If Republicans are going to make inroads with swing voters and in battleground states, their issue has to be crime. That is why House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) is taking his committee to Alvin Bragg’s backyard today.
The Judiciary Committee has convened a hearing in the Javits Federal Building, a stone’s throw from the district attorney’s office in lower Manhattan. The purpose, Jordan says, is to highlight the peril into which Bragg’s progressive non-prosecution agenda has placed New Yorkers.
This could be good policy and good politics . . . as long as Jordan keeps the spotlight on crime, rather than on Donald Trump.
Republicans made surprising gains in New York State in the generally downbeat 2022 midterm elections. The main reason was crime. Washington sends federal dollars to New York and other states to fight crime. As I’ve explained, I do not believe that is a valid constitutional basis for Washington to presume supremacy over state-level law enforcement, or to micro-manage how a municipal district attorney conducts individual cases — particularly cases fraught with politics. Nevertheless, Jordan could not be more right that the federal spigot should be shut off if the taxpayer money for law enforcement is going to progressive prosecutors whose default position is nonenforcement, and who, under a delusion, are implementing dangerous decarceration policies.
When criminals are imprisoned, in the majority of cases it is for violent crimes, generally committed by recidivist offenders. Progressives promote a fantasy narrative that imprisonment is driven by systemic racism. In reality, it is driven by violent crime, and if there is a racial element that should concern us it is that poor communities are disproportionately preyed upon — and bear in mind that most crime goes unsolved, often because victims are afraid to report it.
Thoughtful analyses of whether sentences of incarceration do more harm than good in cases of low-level, nonviolent crime committed by offenders with little or no criminal history are worthy. Indeed, that consideration has always been a staple of properly exercised prosecutorial discretion. But an ideological commitment to decarceration, manifested by charging practices that plead serious offenses as if they were trivial in order to dodge mandatory imprisonment provisions, inevitably plagues urban neighborhoods with hardened criminals and street gangs. Recidivists drive crime (see, e.g., new data that just 327 people were responsible for fully one-third of shoplifting crimes in New York, a city of 9 million people). If committed criminals are not locked up, they are committing crimes, period.
Moreover, the federal government has a history of bolstering municipal police and district attorneys with Justice Department resources during periods of surging crime. The effectiveness of such joint-task-force arrangements hinges on a mutual commitment to aggressive investigation and prosecution. If elected progressive district attorneys, such as Bragg, are determined to water down rather than step up enforcement, then federal resources should be pulled from their jurisdictions and deployed where the resources can do some good. It is thus appropriate for the Judiciary Committee to probe the facts on the ground in the nation’s biggest city as Congress considers legislation and budgets to address crime.
If this is Jordan’s focus, the hearing could be effective. On the other hand, if it becomes a matter of Jordan and House Republicans coming to the Big Apple to act as former President Trump’s defense lawyers, it will fall flat.
Trump is obviously a catalyst for Monday’s hearing. There are progressive prosecutors all over the country. Violent crime is rampant in Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Albuquerque, Detroit, Memphis, Baltimore, and elsewhere. Yet it is New York where House Republicans have chosen to begin their campaign against progressive prosecutors. Manhattan, of course, is where Trump was indicted. Yes, Bragg’s prosecution of Trump is ludicrous. But while New York City has experienced an alarming spike in crime since 2017, is not the nation’s biggest crime problem. Jordan’s decision to focus like a laser on Bragg — as opposed to one of the approximately 70 other progressive prosecutors across the nation — is as much about Trump as it is about crime.
There could be an upside: the potency of graphically portraying the real crime to which Bragg is oblivious while he politicizes his office to prosecute the Democrats’ nemesis. To testify at the hearing, Republicans have lined up crime victims who can make this point. They will be very tough for Democrats to cross-examine. Still, Republicans need to guard against hyperbole. Crime is up in New York City, and the trend in the last six years is troubling. But to suggest, as some have, that Bragg is presiding over an unprecedented crime wave is laughable.
Crime is not anywhere close to where it was in the early 1990s (compare: 2,245 homicides in 1991 to 289 in 2018). In 2022, Bragg’s first full year in office, serious crime was up overall by about 22 percent over 2021, though murder was down: The year’s 433 homicides were alarmingly above the just-mentioned 2018 low but a marked improvement over 488 in 2021. Bragg is quick to counter that Manhattan is not the only place where crime was up last year, and that it is trending down through the first quarter of 2023. Yet progressive prosecutors have had a lot to do with crime’s rise — the decarceration push, the practice of pleading felonies down to misdemeanors, the bias against pretrial detention even for forcible offenses, and so on. While the recent downward trend is welcome, it is marginal — and it’s still early in the year. In general, serious crime is flat year over year, and it remains significantly higher than just two years ago (when it was already noticeably up).
Crime is a winning issue for Republicans because its importance to everyday Americans cuts across partisan lines. Plus, the Democrats’ progressive base will persist in policies that put the interests of criminals over those of communities — in the service of a racialized narrative that normal people realize is nonsense. If that’s where Jim Jordan keeps his sights trained, he can do real good. Democrats will try to portray the Judiciary chairman as a political stuntman who is smearing Bragg for Trump’s benefit. Jordan needs to keep the spotlight on crime.