Ever since the Left embraced the ‘Defund the Police’ motto and the pro-crime BLM message of a war on police, too many Republicans and conservatives fundamentally misunderstood the problem.
The police haven’t really been ‘defunded’ in most places. The real problem was that police were intimidated into not doing their jobs. The Trump administration has begun tackling that by eliminating some of the consent/oversight put into place by the Obama/Biden administrations on police departments that keep them from being able to do their jobs.
But the police responding to calls or maintaining patrols is only half of what it takes to stop crime. And less than half.
The bigger problem is a functional justice system.
Take New York, which has tons of cops but no functioning justice system once bail was eliminated, or California, which effectively legalized shoplifting and freed tens of thousands of criminals on COVID pretexts.
The police can arrest someone, but if the criminal isn’t going to prison, then it’s just a revolving door system.
President Trump responded to the crisis in D.C., including a carjacking of a DOGE staffer, by sending feds to enforce the law, but while the D.C. force isn’t massive, it’s big enough for what the city needs.
The problem is the ‘justice’ system.
The D.C. City Council began legalizing carjacking a few years ago, they overrode Mayor Bowser’s veto, explicit warnings from the city’s top prosecutor and at that point, a Republican congress and Biden teamed up to tell D.C. to stop it.
Carjackings are part of the culture in D.C. And they’ve figured out how to use kids to get around real penalties.
Carjackings rose around 500% in Washington D.C. A 12-year-old was arrested for four armed carjackings in an hour in Washington D.C. The criminal justice reform movement has fought against prosecuting teenagers, even those who commit murder, as adults. And, indeed, the two teen girls who killed an Uber driver in D.C. reportedly reached a plea deal
Teen carjackers assault drivers while fearlessly brandishing guns like it’s hunting season because they know the police won’t shoot them and district attorneys won’t lock them up.
While criminal justice reformers claimed that trying teens as adults ‘criminalized’ children, it dissuaded teens and, more importantly, the organized gangs using them as pawns. The decriminalization of teenage crimes led to a boom in teens being recruited by organized crime.
What do you do with that?
You have to deal with the culture and with the organized crime operating behind some of this. And you absolutely have to bring back real penalties.
Will those arrested by the FBI face federal prosecution? Even if so, the feds only have so much spare capacity to enforce the laws that D.C. isn’t enforcing. It’ll take a wholesale takeover of D.C. to make sure that not just the police, but more importantly, the prosecutions work, the judges do their job and the prisons are full.