Crime

Washington DC — I’ll try not to overstate things here — does not have a stellar reputation. Most Americans regard it as corrupt, alien, taking in an exorbitant amount of their taxpayer money and blowing it on stupid wars and bureaucratic boondoggles. DC is the Swamp, a fetid hothouse of buzzing lobbyists and special interests. It’s the Deep State, where well-oiled gears interlock and turn towards ever more self-enrichment and self-preservation. The reality has always been a bit sadder. Washington is more pseudo-expertise than evil genius, more $3 Coors until closing than three-martini lunch.

Can crime be beaten with a beaten down police force? The government certainly hopes so. Today, the Prime Minister launched the much trailed ‘Beating Crime’ Plan. Not trailed enough, according to the boss of the cops’ union, The Police Federation, who says the first he heard about the plan was last Sunday — shortly after his organisation, representing 130,000 front line officers, passed a vote of no confidence in the Home Secretary. How has this fracture between police and politicians come to pass? In rhetorical terms, this is the most pro-police administration in the last ten years. It has certainly worked hard to exorcise the malign impact of Theresa May.

Imagine dining al fresco at a popular French brasserie in Washington DC. It’s a clear, summer night and the streets are buzzing with residents and tourists alike. You’re enjoying your Burger Americain, and suddenly gunshots ring out down the street. Diners duck and run for cover. You later hear that two men were injured just blocks away from where you were enjoying your meal. The stark realization hits: the heart of the nation’s capital is not safe. Thursday night’s shooting on 14th Street was just the latest shocking crime to occur in a well-populated and upscale area of DC. Three people were shot and wounded just outside of Nationals Park during a heavily attended baseball game last week.

It’s not known when Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot experienced the first stirrings of her secret GOP gland, but knowledgeable conjecture puts it perhaps two nanoseconds after taking the oath of office in 2019. It’s then that Lightfoot, buoyant after having been swept into office with 74 percent of the vote, surely had an alarming thought: ‘OMG, I’m mayor. What do I do now?’ All Democratic politicians aspiring to executive office have a secret Republican gland, although it’s vestigial till they sit behind an executive desk. When it’s dormant they can sign up for any damn fool notion. During her mayoral campaign, Lightfoot had cheerfully endorsed both an elected school board and an elected police board.

Which Spectator contributor will be jailed next? Taki and Michael Avenatti have both done time after bylining in these august pages — and Roger Stone only swerved his 40-month sentence by the grace of President Trump. It could be argued that The Spectator’s decision to publish Michael Avenatti was not our finest moment. The Creepy Porn Lawyer, as Tucker Carlson insisted on calling him, is not the best egg in the anti-Trump basket. But we believe in free speech, and Avenatti was eager to trash Beto O’Rourke and that’s always good idea.

Just before 11 p.m. on Tuesday June 1, 18-year-old Kennedy Hobbs of Jackson, Mississippi stopped at a gas station off of Medgar Evers Boulevard to gas up. She had graduated from Murrah High School in Jackson that same day and was on her way to a graduation party. While at the gas station, she made a phone call. While talking, she was shot multiple times by an unknown person and died on the scene. Details are murky and police are still investigating, but at this time it doesn’t appear that Hobbs knew the shooter. Like many other cities, Jackson, whose population is almost 82 percent black, has experienced a surge in violent crime over the past two years. Its murder rate is one of the highest in the country.

President Biden’s White House, like his jaw, is made of glass. But you have to give the 78-year-old credit: he never stops throwing stones. As he took the podium on Wednesday to introduce his new ‘anti-crime’ bill, Joe’s hypocrisy was dazzling. The man who once told his wife that if she were ever concerned for her safety, she should take a ‘double-barrel shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house’, lectured the American people on ghost guns, ‘F-15s’ and nukes. With his usual mix of slurring and smugness, Biden mocked gun owners with dismissive jokes about their right to bear arms.

The New York City mayoral race is split between two factions of Democrats: those who cut a tempered figure offering government solutions to the nightmares their own party created and stoked over the last year — and the kooky true-believers with the thousand-yard stare who continue to preach fire and damnation. The current, term-limited mayor, Bill de Blasio, belongs to the latter camp, though most of his fire dances not from brimstone but just above the slide of a bong. His ideological successor, race-hustling civil rights lawyer Maya ‘Defund the Police’ Wiley, who was recently endorsed by her sister-from-another-mister in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, isn’t doing so great in the most recent polling, though still rounds out the top four.

A cellphone video surfaced in Chicago last week showing three African American women twerking on top of a slowly moving Chicago Police Department SUV, as a crowd of night-time revelers urged them on. The clip quickly went viral. Although important details have yet to emerge, CPD officials have acknowledged the incident and stated that an investigation is 'ongoing’. To a fossil like me, twerking anywhere is distasteful, even disgusting — and to do so out in public is at once incivil and degrading. To do so on top of a moving police vehicle strikes me as borderline degenerate, but such paracoital gyrations will doubtless be read by some as ritualistic community expressions of both disrespect for and indignation over the po-po.

Tonia Antoniazzi’s speech in the House of Commons this week was remarkable, not because of what she said – the need for accurate recording of crimes according to sex – but because she had the courage to actually say it. After the ongoing intimidation of Rosie Duffield, it is a brave Labour MP who stands up and defends the right of members of her sex not to be blamed for the crimes of the other sex. Antoniazzi pointed out that where particular offences are very rarely committed by women, the addition of just one or two people can have a significant impact on data. Antoniazzi alluded to the case of transgender fell-runner Lauren Jeska who was jailed in 2017 for the attempted murder of Ralph Knibbs, UK Athletics' head of human resources and welfare.