OPINION:
Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke in Chicago on Wednesday about how safe the country has become under the Biden administration. The topic was selected to address concerns raised by worried Democratic pollsters.
President Biden’s indifference to rampant lawbreaking was highlighted over the weekend as his predecessor and potential successor, Donald Trump, attended the funeral of slain New York police officer Jonathan Diller. Mr. Biden instead chose to cavort with former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama at a glitzy fundraiser.
Officer Diller, 31, was gunned down as he conducted a traffic stop. The man charged with murder in his slaying is Guy Rivera, a career criminal who had been sprung from prison despite a long rap sheet that includes a past attempt at murder.
Mr. Rivera had also been nabbed on gun charges last April, but rather than send him back to the big house, prosecutors let him go. Like most blue cities these days, New York has a catch-and-release program that rewards repeat offenders.
With policies like that, there is good reason to question statistics claiming that lawlessness is on the decline. Police just aren’t responding to calls or counting incidents as they once did. For instance, big cities like New York and Los Angeles didn’t even bother turning in data to the FBI for use in the agency’s 2021 statistics.
The public knows the rosy numbers don’t reflect reality. A Gallup survey last year found an 11% increase in the number of people afraid to walk alone at night near their home since Mr. Biden entered the White House. As a result, a Rasmussen poll from February gave Republicans a 13-point edge over Democrats on handling crime.
As long as our borders are open, allowing millions to enter the country illegally and stay as long as they please, the polls aren’t going to change. Customs and Border Protection reported it had apprehended 15,267 convicted criminals trying to sneak in last year. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in February it had just nabbed “171 unlawfully present noncitizens with pending charges or convictions for murder, homicide or assault against children” in just 12 days.
Instead of addressing crime, Department of Justice officials are accused of perpetrating it. As The Washington Times reported, erstwhile Jan. 6 prosecutor Patrick Douglas Scruggs faces a May 3 pretrial hearing on charges that he stabbed another man on a Florida bridge in September.
On Thursday, the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals heard the appeal of Douglass Mackey, who was sentenced to seven months in prison for doing nothing more than post a joke image about Hillary Clinton on social media. Humorless Biden administration thugs twisted an arcane statute to criminalize speech in a proceeding so absurd that even the Harvard Law Review came to Mr. Mackey’s defense.
“Simply put,” the publication concluded, “there is a poor fit between the new-age communication method of memes and the 150-year-old Enforcement Act of 1870.”
This is why it will take a lot more than a lecture from the attorney general to rescue the administration on the crime issue. If Mr. Garland actually cared about justice, he would end the political prosecutions and concentrate on putting actual violent criminals behind bars.
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