to rebalance the cosmic scales.
They are also intentionally eroding respect for the law among everyone. If you are a citizen standing in line to pay for your purchases and a criminal walks in and fills up a bag or two with stolen goods and then waltzes out, eventually, you are going to start to conclude that you are a sucker for obeying the rules. If a fare beater jumps turnstiles and no one stops them, what kind of schnook would keep paying?
There is no point in calling the cops if someone is trespassing on your property with a machete; they are not coming out to arrest a criminal who won’t be prosecuted.
Finally, by determining which laws they will and won’t enforce — which laws actually exist and which don’t — these people are acting as a super-legislative body. No one elected them to do that. This, too, deteriorates confidence in government.
None of this is accidental. The entire purpose of the exercise is to destroy the confidence of the citizens in self-governance, the rule of law and the preservation of private property. The criminals are merely handy tools for that task.
The revolutionaries masquerading as prosecutors know that. They are pro-criminal because criminals destroy order and societal confidence in institutions.
They are, of course, not alone. The current administration not only allows but encourages and provides transportation for the millions who have entered our country illegally in the last year. In this, their goals and methods are the same as the renegade prosecutors. The administration, including its leader, believes that the legal system is corrupt. Apparently, the best way to clean it up is to ensure that we create many, many more criminals and do nothing to prosecute them.
It is telling — and depressing — that President Biden managed only an entire tweet in the wake of the killings of Detective Jason Rivera and officer Wilbert Mora. Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s new district attorney who is entirely on the side of the criminals in this struggle and whose office is about 4 miles from St. Patrick’s, couldn’t make the funeral.
To add to the insult, Mr. Biden promised to travel up to New York City to talk to Mr. Bragg about gun violence, like somehow the shooting of two NYPD officers in Harlem was just another instance of too many guns in the neighborhood and was utterly unrelated to the carefully cultivated contempt for the law and advocacy for criminals by some on the left.
In her eulogy for her husband, Rivera, Dominque Luzuriaga said: “The system continues to fail us. We are not safe anymore. Not even the members of the service. I know you were tired of these laws, especially those from the new DA. I hope he’s watching you speak through me right now.” St. Patrick’s erupted in a standing ovation, no doubt a first for a eulogy, and the funeral procession drove past thousands of New York City officers in uniform and at attention in the snow.
“But I promise, we promise, that your death won’t be in vain.”
Let’s hope she’s right.
• Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is the president of MWR Strategies. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House.
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