Redefining crime to deny reality
It’s a sad fact that in the US there are differences in the rates of violent crime commission and victimization according to race. Race is hardly the only factor influencing criminality, though; there’s also poverty, fatherlessness, education level, and of course sex (male) and age (late teens or young adult) But race is another independent variable.
I happen to think the reasons are socio-cultural rather than genetic. But it really doesn’t matter for the purposes of this post, and I’m not going to solve or even discuss that issue now. What I do want to remark on is the reaction to the fact of these racial disparities, and one reaction that is getting more and more common nowadays is to redefine offenses and recalibrate the law’s response to them in order to minimize or even erase those racial disparities. I don’t think this does the black victims of crime any favors at all, but it’s the type of ritual those in power like to perform as a gesture of virtue-signaling.
As part of this trend, Illinois has passed a law entitled the Safe-T Act, banning automatic bail-setting in the entire state for offenses except the most dangerous, and implementing certain other changes including how trespassing is handled. These changes are due to go into effect the first of January. Here’s a brief description:
“It’s opening the door for the anti-police activist community and the attorneys that represent them that are anti-police,” retired Chicago Police Department Chief of Detectives Eugene Roy told Fox News Digital about the Safety Accountability and Fairness Equity Today Act (Safe-T Act), which is set to be enacted in January 2023 after being pushed through the Democrat-controlled Illinois legislature in the final hours of a lame-duck session and signed by the state’s Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
Roy took issue with several aspects of the bill beyond the one eliminating cash bail, including one that eliminates the requirement that officers accused of misconduct be told the identity of their accuser as well as the identity of the official who is investigating them.
“The problem that nobody sees or turns a blind eye to is the effect on morale, recruiting and retention,” Roy said. “Anybody can just make a complaint against an officer…
Napolitano [alderman of Chicago’s 41st ward] added that police he has spoken with oppose the Safe-T Act and say it will make it even harder for them to do their jobs.
“They don’t even want to, they’re almost wasting pen ink writing paperwork or typing because states attorneys are downgrading charges, judges are throwing charges out. This is pure nonsense for anyone to support the Safe-T Act.”
Illinois, specifically the city of Chicago, has been struck by skyrocketing crime since 2020, and at the same time arrests are dropping to historic lows due in part to sweeping changes being made to how police are allowed to pursue criminals and to prosecutors having a tighter grip on approving felony charges…
“Under the new law, entire categories of crimes such as aggravated battery, robbery, burglary, hate crimes, aggravated DUI, vehicular homicide, drug induced homicides, all drug offenses, including delivering fentanyl and trafficking cases, are not eligible for distinction, no matter the severity of the crime or the defendant’s risk to a specific person or the community unless prosecutors prove by convincing evidence that a person has a high likelihood of flight to avoid prosecution,” Smith [manager of the Supreme Court and Appellate Advocacy Program in the Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center] said. “When you read that list, that’s shocking.”
The article also states the 100 out of 102 elected county state’s attorneys in Illinois are against the bill. That’s nearly 100%.
There’s also been a flurry of articles from the left purporting to “debunk” what they label right-wing lies or propaganda about the bill. Here’s a link to one of them. See if you think this is a debunking of the statements on the right:
People accused of those charges [such as second-degree murder, arson, and burglary] can still be held pretrial if a judge determines that they are a flight risk, if they are in violation of their parole or probation, or if they are already on pretrial release for a previous charge.
I haven’t seen anyone claim it would be impossible to detain people by setting bail for those offenses, just that it would become very difficult to do so because the new presumption would be for no bail and the exceptions (flight risk, etc.) would have to be affirmatively proven. So the “debunking” is the debunking of a strawman, as far as I can tell
Concerning trespassing, the article says the following:
CLAIM: The SAFE-T Act prohibits police officers from arresting someone for trespassing.
FACT: The SAFE-T Act does require police officers to ticket people accused of low-level offenses, including criminal trespass to property, unless they pose an obvious threat to themselves or the community. That means police officers still have the discretion to arrest someone if they determine that they threaten public safety.
The act doesn’t make it absolutely impossible to make such an arrest. It just makes it very difficult and unlikely. The new normal will be to not arrest a person for trespassing, even criminal trespass, unless some sort of extra-special dangerousness can be proven. The entire balance is shifted in favor of non-arrest.
At Ace’s, I found a quote from this article by Suzi Weiss (whom I believe may be Bari Weiss’s sister, although I’m not sure) that I think encapsulates the reasoning behind a great deal of this. Here she’s quoting a young activist leftist in Park Slope, Brooklyn:
“Crime is an abstract term that means nothing in a lot of ways,” said Sky. “The construct of crime has been so socially constructed to target black and poor people.”
Remember that old saying from Irving Kristol [not Bill; Irving, his father] about being “mugged by reality”? In the following quote, what he meant by “neoconservative” was the old meaning of the word – that is, someone who used to be a liberal but became conservative:
A neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality but has refused to press charges.
Or who wants to redefine reality.
I am wondering what will happen to the young people, under 30 who are living in the culture where there are no consequences for their actions, they have become the Post-Modern Metro Pirates, rape, loot, pillage and plunder, get caught and released and where will it end? Can a person brought up in those circumstance learn to be a cautious, law abiding, family person working responsibly for his or her personal future? There are a lot of mad Metro Pirates out there who, it seems, don’t have to answer to anyone and how will that work out? I don’t have any answers and barely know the questions.
The Suzy Weiss (yes she is Bari’s sister) piece is something else. There were people seriously asking if this was parody or real.
Those legislators who passed this bill, plus of course the Governor have now forfeited any claim they might make in disputing their complicity in the crimes they have enabled.
Since legal redress of grievance is now impossible in Illinois, sooner or later, vigilante justice will arise.
Until consequence for these individuals is personal, the insanity will continue.
Let’s see what that young activist leftist says when the abstract notion of crime mugs him, beats the shit out of him, steals his phone and wallet and requires he spend some quiet time in the hospital.
One can only hope
Do I wish he gets mugged, severely beaten and sent off to recuperate in the hospital?
You bet I do.
Those who are in accord with his views and actually have the authority to implement the policy he espouses have no problem whatsoever freeing dangerous criminals that attack and severely injure or kill innocent people. There is not one word of remorse , not on iota of regret from people like this leftist POS activist.
They are truly evil people. In pursuit of their dangerous ideology, they are literally sentencing innocent people to death; killed by criminals who face zero punishment for their crimes.
On second thought, let’s hope all those near and dear to this leftist also wind up in the hospital; victims of abstract crime.
I wonder how often he or his loved ones must be victimized by this abstraction before he determines that this abstraction results in very real consequences. .
Talk about redefining reality. Letitia James, the NY DA, claimed Trump overstated the value of his property to obtain cheaper insurance. I always thought that if your real estate was more expensive, you paid more for insurance because the insurance company was taking the risk of a higher loss. Is this DA for real? Where does foolishness turn into fraud?
what is really the purpose, the stated reason can’t be the one, so one has to conclude that demolition of the country, is the point,
Letitia James: a perfect example of the downside of affirmative action.
Neo– Typo: Park Slope,
BrookynBrooklynNew York passed bail reform laws much like this at the beginning of 2020, and it has been an unmitigated disaster — though you won’t get most liberals to agree with you on that. Did you hear about the guy who recently got into a dispute with another customer in a McDonald’s in NYC, pulled out an ax, brandished it at patrons and smashed up walls, counters and tables? He was arrested and charged — and immediately released without bail. There are countless examples of criminals getting released for serious offenses, often violent crimes, and immediately offending again. And of course you’ve seen the statistics on the escalating crime rates in NY.
One confounding element is that New York does not permit judges to consider public safety in setting bail. In other words, the likelihood that a violent offender might hurt somebody again (like a madman who just yesterday threatened a bunch of McDonald’s customers with an ax) simply does not count, at all, in deciding whether or how high to set bail. Even before bail reform, NY judges could only consider factors like flight risk in deciding bail. That limitation is still in place now, along with new laws that prohibit setting any bail at all for most offenses and limit it drastically for the few where bail can be set. It’s the only state in the union, I believe, that handcuffs judges in this way. Unique New York, indeed.
Now it must be said most people probably agree that New York’s bail laws did need some kind of reform, if not as drastic as this. It’s true that many very poor defendants, often juveniles, were being held before trial for ridiculously long periods on minor offenses because they could not afford their bail, while wealthier people walked on much greater offenses. One major force that fueled bail reform (along with a number of needed changes in New York’s juvenile delinquency laws) was the suicide of Kalief Browder after he was released from Riker’s Island jail in NYC. He had been arrested at age 16 on suspicion of stealing a backpack and then held for THREE YEARS without trial, apparently long after the prosecution knew they had no case against him. Of course he suffered what you’d expect a teenaged boy to suffer when locked up for years with a bunch of violent adult criminals. There are too many horrendous details to list but it was an indefensible nightmare (NYC later paid $3.3 million to his family). And as you can imagine, his story — and too many others like it, if not quite so dreadful — made it hard for conservative legislators to argue back against progressives’ claims that NY’s bail laws needed drastic reform.
But the real progressive goal, of course, wasn’t just to reform bail but to end “mass incarceration.” So they didn’t stop with bail reform — they also reformed criminal pretrial discovery rules in ways that make prosecution far more difficult. As just one example, the prosecution must turn over the names of all witnesses to the defense before trial — can you imagine how that works out in a gang-related case, or a drug trial? Predictably, nobody wants to testify now. In my own county, criminal prosecutions — not to mention arrests — have pretty much ground to a halt. In the next county over, the DA has announced that he won’t run again because the new laws mean he can’t do the job he was elected to do. He says the criminals are now running the system.
So there we are. You’d think other states might watch and learn. But apparently, in Illinois at least, they’ve learned all the wrong things.
Mrs. Whatsit,
New York went from one extreme to the other.
The Constitution requires a speedy trial.
So the smart response should have been to create more courts to handle cases quicker, and/ or make the other courts more efficient and examine the defendants previous criminal history when setting bail – first timer verses repeat offenders.
And they should have gone to lower cash bails for poor people, not “ no cash bail”.
Now look how long the Jan 6 defendants are being held without trial. The system is messed up, but the democrats do not know how to fix it.
It is like we are stuck between extremes.
The crazy left on one side and people on the right , like Sean Hannity, and Trump who support “ Stop and Frisk”.
“Stop and Frisk “ was a horrendous Supreme Court ruling that undermined both the Second and Fourth Amendments.
If we would stick to Constitutional principles we would be better off.
Why because the times and the aclu concurred ‘stop and frisk’ was bad.
In the middle of florida they had a soros da ayala who was agregiously bad she was replaced by another one who was lower profile but still dangerous
Ayala is running as the democratic candidate for atty general!
Miguel,
“ Why”, because I have read the second and fourth Amendments.
And I am a southern conservative, not a New York “ conservative” like Trump or Hannity. I have been around guns my entire life. My first weapon to shoot, besides a BB gun, was a 22 rifle that my grandfather purchased when he was young. My dad hunted with that rifle when he was a kid. When it came time to graduate to shotguns, as a pre teen boy, my dad became visibly angry when I expressed fear of the “ kick” or recoil from a shotgun. He made me shoot that shotgun. Gun culture is deeply ingrained in both my maternal and paternal lines. Every boy is taught how to use firearms from an early age.
I can only imagine how much animosity is created by cops throwing people up against the wall and searching them for weapons.
I am a white guy. The only time cops ever threatened to arrest me it was two black cops. More than two decades ago I was in a black neighborhood , perhaps naively in my zealous youth, trying to help a black girl that was a drug addict. Black cops threatened to arrest me for being at the wrong house. I can sympathize with blacks thrown up against a wall in NYC. To this day , I am always concerned about being near black cops.
I suspect “ Stop and Frisk” helped to create some of the “ social justice” narrative.
I said “ pre teen”. I am not sure of the exact age, and it was only a 410 bore shotgun. Dad did not want me to be afraid to move to the next level.
In these cities and counties with lenient judges and prosecutors, the police complain that they’re arresting the same group of people over and over. The cops know who the habitual criminals are. When you get most of them off the streets, things calm down rathe markedly.
Mayors, county executives, and governors have to BACKTHE BLUE. That means warning the criminals in your jurisdiction that resisting arrest is a crime, and it could get you injured or killed because the police are authorized to use whatever force is necessary to make the arrest. Further letting criminals know that they will receive speedy and firm justice. When these Democrat officials fail to back the police, it destroys morale and signals the crooks that they can get away with murder.
Many cities, Seattle is one, are now unable to recruit the policemen they need to effectively enforce the law. Being a cop is a dangerous, difficult job. Why would anyone choose it if the officials responsible for leading the law and older effort aren’t on their side?
Again, the Gods of the Copybook Headings will have their say.
Were this article half as long, I would have assumed it was from the Bee. It’s just too deliciously ironic not to assume it’s parody.
“Crime is an abstract term that means nothing in a lot of ways,” said Sky. “The construct of crime has been so socially constructed to target black and poor people.”
…I mean….come on! The best satirist couldn’t write a more perfect snippet.
Marxists unleashing their army onto the public
Isn’t it ironic every Leftist acronym is implied to be the opposite it really is?
CCW revolvers “leave no brass behind”