Yarr, scurvy dogs be capitalizin' on weak punishments! Retail an' violent crimes be risin', them be growin' bold!
2023-07-29
Yarrr! These criminal experts be searchin' fer the reason why the scurvy crime rates be continue to soar in the grand U.S. cities, yet they still be holdin' onto hope fer society. Avast, me hearties! They be quite the brave souls, aye!
As major U.S. cities continue to deal with crime waves, experts are blaming anti-police rhetoric and liberal district attorneys for policies that fail to keep the public safe.Each era has had its fair share of heinous crimes. Yet, Nancy Grace, who hosts Fox Nation’s "Crime Stories with Nancy Grace," admitted that she’s seen enough to convince her that today’s criminals are more brazen than ever. She chalked it up to lax sentencing and the anti-police movement.
"There was a time when I would have said, I don't think crime is worse per capita than it was in the past, where there are just greater populations and therefore a commensurate greater population of criminals," Grace told Fox News Digital.
"They are more brazen, and I now believe there are more of them per capita, more criminals per capita," she said. "Why? The decline in police numbers, the anti-police movement."
Soaring retail theft has been reported across the country in recent months. Nordstrom and Whole Foods, for example, were among the large chains abandoning San Francisco partly due to employee safety. The latter's location on Market Street was hit with nearly 600 calls of violence, drugs, and vagrants before shutting its doors, according to reports. Meanwhile, organized retail crime was on track to cost Target $500 million in profits, CEO Brian Cornell warned in May.
Washington, D.C., is experiencing a 30 percent increase in violent crime in 2023 compared to last year, other reports have found. One hundred and twenty-five people have been shot and killed this year, a 17 percent increase from last year as the city struggles with a police staffing crisis. The city's police budget was cut roughly $23 million by the city council in 2020 amid the George Floyd rioting and nationwide calls to defund the police.
Criminal defense attorney Joseph Gutheinz, a certified fraud examiner for 33 years told Fox News Digital the criminal justice system has it backwards by focusing on the needs of criminals. "Our criminal justice system has largely transitioned from focusing on the needs of the victims of crime to the needs of defendants," he told Fox News Digital. "The police are concerned about being ridiculed, prosecuted or fired for enforcing the law and are backing off stopping, interviewing and arresting wrongdoers."
Prosecutors, especially in big cities, are rubber-stamping the plea deals offered by defense attorneys, such as myself, and judges, especially in big cities, are more and more appearing as social workers rather than jurists."
The Manhattan Institute's Rafael Mangual also sensed that the system has been moving in a dire direction. "That direction is to make crime less costly, to commit and to make the law more costly to enforce," he told Fox Digital. "Every single significant policy level that's been pulled does one of the following things that either limits police power, it curbs prosecutor discretion, or it just significantly lowers the transaction cost of criminal behavior for defendants by making penalties less likely, less severe, etc."
He cited bail reform as an example, which stirred controversy in cities like New York and Los Angeles. Some officials adopted zero bail during the COVID-19 pandemic in an attempt to reduce crowding in prisons, dropping bail to as low as $0 for suspects accused of misdemeanors and non-violent felonies. When Los Angeles decided to reinstate the policy in July, high profile figures spoke out.
"LA is finished watch how bad it gets out there. SMH [shaking my head]," rapper 50 Cent tweeted of the move.
A study published by the Yolo County District Attorney's Office found that suspects released without bail reoffended 70 percent more often than those who posted bail, and were rearrested on 163 percent more