The Free State of Florida Is Also Safe

C rime is skyrocketing across the country — but not in Florida. After the Covid-19 pandemic started and the George Floyd killing led to riots in one city after another, many local officials embraced “Defund the Police” and other soft-on-crime approaches, with disastrous results. But in Florida, Democrats and Republicans alike realized that personal safety is an overriding human need. And they delivered. That is another reason that residents of other states are voting with their feet and moving to the Free State of Florida.

The “Defund the Police” movement began in 2020 with self-designated “autonomous zones,” where police were barred from parts of Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis. Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan welcomed the officially sponsored anarchy as a “summer of love.” Shootings and murders proliferated along with allegations of sexual assault, and a quickly brewing mental-health crisis was being reported, but there was no one to investigate. The experiment was an utter failure, as each zone logged record crime rates. The inmates were running the asylum.

The failed result did not deter calls to “defund the police,” and 21 cities voted to do so. The results have been disastrous. In 2020, murders skyrocketed by 63 percent in Seattle, 43 percent in New York City, and 150 percent in Chula Vista, outside San Diego. The major city with the biggest crime increase during the pandemic appears to be Austin, Texas, where the murder rate rose 48 percent in 2020, and another 86 percent in 2021. In 22 major U.S. cities, murders increased 44 percent from 2019 to 2021.

Miami, too, was tested by protests in 2020. But the police in Miami did not allow the state’s monopoly of force to be contested by criminals. Violent protesters were arrested and prosecuted for aggravated assault. Video of police officers forcefully responding to protesters attacking their vehicle went viral and helped make clear that law and order would be preserved.

Protests across Florida quickly petered out, and the results are now in: Bucking the national trend, Miami saw violent crime drop significantly in 2021 after rising in 2020, with the murder rate falling more than 15 percent.

Despite the spectacular failure of their policies, officials in blue states have doubled down. In Los Angeles, where rail theft has increased 356 percent, Union Pacific says its patrolling officers have arrested more than 100 people in the past few months, but none have been prosecuted by LA District Attorney George Gascon, who issued special directives that, unless it is committed with violence, a felony be reduced to a misdemeanor with no jail time. Defunding the police doesn’t just limit the number of available police. It also creates a disincentive for the police to perform their duties at all.

New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg believes, along with his LA counterpart, that nonviolent crimes do not need prosecution. Bragg was recently called out by the widow of Jason Rivera, a young policeman who, along with his partner Wilbert Mora, was gunned down responding to a domestic-violence call in January. “We are not safe anymore, not even members of the service,” Dominique Luzuriaga, Rivera’s widow, said in her eulogy. “I know we are tired of these laws [a reference to Bragg’s memo to prosecutors that nonviolent felonies will not be charged], especially from the new DA. I hope he [Rivera] is watching. You speak through me right now!” So far in 2022, 19 police officers have been shot dead in the line of duty, and 71 have been shot and wounded.

We have been here before. New York became a mess during the administration of Mayor John Lindsay, worsening under Abe Beame, and cratering under Ed Koch and David Dinkins. In 1994, Rudy Giuliani became mayor and tackled all crime, not allowing small crimes to go unanswered, using the broken-windows theory of policing advanced by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. He was the architect of New York’s turnaround, and it was followed and improved by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. These two men for 20 years created a safer city year after year, attracting talent from all over the world. It was not until Mayor Bill de Blasio’s “hands off” approach and inevitable call to defund the police that violent crime escalated across the city in 2020 and 2021.

Crime does not go away because you don’t incarcerate. Those left in crime-infested neighborhoods will simply move to where law and order are respected, if they have the means. In the past year, New York State lost 319,000 citizens, or 1.6 percent of its population, as people flee crime and lockdowns, which have made life unlivable for many. California has lost a congressional seat because of its declining population. Meanwhile, Florida gained 211,000 residents, and Texas 310,000, both considered law-and-order states.

When I was elected to the Board of Commissioners of the City of Miami in 2006, the city had only 1,151 uniformed officers. But the city was growing, and the police chief at the time, John Timoney, determined that the city needed to grow the force. Today we are at 1,400, and our government officials support them. In other states, rioters were allowed to burn and loot and run rampant, but in Florida they were arrested and prosecuted. While the rest of the country defunded police, Miami and the State of Florida did the opposite.

Now Miami and the state are enjoying the benefits. In 2017, Miami was named startup capital of the United States. In the second quarter of 2021, Miami created more tech jobs than any major U.S. city. Nearly $1 billion in venture capital flowed into Miami in the first half of 2021, and another $1.36 billion in the third quarter. In the first half of 2021, tech jobs in south Florida soared by 29 percent.  In Forbes’s 2021 ranking of emerging tech hubs, Tampa and Miami were Nos. 1 and 2, respectively. We are now recognized as the tech and financial center of the Southeast, and of Latin America.

If you provide safety with a fertile business environment, the private sector will reward your city with job growth and a widening of your tax base. Miami has become a prime destination for people fleeing far-left policies in California, New York, and elsewhere. The formula is simple, as Mayor Francis Suarez said in an interview in the Wall Street Journal last fall: “Don’t tax more than you have to. Government shouldn’t constantly be in our pocket. Use technology to make everything run better.” And, crucially: “Invest more in policing, not less.”

There was a time when Democrats understood these realities. After the crime wave of the 1980s, President Clinton signed the Crime Control Bill of 1994, of which Joe Biden was the main sponsor in the Senate. Fearing a left-wing backlash, Biden walked away from that bill during the 2020 campaign. But he should have feared the backlash from mainstream America more. Crime is now polling as the second-biggest concern for Americans (inflation being the primary issue). Pocketbook issues and crime will be driving issues for those voting in 2022.

What the new woke do not understand in their efforts to control all aspects of our life is that, when government ignores people’s basic needs, it drives them away. But when it shows that it understands what they really need, it can attract the best and the brightest, as Florida is doing today.