I used to work in the city of Boston, Mass., and felt relatively safe in the city, even at night. It's a great city—or at least it was—full of history. In a lot of ways, I miss being there every day (it's been many years)... in other ways, not so much. Frankly, I really don’t think I’d be comfortable there anymore. Why? Because the city’s Democrat mayor, Michelle Wu, has officially lost her mind.
In her latest far-left scheme to destroy what's left of this once-great city, she's implemented a mind-boggling "no-arrest" policy for drug dealers. You read that right—drug dealers are getting a free pass in Boston now, courtesy of the local Democratic Party.
This disastrous policy, cooked up by Wu alongside Police Commissioner Michael Cox and Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden, represents everything wrong with progressive governance. They're calling it an "evolution" in tackling drug problems.
“At the end of the day, this issue is about sobriety,” said Hayden. “Incarceration is not the answer to help get them sober, and if we don’t get them sober, then they’re coming back.
“If we don’t address the underlying issue, then we don’t solve the problem, and they will continue to commit whatever crime they were committing, whether it’s drug use, whether it’s drug dealing to support the habit, whether it’s shoplifting, whether it’s robbing somebody, whatever it may be, that’s what we’re trying to deal with,” Hayden added.
While Wu and her squad of enablers pat themselves on the back for their "compassionate" approach, Boston's streets are turning into open-air drug markets. Local business owners are watching their livelihoods circle the drain as customers avoid the increasingly dangerous downtown area. At a recent business roundtable, desperate store owners spelled it out plain and simple: the drug situation "scares the customer to come in town and buy stuff."
Sound familiar?
The sheer absurdity of this policy would be laughable if it weren't so dangerous. Instead of arresting criminals who poison our communities, Wu's brilliant plan is to give them a timeout and a participation trophy. Accountability? None of that. Meanwhile, law-abiding citizens are left to deal with the consequences of this progressive fantasy gone wrong.
The “evolved” city plan comes amid heightened focus on violence and open-air drug use downtown, which the police department has previously attributed to spillover from the former long-time Mass and Cass encampment that was cleared via a city ordinance proposed by the mayor in November 2023.
Police statistics show total crime, including drug dealing and shoplifting, reached the highest level in roughly seven years in the Downtown Crossing/Boston Common area last year — with 995 crimes reported, compared to 958 in 2023, according to a Boston Globe report.
We’ve seen these soft-on-crime policies implemented before, and they always end in disaster. The opioid crisis isn't going to be solved by giving drug dealers a free pass.
The complete disregard for public safety and the rule of law is stunning, even by Democrat standards. While residents and critics raise legitimate concerns about the deteriorating situation, Wu's administration continues to plug their ears, sing kumbaya, and treat dangerous criminals like victims. It's the progressive playbook in action: ignore the community, implement failed policies, and blame someone else when it all goes wrong.
The real victims here are the law-abiding citizens of Boston, who deserve better than this dangerous experiment in progressive politics.
But hey, this is what they voted for. Across the country, Democrats keep electing and reelecting the same soft-on-crime politicians, convinced they’re fixing the problem when they’re actually fueling it. It’s as if they’re deliberately running cities into the ground, all while hiding behind empty rhetoric about compassion. The cycle is always the same—Democrats push leniency, crime and disorder explode, and instead of reversing course, they dig in deeper, refusing to admit they were wrong. And it’s happening everywhere, because the same people being hurt by these policies rarely figure out that they can solve it by changing how they vote
Boston’s residents are now paying the price for their leadership’s reckless agenda. The question is, how much worse does it have to get before voters in Boston and all the other liberal cities finally wake up?
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