Jay Weber Show transcript 3-30-23 6:40 am
Milwaukee’s mayor and police chief have been running around the city touting a big reduction in crime...but intentionally only telling part of the story.
And these claims struck me as wrong a few weeks ago, when Cavalier Johnson and Jeffery Norman started making them...but.... given how few of our listeners seem to care about Milwaukee crime, anymore, I never felt the need to dig deeper.
It turns out that Johnson and Norman aren’t-lying- but they-are- doing some serious fudging.
Because- yes- crime was down in Milwaukee in 2022- when compared to 2021- when it really raged.
But- still-homicides were up again in 2022, and that overall level of crime was still-way, way up- from Milwaukee’s level of crime in 2019 and before....
Get it?
As one analyst puts it...if you climb to the peak of a mountain...and then descend a few feet...you are no longer at the peak, but you are still atop the mountain.
What Cavalier Johnson and Jeffery Norman seem to be suggesting here is that Milwaukee’s crime problem is back down at the bottom of that peak.
It’s not. It’s just slid down a few feet...but is still near the peak.
This analysis was done by Sean Kennedy...an expert on crime associated with think tanks. And the Badger Institute has published his findings. Sean Kennedy concludes:
Even accounting for last year’s drop, some serious crime categories have spiked since 2019:
- Homicides have more than doubled (up 121%) and were higher in 2022 than in 2021.
- Non-fatal shootings jumped from 444 to 877 (up 98%) and were higher than 2021 totals.
- Aggravated assaults (inclusive of shootings) rose 24%.
- Auto thefts increased 132%.1
- Larceny-thefts rose 9%.
But bottom line: Milwaukee is still-significantly-less safe than it was in 2019, or before that point.
And it’s not like 2017, 2018, and 2019 were the glory years of low crime in Milwaukee, either. The crime and homicide stats for those years were too high and concerning.
But crime really boomed in 2019. Many left-wing experts want to blame covid...but their links are somewhere between ‘tenuous’ and ‘ridiculous’.
No-
Instead-blame the BLM riots and the defund the police movement. That is what has caused this massive spike in crime and homicides since 2019-including here in Milwaukee.
It was BLM bullplop.... the left’s war on cops and the emergence of truly putrid radical, ‘Soros DAs in our major cities.
Chicago crime has boomed under Kim Fox, their pear-headed prosecutor down there. She refuses to prosecute most cases.
Ditto for the Soros prosecutors in LA, and San Francisco, and Seattle and Portland, and Philly, and New York-with Alvin Bragg- and Milwaukee with John Chisolm-
Folks, things are so bad in Washington DC that the prosecutor there ‘took a pass’ on prosecuting nearly 7 in 10 criminal cases that police sent to her for prosecution.
The DC D-A isn’t prosecuting- 70 percent of the crimes in the city. And since this is ‘the district’ this is technically a US attorney.
Its’ the same situation everywhere- police officers and sheriff’s deputies are still making the arrests it’s the Soros DAs who are refusing to even charge most of the crimes. These perps don’t even have to spend a few uncomfortable nights in a jail cell or face a weak judge. They are never charged in the first place.
The republicans, with the help of a few democrats, just shot down an attempt by DC city leaders to weaken their criminal code even more...and that has led to a new effort by some republicans in congress to intervene in the overall crime problem that has gotten so bad in dc.
The democrats and these awful, weak, city leaders keep insisting that they should be a separate state, and be able to run dc themselves, but the city has become such a disaster that some congressman on both sides of the aisle are starting to ‘take back’ the level of autonomy that congress gave these locals a few decades ago.
They have proven that they can’t run the city efficiently, smartly, or safely, on their own. Why should congress let this experiment continue?
The democrats have been pushing for ‘self-rule’ for decades because they think it will net them more seats in the House and Senate....
Republicans should push for reverting to federal control, entirely, or even ‘annexation’ of the district. Keep a few blocks around the federal buildings and return the rest to the state of Maryland.
But dc has not-earned the right- to local control. Or any special -additional-representation in congress.
story and photo credit: Badger Institute