New York City has been racing toward losing its position as the “safest big city in America” all year, but it’s got some competition coming into the home stretch. The City of Angels has been running up its own dismal record when it comes to violent crime. While still nowhere near Baltimore levels, Los Angeles has now racked up more killings than it did in all of 2019. And if a way isn’t found to turn things around, they are on pace to see more than 300 murders by the end of the year. It hasn’t been this bad in more than a decade. (LA Times)
Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore predicted Tuesday that the city will see more than 300 homicides this year — a grisly milestone not reached in L.A. in more than a decade.
Moore said there had been 266 homicides in the city as of Saturday, representing a nearly 25% increase over the same period last year and surpassing the total number of homicides in all of 2019, when there were 253 killings in the city, and 2018, when there were 260 total killings.
Speaking during a virtual meeting of the Police Commission, Moore called the pace of violence in 2020 a “terrible loss” and an “erosion” of progress that had been made reducing gun violence in the city in recent years.
The most affected parts of the city are in south and central Los Angeles, unsurprisingly the same areas with the most gang activity. The southern district is reporting 50% more homicides than last year. It’s worth noting, however, that the city’s murder rate is still running far below the bad old days of the late 80s and early 90s when they regularly recorded more than one thousand killings per year.
Curiously, following the same pattern that’s been observed in Minneapolis, while violent crime is up across the board, arrests are down by more than ten percent. So more crime is taking place but the police are bringing in fewer perpetrators.
The Chief of Police is attributing at least part of the increase in violence to the pandemic and some lockdown orders, but that obviously can’t account for it all. What isn’t mentioned until the second to last paragraph of the linked article is the fact that Los Angeles “defunded” their police force to the tune of $150 million. That led to a reduction in the size of the city’s police force of more than two hundred officers. So tell us, Mayor Garcetti… how’s that defunding the police thing working out for you?
If events continue to follow the same pattern we’ve observed in Minneapolis, Chicago, and some of our other large cities, we should soon be hearing cries of protest coming from the community about how unsafe the city is becoming. Ironically, some of the carping will be coming from some of the same activists who were out in the streets this summer demanding that the police be defunded. Perhaps it’s just something in the water in these large cities, but people don’t seem to be able to learn from the past mistakes of others or exhibit enough common sense to realize that having fewer cops leads to more crime. But as long as the denizens of Los Angeles keep electing the same clown car full of liberals year after year, they’re probably getting just what they asked for whether they realized it or not. It’s hard to have too much sympathy for them when looked at in that light.
