Yes We Can!

Pardon me for hijacking a phrase made popular by the cop hater in chief, former president Barack Obama as he campaigned for office in 2008. It is very appropriate however in what I am about to write about.

When Obama became president, he appointed a cop hating Attorney General, Eric Holder who spent 8 years on a jihad against local police agencies and their officers. Commencing pattern and practice investigations caused a ripple effect where cops pulled back their efforts to fight crime. This caused residents to lose faith in law enforcement’s ability to prevent and control crime and keep communities safe. More and more residents and businesses stopped reporting crime or coming forward as witnesses as response times grew longer and calls to 9-1-1 centers went unanswered.

Crime fighting is an activity. It is not a passive state. We need to have officers be on offense in an assertive fashion to keep criminals on the run. One of the tenets of broken windows policing is to displace crime from your beat, your sector or precinct and into the next. If the police in a neighboring area are policing assertively, criminals will not find it as a safe haven either to conduct their illegal operations. The goal is make them feel squeezed to where they have fewer opportunities to commit crime. Opportunity is one of the elements necessary for a crime to occur. Arrests and prosecutions ensure that the perpetrators are kept off the streets. Falling crime rates usually follow. This order maintenance strategy stopped at the state and local level. Effective tactics like stop, question and frisk were demonized as intentionally racially based. Never mind that black males were disproportionally committing the violent crime and even the non violent crime that neighborhoods were experiencing. No bail policies were enacted. It was an era of pro criminal policies. That era is coming to an end with President Trump.

The election of the most pro police president in the last half century began in 2016. It stopped under President Biden. It has been renewed with the re-election of Donal J Trump. We can confidently say that there is a new sheriff in town once again.

Renowned researcher and author Heather Mac Donald, a Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the think tank Manhattan Institute, is the preeminent authority on policing in America in my view. Her many columns focus on urban crime, its causes and remedies to control and prevent it. In a recent post she pointed out that most of the urban crime we see is the result of failed progressive policies by state and local elected officials. She indicates that Trump and his new attorney general Pam Bondi are limited as to the effect they can have on local policing. She points out that, Trump cannot order district attorneys in New York or elsewhere to prosecute low-level crimes or seek long sentences for repeat offenders or pay attention to public disorder. This may be true, however I will offer a strategy that will yield tremendous results in reducing incidents of crime, violence and disorder at the local level.

Let me take a page from Border Czar Tom Homan’s strategy on tackling the enormous undertaking of removing the estimated twenty million people illegally in the country. He is starting with removing the criminal element first. I suggest a reverse of the Broken Windows philosophy. This theory is premised on working on the lower level incidents of disorder like misdemeanors, vandalism and other nuisance crimes with the belief that it will ultimately trickle up and reduce violent crime. The reverse of Broken Windows has police focus on going after the most serious violent offenders first. Why?

As Ms. Mac Donald pointed out, the feds cannot do much to prosecute low level offenses but they can use their vast resources to prosecute violent offenders. This was done with initiatives like Project Safe Neighborhood and Project Triggerlock in the nineties where task forces were set up with local, state and federal officers focusing on going after violent offenders, gang and drug dealers.  A prosecution task force of local prosecutors and  US Attorneys obtained federal indictments subjecting perps to be prosecuted in federal court. Using tools like the Armed Career Criminal Act that deters recidivism and Felon In Possession Of A Firearm and the Racketeering statute make prosecution more certain. If found guilty in federal court or in a plea agreement, they faced mandatory minimum sentencing under the federal code. This meant they faced more certain sentencing with longer prison in a federal institution far away from where they lived. It also meant more consistent sentencing. Mandatory minimum sentencing takes away watered down sentences and placement on probation. Crime during the nineties dropped precipitously during this period.

This new attitude of no tolerance for gun crime and gang and drug crime will send an effective deterrence message to lower level offenders. Keep in mind that most people starting out on a career criminal path do so by committing lower level offense eventually progressing on to committing more serious crime. Now they will know what lies ahead on this criminal career trajectory instead of the soft on crime approach in low level crimes that sends a message that no one will punish you for your unwanted behavior.

Another option that AG Bondi has at her disposal is to notify all state and local law enforcement that all federal dollars must be spent on crime fighting activities. Every dollar has to prevent and reduce crime. State and local agencies receive millions in federal subsidies to fill out budget shortfalls. She should suspend all dollars being spent on useless community policing activities and direct them toward crime fighting activities. It is time to end this nonsense that community policing activities help anything. The best way to improve relationships with communities, especially in crime ridden minority neighborhoods is to reduce crime, violence and disorder. Making people feel safe in their homes, schools and on their streets is how you regain the trust of the community.

Yes we can do this. The question is not how. It is whether local agencies and elected officials have the will.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of America’s 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