It took a spate of murders for the mayor of Oakland, Calif., to abandon the destructive "defund the police" slogan. Jason L. Riley writes:
After a weekend in which three people were killed in Oakland, Calif., including a 1-year-old hit by a stray bullet while sleeping in the back seat of his mother’s car, Mayor Libby Schaaf finally reversed herself on defunding the police and pledged to hire more cops. But what took her so long?
Murder rose by nearly 30% last year, and Americans have been making it as clear as can be that they want more and better policing. The incoming mayors of Atlanta, New York and Seattle ran campaigns that prioritized public safety. A ballot initiative in Minneapolis that would have dismantled the police department was defeated soundly, and some of the strongest opposition came from low-income black communities. “Black lives need to be valued not just when unjustly taken by the police, but when we are alive and demanding our right to be heard, to breathe, to live in safe neighborhoods and to enjoy the full benefits of our status as American citizens,” explained a civil-rights activist from Minneapolis in a New York Times op-ed.
We are reminded almost weekly of the tragic failure of bail reform and other soft-on-crime initiatives that have frustrated the efforts of police, prosecutors and judges to keep suspects with long criminal records off the streets. The man charged with driving his SUV through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wis., last month, killing six, had been released five days earlier on $1,000 bail in another violent felony case. The man charged last week in the fatal shooting of a music producer’s 81-year-old wife in her Beverly Hills, Calif., home is a career criminal who was out on parole. The suspect in the stabbing death of a Columbia University graduate student last week is a convicted felon and gang member who has been arrested 11 times since 2012, according to the New York Post.
Carjackings have become so commonplace in Washington that the local ABC affiliate is now offering viewers tips on how to protect themselves. Chicago and California have effectively decriminalized retail theft by raising the threshold for felony shoplifting. The result has been a rise in smash-and-grab robberies and store closures. There were 11 such incidents in and around Los Angeles between Nov. 18 and 28 alone, resulting in nearly $340,000 worth of stolen goods. Although 14 people were arrested, “all of the suspects taken into custody are now out of custody,” Michel Moore, the city’s police chief, told reporters. His hands are tied by a “zero bail” policy for misdemeanors and low-level felonies that is meant to reduce overcrowding in Los Angeles County jails.
[Jason L. Riley, "The Predictable Consequences of ‘Defund the Police’," The Wall Street Journal, December 7]
