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‘Law and Order’ Should Be More Than a GOP Slogan

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Both Foxx and Boudin have been major figures in a controversial national movement known as “progressive prosecutors.” Born out of a time not long ago when crime seemed to be a more manageable problem, their goals sound worthy enough.

Reducing mass incarceration and eliminating abusive policing tactics are popular goals. But it’s not easy to attack the “root causes” of crime, as Boudin found in San Francisco, when the public feels awash in a crime wave, including car break-ins, carjackings, open-air drug dealing and homeless people sleeping and relieving themselves en masse on the city’s otherwise lovely downtown streets.

“I’m proud this city believes in giving people second chances,” said San Francisco Mayor London Breed in a clash with Boudin. “Nevertheless, we also need there to be accountability when someone does break the law. … I was raised by my grandmother to believe in ‘tough love,’ in keeping your house in order, and we need that, now more than ever.”

Boudin denounced her emergency funding request for a police crackdown plan as “knee-jerk” and “shortsighted.” The voters, in a remarkably low-turnout election, appeared to have other ideas.

Now, with Boudin ousted, Republicans feel further emboldened to make “soft on crime” a major issue in the midterms, while many of them go soft themselves on investigating the Jan. 6 attack on law and order by Donald Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol.

They’re accusing Democrats of wanting to “defund the police,” although that call is only coming from a small feather of the party’s left wing.

Democrats need to push back on that. Hard.

As a new report from the centrist Democratic group Third Way finds, Democrats have been funding police in the 25 largest Democratic-run cities at a pace that actually surpasses spending rates of Republican-run cities on a per-person basis.

 

In other words, as the center-left Third Way puts it, Republicans talk more about funding the police than actually funding the police.

Party politics aside, we city dwellers need to deal with the crime problem without creating more problems. We need to build bridges, not drive wedges between the police and the public they are assigned to protect and serve, especially in low-income communities of color that need good policing the most — without abusive policing practices.

Nor can police and prosecutors, regardless of party, fail to prosecute shoplifting and other property crimes that seem like no big deal. Multiple studies over the years find that it’s not the length of sentencing that serves as a deterrent to crime as much as the certainty of being punished.

If we take that simple reality too lightly, the lawbreakers aren’t the only ones who get punished. We all do.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)

©2022 Clarence Page. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.


(c) 2022 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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