With the Washington, D.C., murder rate having dropped 70-plus percent since the Trump administration deployed the National Guard to patrol the city’s streets, numerous black lives have been saved. And while most Democratic politicians, other leftists, and establishment media aren’t impressed with this, many black D.C. residents are applauding. Why wouldn’t they? For they are, as one commentator puts it, “living the Singapore life.”
Writing Friday, pundit Andrea Widburg introduces her story, writing:
My daughter recently moved to Singapore after almost a decade living in the upper Midwest. She and I rendezvoused this past weekend in her old haunt (not Chicago). Aside from the sheer pleasure of enjoying her company, what struck me most was her comment when we spent a few hours downtown: “For the first time since I left America, I’ve had that tight feeling of low-level fear in my chest.”
Every person who has spent time in a Democrat-run American city knows that feeling. It’s the feeling you get when you walk past homeless people slouched unconscious in doorways or panhandling on street corners. It’s the tension you feel when you walk past a group of hoodie-wearing young men — and, as Jesse Jackson would have acknowledged, it’s worse when those young men are minorities. It’s the almost existential despair of sidewalks littered with filth, not just paper litter and cigarette butts, but needles, feces, condoms, and other gross disease vectors.
Widburg then points out what should be obvious: It doesn’t have to be this way. She presents two charts, too, illustrating how D.C.’s (and Minneapolis’) homicide rates have changed over time. As for D.C., its rate was just a bit more than 10 per 100,000 residents in 1960. It reached a high of 80 per 100,000 in the early ’90s, during the crack epidemic. It rose to 40 during the George Floyd propaganda period, and still stands in the high 20s today.
Really, though, this understates the relevant societal change’s impact. Just consider, for example, a shocking reality. In 1940s and ’50s New York City, boys would sometimes carry firearms openly on the subways because they attended school riflery clubs. Yet they didn’t commit mass shootings.
Could you imagine doing this today? There might be a stampede.
Then there was the story once told by Thomas Sowell, the 95-year-old black economics professor and commentator. He said that growing up in Harlem, NYC (in the ’30s and ’40s), he never heard a gunshot — ever. Also, Sowell related, he and others slept out on their fire escapes on hot summer nights to stay cool. When he relates these realities to young blacks today, he says, they can’t believe their ears.
There still are places in the world, too, where crime is mostly unknown (and it’s not just brutal North Korea). As to this, Widburg informs about Singapore that it’s
famous for its strictly enforced laws, all of which are intended to create a harmonious environment free of crime and civil strife. If you do the crime, you do the time. There is no wiggle room. Just look at what happened to Michael Peter Fay, an American in Singapore in 1993, or Oliver Fricker, a Swiss national in 2010, if you want to know how that works.
The combination of social and police pressure to conform to the rule of law means that [in] Singapore … following the rules practically guarantees a high-quality, safe lifestyle. Singapore is ranked as the world’s second safest city, second only to Tokyo, which has the advantage of a monoculture, unlike Singapore’s heterogeneous makeup.
To be clear, part of this is explained by demographics. To illustrate this, and in line with the citing of Tokyo’s safe environment, know that Japan has one of the world’s lowest homicide rates. Nonetheless, an old statistic held, Japanese-descent people living in the U.S. had a murder rate half that of Japan’s.
(Explanation? Japanese who come to America tend to be the crème de la crème.)
Widburg proceeds to say that her daughter loves living in a city that strictly enforces just laws. She feels safe, as a woman, even while taking public transportation at midnight. It’s how life is supposed to be.
And now the Trump administration has delivered a measure of this tranquility to D.C. Many city residents are attesting to this, too, as the below videos (courtesy of Widburg) reveal.
Even D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser, perhaps reacting to public sentiment, had to get aboard the Trump train on the “Singaporization.” (Video below.)
What’s so tragic is that it shouldn’t have taken Trump to get this done. This isn’t rocket science. The solution to lawlessness is putting enough “cops” on the street, arresting the miscreants, and punishing them harshly enough to deter crime. Remember, too, that ensuring domestic tranquility (and safeguarding the border) is a most basic government function. If a state cannot or will not secure it, it has neither reason nor right to exist.
It’s also far easier to do the things you should when you’re not doing the things you shouldn’t. That is, left-wing jurisdictions have for too long been focused on social engineering. Consumed with advancing “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” “trans” and “white privilege/supremacy” dogma, and other policy “crimes,” pseudo-leaders cannot tend to bread-and-butter issues. They’re like the parent who’s so strung out on drugs and alcohol that he neglects his children’s safety, education, health, and general well-being. Only, leftist politicians’ addiction is stupidity.
Just imagine how much safer our country would be if big-city Democrats, watching the D.C. miracle, took lessons from it. This won’t happen, though, until big-city residents kick their addiction — to voting for pols addicted to stupidity.