The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
After years of declining crime rates, the United States is suddenly contending with an upsurge in shootings and murders — and the numbers are sobering.
In Chicago, homicides soared 56 percent last year, and they’re up again this year. In New York, last year’s increase was almost 45 percent; in Los Angeles, it was 36 percent. If the current pace holds up, 2021 could produce the highest murder rate in a quarter-century.
Experts haven’t settled on an explanation for the wave of violence, but many say it’s clear the COVID-19 pandemic was a factor: too many young men with no jobs, time on their hands and plenty of reasons to be angry.
Republicans are already turning the crime surge into a campaign message: It is the fault of President Joe Biden and the soft-on-crime Democrats.
“Here’s the Democrat plan for America: crime,” Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, chairman of the GOP’s Senate campaign, says in a commercial over dramatic images of rioters smashing plate-glass windows. “The Democrats have embraced the idea of defunding the police, which is the dumbest idea ever.”
The claim that Democrats’ criminal justice policies lead to more crime has been a favorite Republican campaign theme for generations. But this time, at least, the facts don’t support their charges.
The upsurge in violent crime began under Republican President Donald Trump. And it came before the murder of George Floyd touched off a campaign by progressives to “defund the police.”
That defunding campaign, by the way, never really took hold. Biden and other leading Democrats quickly repudiated the slogan. Some big-city mayors rashly announced plans to cut their police budgets, but many, including Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, reversed course after they realized the idea had little public support.
That doesn’t mean Republicans will stop campaigning on law and order and accusing Democrats of being anti-police. And the tactics could work. Experts expect crime to spike this summer, if only because that happens almost every year. And when bad news occurs, voters tend to blame the president who’s in office.
That’s partly why Biden last week attempted to make his party’s renunciation of defunding formal and irrevocable, announcing that he’s seeking more funding, not less, for police departments. “This is no time to turn our backs on law enforcement or our communities,” he said.
The president announced that state and local governments have his permission to use their coronavirus relief funds to hire police officers, pay police overtime and support community-based anti-violence groups.
Biden aides were careful to point out that those federal dollars would come from the $350 billion in subsidies to state and local governments that Congress approved in March — over unanimous opposition from Republicans.
In addition, Biden said, he’s asking Congress for even more anti-crime money: $300 million in new community policing funds, to go directly to police departments, and a $5 billion fund that will include money for community violence intervention.
Biden’s funding proposals were paired with measures to crack down on illegal gun sales and expand background checks, a nod to traditional liberals. But even those were cast as strategies to fight violent crime.
In effect, Biden is taking advantage of the fact that the pandemic has made it possible to seek more spending than usual from Congress and combined proposals for traditional police funding with police reforms — and to dare Republicans to oppose them.
Which, to nobody’s surprise, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky promptly did, attacking Biden for “making gun ownership in America more burdensome than ever” and “federalizing and defunding the police.”
But the senator missed the point. Biden has nudged his party back to where most of the public is. Both parties want to spend more on policing; only one of them stands for police reform and gun control as well.
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