Democrats Owe the Nation’s Police an Apology

Their embrace of the criminal-justice reform movement has sabotaged a core government function

By Edward Conlon. He is a former NYPD detective and communications director. His most recent book is “The Policewomen’s Bureau.” Excerpts:

"The prevailing attitude among the academic elite was that whatever harm offenders inflicted on others was outweighed by harms inflicted on them by society. No one should go to prison aside from murderers and rapists, and their terms of incarceration should be as brief as possible. Talking heads routinely made the false claim that modern American policing derived from slave-hunting patrols in the antebellum South, and has more-or-less stuck to the same mission."

"Discovery reform obliged prosecutors to produce massive amounts of irrelevant documentation in every case, on the strictest of timetables. The dismissal rate soared. Prosecutors now drop 62% of cases, compared with 41% before the reform, mostly because the paperwork burden can’t be managed. Juvenile justice reform led to a dramatic rise in adolescent recidivism."

"Across the country, veteran cops retired in droves. New academy classes couldn’t be filled. Response times went up, and clearance rates went down. In 2014 there were some 14,000 homicides in this country. By 2021 there were nearly 23,000—roughly 30,000 excess murders across seven years. Traffic fatalities followed a similar pattern, from 32,000 in 2014 to 43,000 in 2021, for a cumulative total of 34,000 additional deaths."

"the two record-breaking murder spikes—2014-16 and 2020-21—correlated precisely with the crests of the Black Lives Matter movement"

"Consistent majorities of black voters tell pollsters they want more police in their neighborhoods"