Baltimore, Maryland's top prosecutor, seems to have uncovered a key aspect of his job: Locking up crooks. It seems as though, if you lock up convicted criminals, crime rates drop. Yes, really; many of us have been confronted at one point or another with the laughably stupid leftist claims, "If our crime rates are dropping, why do we have so many people in prison?"
The key, of course, is that crime rates are dropping because the goblins are locked up. A minority of goblins account for a majority of violent crime, and Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates has a good bead on that principle. Good for him.
After years of surging violence, Baltimore’s top prosecutor says the tide is finally turning — because his office is taking repeat violent offenders off the streets.
"We had to let the criminal element know that it was a new day, that there was accountability and that you will go to prison," said Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates told Fox News Digital.
Bates said his crime-fighting platform was built around one promise: go after the people doing the most damage.
"When we came into office two years ago, I ran on a platform of going after repeat violent offenders… those were the individuals that we knew were causing the terror in our communities," he said.
"If you are a violent repeat offender, you are our number one target, our number one focus, and we need to remove you from the street," Bates continued.
These are precisely the people who need to be removed from Baltimore's streets. At least one study - not a poll, an actual scientific analysis of data - done in Sweden, shows that roughly one percent of the population is responsible for 67 percent of violent crimes. The United States Sentencing Commission has a wealth of data on such recidivism among violent offenders.
And, wonder of wonders, if you lock up the violent offenders, violent crime goes down.
According to Bates, there were between 5,000 and 6,000 such offenders in the city. His office zeroed in on illegal gun cases involving convicted felons, using a powerful tool Maryland law already provided.
"In Maryland, if you carry a gun and you’re a repeat violent offender, the state’s attorney’s office could invoke a count that’s a mandatory minimum, which means that you would go to prison a minimum of five years without the possibility of parole," Bates explained. "It’s a minimum mandatory. The previous administration did not invoke those charges, accounts. We did."
It would have been great if the people who kept letting Iryna Zarutska's murderer back out on the street had figured this out.
Baltimore still has problems. It's still a badly-managed blue city, with all the inherent infrastructure, housing, and poverty problems that plague so many of our major cities. But this is, at least, a step in the right direction.
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Baltimore is still a blue city. Maryland, a blue state. Ivan Bates is probably a reliable Democrat voter. But some things should transcend party affiliations, and making the streets of a major American city safe for the citizens is one of those things. If Bates has worked out how to do that, more power to him. Maybe he can bend the ears of other big city prosecutors and convince them that their revolving-door systems are what's wrong with their towns.
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