Leftists’ intentional failure to prosecute violent criminals in some of the country’s most populous cities is propelling our societal breakdown.
Los Angeles officials revealed this week that in 2021, the city saw its highest number of homicides in 15 years. In addition to skyrocketing murders, Los Angeles is also struggling with an uptick in violence on the county’s railroad tracks, which are frequently targeted by gangs of looters. Since December 2020, some railroad companies have reported a “160% increase in criminal rail theft,” which has resulted in “approximately $5 million in claims, losses and damages” to the train companies alone.
During these raids, teams of looters pull boxes filled with luxury merchandise, Amazon packages, and even medical equipment such as COVID-19 tests and epinephrine pens out of train cars. After picking through the thousands of packages, the scavengers leave the junk in piles on and around the busy tracks.
Union Pacific, the second-largest railroad company in the United States, issued a scathing letter last month scolding the city for failing to control or punish the criminals organizing increasingly popular train raids but to no avail.
With the uptick of train crimes in the last year and a lack of prosecution from progressive district attorneys, Union Pacific said it is evaluating relocating from Los Angeles until the crime problem is properly addressed. Adrian Guerrero, Union Pacific’s director of public affairs, blamed far-left Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon for refusing to prosecute and punish the criminals who raid “over 90 containers” a day.
“Criminals are caught and arrested, turned over to local authorities for booking, arraigned before the local courts, charges are reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense, and the criminal is released after paying a nominal fine,” Guerrero wrote in a letter to Gascon. “These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than twenty-four hours. Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to UP by these same criminals. In fact, criminals boast to our officers that charges will be pled down to simple trespassing — which bears no serious consequence.”
“Without any judicial deterrence or consequence, it is no surprise that over the past year UP has witnessed the significant increase in criminal rail theft described above,” Guerrero added.
Los Angeles certainly isn’t the only city experiencing a terrifying rise in violent and destructive crime. New York, D.C., and Chicago all saw “record-high” murders in 2021 while Philadelphia; Portland, Oregon; Louisville, Kentucky; and Albuquerque, New Mexico, “had their deadliest years on record.”
As Federalist Contributor Kyle Sammin noted in a column at the beginning of this year, “in 2021, Philadelphia shattered the previous record in murders, which was 500 in 1990,” which some attributed to the tumultuous social conditions brought on by the death of George Floyd and COVID-19.
“But crime started rising before anyone in Philly ever heard of Wuhan or George Floyd,” Sammin noted. “Years before that, change was already underway when Philadelphians elected a district attorney determined to do anything but put criminals in jail.”
While Democrats and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s rigged Jan. 6 commission like to claim Republicans endorse and even incite violence, there is no denying that progressives’ soft, leftist policies have ravaged cities and are quickly turning the U.S. into a crime-ridden state.
During the 2020 summer of rage, thousands of rioters sacked cities across the nation, costing taxpayers, business owners, and families up to $2 billion. They looted storefronts, set businesses owned by families for generations on fire, and vandalized government property in the name of “racial justice.” Instead of facing condemnation in the courts or in the public court of opinion, however, many of these violent rioters were bailed out on the recommendation of now-Vice President Kamala Harris and progressive-backed initiatives under lax-on-crime policies implemented by leftist DAs.
This same caveat for crime was applied more recently in Waukesha, Wisconsin, when Darrell Brooks Jr. was let out on exceptionally low bail days before he was charged with murder for using his red SUV to mow down dozens of people and kill multiple adults and even a child at the city’s annual Christmas parade.
The Milwaukee district attorney, whose policies set Brooks free, is a pro-criminal-release leftist who previously said it was “guaranteed” that someone he let off easy would kill somebody someday.
“Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into [a] treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody?” Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm flippantly said to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2007. “You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach.”
Chisolm was unwilling to take responsibility for letting Brooks off the hook days before his deadly crimes but had also expressed an unwillingness to change his policies, which circumvent or eliminate bail requirements for many dangerous criminals.
Some city officials such as San Francisco Mayor London Breed have finally admitted the necessity of a crime crackdown to address “all the bullsh-t that has destroyed our city,” but that sentiment is not shared in other quickly declining urban areas.
Until prosecutors start being tough on crime again or progressive district attorneys are recalled, crime in the country will continue to skyrocket and harm cities already struggling to keep citizens from fleeing poop-littered streets to red states.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordangdavidson.
Source: The Federalist
