My column for the Washington County Daily News is online and in print. Here’s a part:
The first trend is the intentional softening of our criminal justice system. With callous disregard for the victims of crime, the left has made a concerted effort in recent years to drive soft-on-crime policies while putting in place prosecutors, judges, and police leadership who use their positions to coddle criminals at every opportunity.
The left is so proud of their pro-crime positions that they are not shy about telling people. Gov. Tony Evers has a stated policy goal of halving the state’s prison population. The only way to do that is to let some criminals out early while preventing more from going in. Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm has a long history of advocating for criminal justice reform, the euphemism liberals use for soft-on-criminal policies. Chisholm’s “bail reform” initiative, which allows violent offenders to bail out of jail for little or no money, has led to criminals committing more crimes when they should have reasonably been in jail.
In each of the three incidents that led to the deaths of four officers this year, the murderers should have been in jail. We used to know that locking up violent criminals was the surest path to reducing crime. The left wants us to forget that fact, but the evidence is clear.
The second trend is the cultural contempt for police that the left is advocating. Every time there is a policeinvolved shooting, leftist politicians activists leap to blame the police and attack them with accusations of racism or misconduct before the guns have even cooled.
The left pushed the defund-the-police movement using rhetoric that the police were so fundamentally corrupt that they could not be reformed. They must be defunded and disbanded instead.
When leftist rioters burn down our cities, attack people, and occupy neighborhoods, leftist politicians and activists side with the rioters and prevent the police from keeping order.
Even with our children, the left teaches that police are inherently bad and corrupt. In the wake of the BLM movement, the Milwaukee Public Schools ejected all Milwaukee police officers from their schools and are boisterously rejecting Republican calls to let them return. How are Milwaukee’s public school kids supposed to respect police officers when they are being taught that the police are violent bigots?
The overall increase in crime driven by leftist policies, prosecutors and judges coupled with the leftist anti-police rhetoric is having the intended effect. More police officers are being murdered by violent criminals who no longer respect the police and should have been in jail anyway. The story of leftist rule is being written in blue and red.
Interesting. Now that certain areas of some cities have been turned into “no go zones”, today’s column in the Daily News by Mark Belling points to something similar happening in the public schools. He gives several examples of WI schools where administrators have been ineffective in dealing with bad behavior. No support for concerned teachers and parents. How long before the public schools become “no go” for teachers and families that can afford to escape those dynamics?
Years ago I golfed regularly with two brothers who were both MPS employees. One was a speech therapist and the other a Vliet Street administrator of some kind. Admin guy’s wife was a principal at one of the elementary schools. All of their children went to private schools, K-12. I have no idea if they took any gas from colleagues over it or if it was just standard practice for those that could afford it, but I sure found it quite amusing that they deemed their own product not quite good enough for their own children. I guess if you know, you know.
Merlin, that may be sadly common. Of the 4 couples working for MPS that we know, only one child went to a public school, but she got on some program that got her a long bus ride to a Waukesha HS.
“The left is so proud of their pro-crime positions…” ‘Pro crime positions’, a very accurate ambiguity, isn’t it? That says it all right there.
If a series of failures result in learning that eventually leads to success you’re at least on a path to success. The left seems to not only refuse to learn from failure, they stubbornly double down on those failures as though the learning phase is completely unnecessary to success. It’s exceptionally easy to accept failure when it’s all funded with endless supply of other people’s money. Dry up they money and a new reality dawns.