The only people who might better know the streets of urban America than the cops who patrol them are the crooks who haunt them. What can the criminals tell us now about the state of our cities? The crooks know that the streets and alleys are being returned to them and that the police are in retreat. That is unmistakably the case as crime, particularly violent crime, is exploding all over urban America. I was deputy attorney general the last time we suffered a crime wave of national proportions and had to learn the why of it in order to help lead the response that started the trend going the other way. It is mind-boggling to me to see how we are being condemned to repeat the exercise — at the cost of many innocent lives, the vast majority of them being black lives.
The blame for this turnabout is not with the police. Rather it is squarely on the shoulders of elected and appointed officials in local and state government who have abdicated the first responsibility of the offices they hold — to maintain public order so as to assure their citizens that their most fundamental civil rights will be preserved. Abdication is not a form of neglect, nor is it the result of ignorance, and it is not even a function of just wrongheaded policy choices. Rather, it is the intentional adoption of legislation, directives, and orders that have the effect of crippling the police function and thereby condemning to death, at the hands of criminals, minority citizens of inner-city and gang-infested neighborhoods. This week the Washington Post reported of the July Fourth weekend that “tragedies struck in urban centers thousands of miles apart, with 65 people shot over the weekend in New York and 87 in Chicago, and homicides climbing from Miami to Milwaukee.”
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