Vilification of police and bail reform lead to more crime

See Crime Is Up and Democrats Are Scrambling: It’s getting harder to convince people that the police are a bigger problem than the criminals by Jason L. Riley. Excerpt: 

"Murders spiked by close to 30% in 2020, the biggest one-year increase since 1960. Aggravated assaults rose by 12%, and violent crime overall increased by 5.6% from 2019 levels. The left blames Covid-19, but the trend predates the pandemic. Violent crime, which more or less had been steadily declining since the early 1990s, began reversing course in 2015, not 2020. “Violent crime and homicide rates rose in the U.S. in 2016 for the second consecutive year, driven in part by a spike in murders in large cities,” the Journal reported in 2017, citing FBI data.

The real surprise would be if crime rates weren’t rising. Since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., seven years ago, there has been a concerted effort on the part of Democrats and progressives—from Barack Obama on down—to blame law enforcement for social inequality. Resources have been diverted from police departments to appease activists. Sections of major cities have been turned over to hoodlums. The public has been fed a steady diet of malarkey about cops gunning for young black men. Camera phones and social media have made statistically rare fatal encounters between police and black suspects seem commonplace, and the press has expressed next to no interest in providing context.

A 2020 study by Harvard economist Roland Fryer and co-author Tanaya Devi assessed the impact of these “viral” incidents and noticed a disturbing pattern: police become less proactive, their contacts with civilians decline, and violent crime spikes. That’s what happened in Ferguson after Brown was shot by an officer, in Chicago when the same thing happened to Laquan McDonald, in Baltimore after Freddie Gray died in police custody, and in Minneapolis after a cop murdered George Floyd. 

In addition to vilifying police, many states and cities have passed “bail reform” laws that limit the ability of judges to hold defendants until trial. Local prosecutors now brag about how few crimes they prosecute. California has effectively decriminalized shoplifting. Covid likely has contributed to the uptick in crime, but not in ways that the left wants to talk about. In hindsight, perhaps releasing thousands of repeat offenders from jails and prisons to alleviate overcrowding wasn’t such a good idea."