I hear about Joe Biden’s crime bill all the time — oddly enough, it always seems to be from Joe Biden’s lips.
How exactly has he come to think that his crime bill is what turned around New York City? That his bill is what made it safer to walk around the Bronx neighborhood where I grew up? That somehow 8,000 cops sprinkled around the country — without any change in the way in which those cops were trained and deployed — is what drove down crime nationwide? Is there possibly any New Yorker who believes that? — even if they haven’t heard of Jack Maple or COMPSTAT or Bill Bratton?
Biden may go back home to Delaware very night, but his crime-bill conceit is testimony to an amazingly blinkered Beltway mentality — right up there with Al Gore’s fantasy of having invented the Internet.
And the crime-fighting reality is not lost on those outside New York City. There are plenty of cities that now know how you fight crime. Here’s Heather Mac Donald with the latest developments.