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Trump’s News
At this moment, even as
Democrats demand stricter
oversight of cops and call to
“defund the police,” Joe Biden,
author and promoter of the
1994 crime bill, is their
candidate for president. Let
that sink in.
The irony is magnificent. For
decades, liberals have
thundered against the Violent
C r i m e C o n t r o l a n d
Enforcement Act, signed into
law by President Clinton with
the enthusiastic support of his
wife Hillary. The legislation,
now deemed racist by the Left,
toughened sentencing laws,
funded the hiring of 100,000
new police officers and
designated almost $10 billion
for new prison construction.
It passed Congress easily
with, as the Clintons have
argued, the support of the
black community which, at the
time, was combating out-of-
control violence in their
neighborhoods.
And now Biden, who “largely
wrote and shepherded [the bill]
through the legislative
process,” according to the
Annenberg Public Policy
Center, is the standard-bearer
for the party that wants to
dismantle every aspect of that
law.
That is not the only irony we
see today. In addressing the
cruel killing of George Floyd,
and pushing for more oversight
of cops across the nation,
Democrats – champions of
organized labor – are citing
police unions as major hurdles
to reform.
In a recent piece, the New
York Times says the unions
“use their outsize political
power” to keep cops from
POLITICS
being held accountable and
huffs that, “A single New York
City police union has spent
more than $1 million on state
and local races since 2014.”
Unions, the Times reports,
stand in the way of getting rid of
bad actors. Yes, they do. And
we could say the same for the
teachers' unions, which do
exactly the same, and which
gave tens of millions of dollars
to Democrats running for office
in 2016.
Biden is a big promoter of
unions; he promises on his
campaign site to “Encourage
and incentivize unionization
and collective bargaining.”
Maybe now he'll need a
footnote excepting police
unions.
Policies sometimes move
from one extreme to another,
and such is the case today with
law enforcement.
Rather than focusing on the
devastation of our cities, the
nation's outrage over the killing
of George Floyd is now
directed toward harnessing the
police.
Some Democrats have
heeded the call. Los Angeles
Mayor Eric Garcetti made a big
show of slicing his city's law
enforcement budget, though
some have noted that LA's dire
fiscal outlook made such cuts
inevitable and characterized
the move as political theatrics.
New York City Mayor Bill de
Blasio, who was booed by
protesters recently for having
defended his city's cops, caved
to critics and recently tweeted,
“This morning we committed to
move resources from the
NYPD to youth and social
services as part of our City's
Liz Peek: Can Joe 'Crime Bill'
Biden lead Dems seeking to
defund police, challenge
unions?
By Liz Peek | Fox News
budget.”
Much as the nation is
disgusted by the death of
George Floyd and other
apparent misdeeds targeting
b l a c k s , h i s t o r y s h o w s
Americans will not tolerate
public officials who fail to keep
our streets safe.
This, even as recent
experiments with dumbing
down law enforcement have
spectacularly backfired.
Last year New York state
passed controversial “bail
reform” legislation, which
designated a long list of crimes
for which people could no
longer be jailed. The new
policies took effect at the start
of this year, triggered a surge in
crime, and almost overnight
b e c a m e a p o l i t i c a l
embarrassment.
The NYPD has blamed the
new no-bail rules for a 20
percent spike in crime since
the legislation took effect. They
claimed that in the first three
months of the year 482 people
arrested were released from
custody only to commit 846
new crimes, of which 299 were
“major” felonies, including one
murder.
Seeing the catastrophe they
had unleashed, the brainiacs
behind this idiocy attempted to
clean up their handiwork. They
failed to fix the mess, which is
why even as the NYPD
arrested hundreds of looters
smashing New York City to bits
on recent nights, those
criminals were swinging
through the revolving doors of
New York justice back onto the
streets, mostly within hours of
being detained.
Some 59 percent of New
York residents have soured on
the bail reform initiative and
even the hapless de Blasio, at
the urging of his police, has
called for changes in the law.
And that was before the chaos
of recent days.
Democrats want to take their
softer-on-crime approach
national. Legislators in the
House are beavering away on
a new bill aimed at tougher,
federally mandated police
“reform.” They want to
eliminate certain police
methods, such as chokeholds,
prohibit the transfer of military
weapons to the police, and
make it easier to prosecute
misconduct. The law is called
the “Justice in Policing Act of
2020”; the New York Times
describes it as “the most
aggressive intervention into
policing in recent memory.”
Biden, speaking after the
death of George Floyd, called
for some of the same
measures. That is surely a far
cry from his tone in 1994 when
he voted to put more cops on
the street and expand prisons.
This is dangerous territory,
both literally and politically.
When the thugs destroying
stores in Manhattan and
Brooklyn learned there would
effectively be no penalties for
their misbehavior, they went
right back out and did it again
the next night. Such laws do
not protect our citizens.
Meanwhile, the mayor of
Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, a civil
rights lawyer elected to mend
the relationship between the
police and the city, is learning
the hard way that it is not easy
to appease the mob. The
Times reports that the 38-year-
old Democrat got a “stinging
rebuke” from a “sea of
protesters” chanting “Shame!”
“Shame” recently, when he
confessed that, “I do not
support the full abolition of the
police.”
Imagine. Abolishing the
police department.
Democrats, including Joe
Biden, are on shaky ground
here. Much as the nation is
disgusted by the death of
George Floyd and other
apparent misdeeds targeting
b l a c k s , h i s t o r y s h o w s
Americans will not tolerate
public officials who fail to keep
our streets safe. (See: Nixon in
1968.)
Nor should they.