THE MISSING PIECE

With crime and violence rates surging all across America, people are in search of ways to stem the record number of murders, aggravated assaults (non-fatal shootings) robberies, auto thefts and carjackings. The number one solution being offered to this by policy makers is to throw money at it in the form of social engineering projects like so-called second chance programs, job training and behavior modification programs for career criminals. These are not novel, never-before-tried efforts. These are the same old attempts that have never had much impact previously.  They instead are the same warmed-up leftovers from the past rebranded as new and improved. Renaming something that did not work before gives it no better chance of working the second time around.

Public safety is the first and highest priority of all levels of government. Federal, state and local governments have a vested interest in reasonably securing the personal safety of citizens. A long time ago, we allowed the individual citizen to provide for their own safety. Citizens were their own arbiters of how to carry out justice. People at one point in our history then agreed to turn this over to the government for more consistent and just application of the law. From that point forward, turning our safety over to the government made a crime a violation against society, not the individual. The government would handle this through state prosecution of criminals. It generally works. At least it did up until recently.

The leftists have co-opted our criminal justice system and have bastardized the law. They have decriminalized unlawful behavior that we once considered abhorrent and unacceptable in a civilized society. This same insidious bunch convinced many that our criminal justice system was inherently racist. They refer to jails and prisons as oppressive and with a hidden objective of enslaving black people. It is called the new Jim Crow.

As if that wasn’t bad enough from outside the criminal justice system, now they have infiltrated inside the system.

As you know, the criminal justice system is composed of four elements. It starts with the police who begin the process by an arrest, then it moves to the prosecution stage, then onto the courts. The final player in this system is corrections. In order for this process to be successful in keeping society safe, the entities involved have to each perform their role competently and consistently. It doesn’t solely matter how many people are arrested by police. At any point in this process, an arrestee can be processed out of the system for any number of reasons. I have no problem if there is a better more reasonable way of dealing with an arrest short of a criminal charge being issued and/or a person being sentenced to jail or prison. It’s not a rubber stamp. Prosecutors and judges do have discretion. That discretion currently is being abused. This has turned into a one-size-fits-all. Criminal history no longer matters. Career criminals are given the same leniency as a first-time offender. Even if a person is charged with an offense, there is an over-reliance on probation with no time served. Additionally, serious charges are watered down to misdemeanors and other included charges are dropped in exchange for a plea bargain. These options create what we call the revolving door of criminal justice. Repeat criminals are not deterred from engaging in the same behavior if they are not adequately punished for their criminal behavior. They see that the justice system will not adequately stop them, so they conclude there is no incentive to stop.

The biggest area of the failure of the criminal justice system today is in prosecution. In order for a system to work, each component therein must do its part. I like to use the analogy of a car engine. Let me ask you what the most important part of a car engine is. The answer is the part that isn’t working, because if any one part of the engine isn’t working, the car won’t start of run properly. We’re seeing that with the prosecutors offices all across the United States. Here is some stunning data to emphasize how bad things have become.

Several years ago, billionaire socialist businessman George Soros started a project to weaken America by attacking our criminal justice process. He spent millions on an effort to elect state prosecutors and district attorneys who are called woke. They ran on platforms of pledging to not charge criminals. This is their idea of criminal justice reform. They set policies of no bail for persons arrested even for serious offenses. These two elements have destroyed communities’ efforts to keep crime under control. They have been on this jihad for several years now. We are seeing the success of their mission to weaken America. 

New data is rolling in on several Soros-supported state prosecutors’ efforts to live up to their campaign promise of going soft on crime. A study done by the Manhattan Institute shows that 69% of criminal cases reviewed for prosecution by the New York City prosecutor’s office have been tossed out. This is up from 44% in 2019. They refuse to issue charges. Let that sink in. Sixty-nine percent. At the same time the study points out that felony arrests by police have fallen by 14% when shootings rose by 102% and murders rose by 51%. To deny a correlation here is to deny reality. There is no doubt that police have become frustrated with the prosecutor’s office not charging suspects. Why should they bother?  And it is not only in New York. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a news report details that 60% of felony cases that are forwarded for prosecution are not charged. Additionally, 80% of misdemeanor charges are dropped. The elected district attorney, John Chisholm, another woke politically active prosecutor, has previously professed his allegiance to decriminalizing unlawful behavior. All of this is anathema to what was being done to control and prevent crime in the ‘90s. Order maintenance strategies were enacted that had all four components of the criminal justice system working together and complimenting each other. Arrests were up, as were prosecutions. Courts handed down longer periods of confinement and guess what? We experienced historic record lows of crime and violence. Imagine that.

This version of a criminal justice system is broken. The broken part of the engine is at the prosecution stage. Until that part functions properly, nothing that the police do will control prevent and deter crime. This philosophy by prosecutors basically eliminates the courts and corrections phase. These cases never see the inside of a courtroom or end up before a judge although courts have become dysfunctional too. The ironic part of all of this is that prosecutors’ offices are asking for more money in their budgets whining about a lack of resources.

 Somebody in a legislative body that approves budgets or in the media needs to ask the question begging to be asked. More money for what?

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of Americas Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com