The subtle erosion of civil society by Progressive DAs

Major American cities continue their descent into lawlessness: Just this past Fourth of July weekend in Chicago alone at least 109 people, including children, were struck by gunfire. Nineteen died.

Nationally over this period, over 500 shootings were reported, killing at least 180 people and wounding over 525.  

As the mayhem mounts, once-proud cities slowly die — businesses shutter, families flee and neighborhoods decay. 

We don’t have to surrender to this violence — and as Republicans gathered in Milwaukee are highlighting Tuesday at their national convention, we know how to stop it. 

Most predatory violence is committed by a small group habitual offenders — I’ve estimated roughly 1% of the population commits between half and two-thirds of predatory violent crime.

This is not only true in the United States: A 2013 Swedish study found that a cohort of 1% commits 63% of the violent crime.  

Simply put, the more of these habitual violent offenders are allowed to remain on the streets, the higher violent crime.

Progressive “social justice” prosecutors — like Alvin Bragg in New York City, George Gascon in Los Angeles and Kim Foxx in Chicago — are blindly pursuing the same soft-on-crime policies of the 1960s and ’70s that previously produced the biggest crime wave in US history.  

It is obvious these reckless policies are leading to out-of-control crime.

But they are also doing long-term damage to the foundations of our criminal-justice system in less visible ways.

Ignoring lower-level offenses, or routinely undercharging more serious offenses, sabotages the ability of our system to tailor punishment to an individual’s criminal history. 

A repeat offender is more likely to commit future crimes, and deterring them requires a graduated response — imposing stronger penalties as the offender engages in repetitive or increasingly serious offenses.

This requires accurate criminal-history records.

When prosecutors fail to bring charges, or dispose of cases in a way that masks the gravity of the crime actually committed, they are depriving society of information essential to protect the public.

The revolving-door policies of progressive DAs also destroy the most effective means the public has for combatting violent crime: community policing.  

This form of policing focuses on building trust between the community and police officers so that law-abiding citizens in the neighborhood are willing to help by identifying the bad actors who threaten their community.

If police can pinpoint precisely those who warrant attention, they can avoid indiscriminate tactics that cause friction by tending to treat everyone in the neighborhood as a potential suspect.

But this kind of precision policing only works when citizens have confidence that the police will be able to get the criminals they identify off the streets, and prevent them from retaliating.

Why would anybody inform on someone who, even if he’s caught, will be back on the street the next day?

New York City, for example, had one of the best community-policing programs in the country — but it was crippled in 2019 when the state Legislature passed a series of “reforms” that made it harder to detain dangerous violent criminals before trial or to protect the identity of witnesses and informants.

Likewise destructive is the laxity of progressive DAs in dealing with juvenile crime.

They may think they are helping young offenders by letting them entirely off the hook for their first crime — and then their second, and even their third.  

In reality, they are destroying their lives by ushering them along the path of becoming career criminals who commit increasingly serious crimes.

The earlier the justice system intervenes — the sooner serious consequences are imposed for wrongdoing — the better the chance of turning a young person from a life of crime.  

But with each additional crime committed with impunity, it becomes increasingly difficult to salvage that young life.

What exactly is “progressing” in our cities under progressivism? 

Public safety and the quality of life are certainly not progressing: Crime, disorder and squalor are.

It is time to stop the degeneration of our great cities, and this can be done only by rejecting the progressive politicians and their destructive policies.   

Over the main entrance at the US Department of Justice is inscribed the Roman aphorism Lege atque ordine omnia fiunt — “under law and order, all is done.”

It’s a reminder that law and order must be the foundation of a human society that is good, noble and beautiful. 

In other words, any real “progress” can only arise from law and order.

William Barr served twice as US attorney general, 1991-93 and 2019-20, and is the author of the memoir “One Damn Thing After Another.”