Over the last couple of months I’ve been looking at the issue of crime in the large US cities controlled – most of them for decades now – by the Democrat Party, and there is no doubt that the reason for all this is not the Chinese Lung Rot pandemic of 2020 or its hangover effects through 2021/22.

No, the reason is the theories about crime control that the Democrats have picked up in the last few years and implemented via legislation and selecting DA’s and other prosecutors to put those into effect.

But where did these ideas come from? Well they began to breed in academic circles twenty years ago, but the real impetus has been via one of the world’s richest men, who has poured huge sums of money into getting those DA’s elected because he also believes in those theories.

That man of course is George Soros and he has actually spoken for himself directly on these issues, in a Wall Street Journal article back in 2022. I strongly urge you to read the whole thing, especially since you’re hearing the same arguments from the Left here in NZ – including the cost of keeping people in jail. It opens with the usual blather of how we need more “thoughtful discussion about our response to crime” and how “People have had enough of the demagoguery and divisive partisan attacks”. Some key excerpts:

Yet our system is rife with injustices that make us all less safe. The idea that we need to choose between justice and safety is false. They reinforce each other: If people trust the justice system, it will work. And if the system works, public safety will improve. We need to acknowledge that black people in the U.S. are five times as likely to be sent to jail as white people. That is an injustice that undermines our democracy.

And when Black people are committing crimes at five times the rate of White people? As just one example, in Chicago an incredible 97% of homicides are committed by Blacks against Blacks.

The research I’ve seen says otherwise. The most rigorous academic study, analyzing data across 35 jurisdictions, shows no connection between the election of reform-minded prosecutors and local crime rates…Murder rates have been rising fastest in some Republican states led by tough-on-crime politicians.

No citation and I can’t locate the 35-jurisdictions study. As for that last claim, it is either ignorance or an outright lie.

We need to invest more in preventing crime with strategies that work—deploying mental-health professionals in crisis situations, investing in youth job programs, and creating opportunities for education behind bars. This reduces the likelihood that those prisoners will commit new crimes after release.
…
It urges that we treat drug addiction as a disease, not a crime. And it seeks to end the criminalization of poverty and mental illness.

Fair enough. Almost everybody could agree to that. But in what way do things like cashless bail, $950 limits before shop-lifting charges are laid, and simply dropping prosecution charges help? Especially when all that would keep people in jail where these treatments can most effectively be applied.

Many of the same people who call for more-punitive criminal-justice policies also support looser gun laws

And all of the Democrats supported by Soros, plus many who were not, demand tougher gun laws even as they regularly release back on to the streets people who break their gun laws. What is really meant by this is getting tougher on people who own guns and don’t commit crime.

This agenda, aiming at both safety and justice, is based on both common sense and evidence. It’s popular. It’s effective. The goal is not defunding the police but restoring trust between the police and the policed, a partnership that fosters the solving of crimes.

It is not effective and it is increasingly unpopular, judging by the Soros DA’s who are either quitting before losing an election, or recalled (as with SF’s Boudin) or simply getting hammered by public opinion but not quitting (Gascon in LA).

This is why I have supported the election (and more recently the re-election) of prosecutors who support reform. I have done it transparently, and I have no intention of stopping. The funds I provide enable sensible reform-minded candidates to receive a hearing from the public. Judging by the results, the public likes what it’s hearing.

Recall that was written in mid-2022 when the voters in Chicago, LA, SF and half-a-dozen other Democrat fiefdoms were under election loss threat. Judging by that statement Soros is simply another fanatic who won’t stop, largely because his wealth insulates him from the fallout of these toxic crime policies.

But there’s no question that there is still a good chunk of Left-wing voters who believe the same stuff, even those who have suffered the most terrible fate as a result, like the father of Jack Merritt, murdered on London Bridge in 2019 by one Usman Khan while both attended a prisoner rehabilitation conference:

Jack Merritt’s father, David Merritt, is still a true believer in Britain’s failed multiculturalist project: he wrote that Jack “would not wish his death to be used as the pretext for more draconian sentences or for detaining people unnecessarily.”

Well, except for the specific agenda of hate that actually ended up killing him. That he didn’t fight against but enabled via his ideas of releasing violent criminals as soon as possible and “coaching” them into living a better life, even when they were Islamic Jihadist terrorists who look for suckers like him all the time.

ITV News reported Saturday that Khan got onto the track that led him to the program [Learning Together] where he killed Jack Merritt when he “penned a letter from his jail cell asking to take part in a deradicalisation course to become ‘a good British citizen.’” Predictably, British authorities, ever anxious to avoid charges of “Islamophobia,” fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Khan’s deceitful cry for help came in October 2012, “after his conviction for plotting to blow up the London Stock Exchange as a member of an al Qaida-inspired group.”

If you read that 2019 article you’ll find that Usman was not alone. Jack, like his Dad, “fought” against the hobgoblins of “Right Wing Extremism” and all the rest of the Left’s fantasy world in which criminals like these ones get back out into society with no practical evidence that they’ve changed. Jack Merritt sounds like he was a really decent guy. I could even imagine having a beer with him, allowing that he might have got very angry dealing with a scum of the earth RWNJ. He did not deserve to die as he did. But his ideas, which are clearly also the ideas of his old man, surely do deserve to die – before they get more people killed.

And as this senior lecturer in criminology says about those ideas and the “liberal” academics that push them:

My own university at Kent, where I lecture in criminology, runs a similar course to the Learning Together one, titled Inside-Out. It is decent and popular and well run, and I know from direct experience just how beneficial such an initiative can be for everyone involved. Criminology students gain a practical understanding of what prison is like from the perspective both of those who run prisons and those who must reside in them, and prison inmates learn how to interact with non-inmates and engage with intellectual materials. But clearly not everyone is a suitable candidate for such a course. And some will no doubt be highly unsuitable: notably, pedophiles, rapists, and recently convicted terrorists
…
There is a certain type of liberal-leftist, however, for whom the business of striking a balance between the rights of the offender and the common good of security will always be stacked in favor of the offender, so inflamed are they by the principled and purifying passion for defending the rights of the underdog. 

No kidding. Back to the USA and non-academics who see every criminal as an underdog – like Burn Loot Murder:

Or this one, which the MSM and BLM almost, but just failed to turn into another George Floyd situation:

BLM seems to have almost collapsed since then, but unfortunately it seems to have been more because people got bored with them rather than because of these terrible cases and others.

Unfortunately the (temporary?) demise of BLM is not much to celebrate in the face of crap like this:

On May 1 2023, according to reports, Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man, entered a New York City subway car and behaved in a threatening manner. Multiple passengers phoned 911, at least one reporting that someone had a gun or a knife. Daniel Penny, a 24-year-old former Marine, immobilized Neely with what has been called a chokehold. At least two other passengers participated in immobilizing Neely, as video shows. Neely was later pronounced dead. Penny’s hold has been blamed for his death. Penny is white; one of two other men restraining Neely appears to be black.

The New York Times ran articles depicting Neely as a Michael Jackson imitator. One article was accompanied by a very attractive photo of Neely, looking harmless. USA Today depicted Neely as a “beloved part of many New Yorkers’ daily commute” The paper quoted Lennon Edwards, a “family lawyer.” “What he could have been, the world will never know … But we do know that he was someone who should have had an opportunity and a chance, a chance to recover – a chance to turn his life around, a chance to fulfill a dream that he had as a child.” Clearly, in this narrative, society never gave Neely a chance. The paper quotes activists alleging that society – white society – “successfully campaigned to keep poor people in jails” and “flooded our subways with cops.” “Neely’s death is the direct result of ‘abandonment and dehumanization of people experiencing homelessness and mental health complexities.’”

The Soros theory again. In fact he’d committed a string of violent crimes, especially against woman, including trying to kidnap a seven-year-old girl, plus lots of drug use. Penny is now on trial for second-degree murder.

As the writer of that article, Danusha Goska points out, she came from poverty in a hard, multi-racial, multi-ethnic American town:

Our town was mostly white but there were blacks, Ramapo Mountain People, Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, Arabs, and Hispanics as well. It wasn’t paradise. My hometown exposed me to the slings and arrows that flesh is heir to. In just three short blocks, I know of four women who had serious mental health or cognitive issues. This was back in the bad old days when doctors would irresponsibly over-prescribe drugs like Thorazine and Miltown. There was substance abuse, domestic abuse, suicides attempted and completed, and the very rare ax murder. Our town was industrial and cancer was ubiquitous. One family seemed targeted by God: cancer, crippling injury, chronic illness. And we were poor.

But therein lies the tale, literally as Goska says, a “narrative”, not of story but society:

There were bad things I could have done, that many kids do, that I never did, because they went against our narrative. Shoplifting. Smoking. Getting drunk. Taking drugs. Teen pregnancy. Skipping homework. Everyone around me, in what they said on these topics, informed me that they went against our narrative. If I did them, I’d feel guilty and ashamed. I would feel that I had taken a step down in status; I’d feel degraded. I would feel that I had hurt and betrayed people to whom I was connected, not just my parents, but my town and my ancestors.

The theory of George Soros and the Left rejects all this and has done so since the Counter-Culture Revolution of the 1960’s. Something that I, to my great regret, once celebrated, all while sitting in the comfortable hindsight of being a decade distant and amidst the comfort of a family, friends and neighbours, who believed and lived an almost opposite narrative.

That narrative is now dead and even when the theory of crime and justice pushed by Soros and the left destroys itself, as it will, what will replace it if those old narratives are gone beyond memory?