Crime

We’ve seen it again and again – Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, Christina Yuna Lee, Michelle Go, Jocelyn Nungaray, Kristal Bayron-Nieves and now Iryna Zurutska – all young women brutally murdered by repeat offenders who never should have been on the street in the first place.Mental health failures. Bail reform. Parole abuse. Open borders. Progressive DAs. Every layer of this system protects offenders and creates more victims. To most Americans, that seems unthinkable.To those of us who live it, it’s another day in a system that treats criminals better than victims. That’s why the passage of Iryna’s Law in North Carolina matters.

Every day, Chicagoans outside the immediate areas where federal forces are deploying pick up fragments of what feels like an unfolding drama. Here’s a representative example: on the app NextDoor, the Chicago subreddit and in neighborhood Facebook groups, we watch cell-phone footage from Logan Square of smoke spreading through an intersection as a federal vehicle pulls away. Eventually, local outlets verify that a masked federal agent dropped canisters outside the Rico Fresh supermarket near Funston Elementary. It appears the air was filled with a chemical irritant, causing people to panic, and the vehicle departed.

Nearly everybody I know has experienced crime in our cities or had a family member threatened. A few years ago, my pregnant wife was walking in San Francisco when a deranged homeless man repeatedly asked her if she wanted to be raped. This is not unusual in America. Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, was murdered, aged 23, on the subway in North Carolina just recently. The man responsible had been charged and released 14 times under a broken system. A judge who’d never passed the bar, a city council that ignored public safety and Governor Roy Cooper’s Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice all made it harder to keep repeat offenders like Iryna’s killer off the streets.

President Trump has authorized what he called a "kinetic strike" from a US warship that destroyed a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela bound for the US, killing 11 so called "narco terrorists" aboard. The action by a US naval task force in international waters in the southern Caribbean is the first since the President threatened armed intervention against narcotics smuggling by Venezuela’s drugs cartels in January. Trump said that the attack was aimed at members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua drugs cartel which the US branded a terrorist organization in February, and which it claims is controlled by Venezuela’s socialist Maduro regime. The US Department of Justice has called Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro "the world’s No.

Mayor Muriel Bowser has found herself in the middle of a political tightrope – and it’s one that many Democrats may soon have to walk. In response to rising crime and public unease, the Washington, DC Mayor acknowledged something few in her party dare to admit: that Donald Trump’s federal “surge” of law enforcement officers actually made the city safer.“This federal surge has had a significant impact on crime in Washington, DC, and we greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what MPD has been able to do in this city,” Bowser said at a press conference yesterday.That single sentence captures the dilemma of the modern Democratic party.

The President taking such decisive action to save lives this past week is bittersweet beyond words. For years, we begged and pleaded for help to stop the insanity that has spilled blood across our streets. We went to the media. We testified before Congress. We sat across from lawmakers, poured out our stories and prayed someone would care enough to act. But time and time again, our cries fell on deaf ears. Now, finally, something is being done. For those who have never stood in our shoes, it’s hard to explain what it feels like to bury someone you loved unnecessarily – to hold a folded flag or a photo instead of a spouse, child, sibling, or parent. We as victims went through the worst nightmare imaginable.

President Trump has once again identified a critical national need: this time, it is the desperate plea for backup from overwhelmed local police, particularly in large metropolitan areas.  Under the Home Rule Act, the President possesses clear statutory authority to exercise at least temporary law enforcement authority over the nation’s capital city by federalizing the Washington D.C. police force and deploying 800 National Guard troops. The city’s own crime statistics depict a municipality raging out of control. Homicide rates have doubled in the last ten years. Washington, D.C. is one of the fifty most dangerous cities in the world and the fourth most dangerous city in the nation.

Donald Trump's press conference announcing a federal takeover of Washington, DC's police force was packed to the gills with White House reporters – many of whom live in DC and the surrounding area, and are more than familiar with the degradation of law and order in the region. But just because they know it's bad doesn't mean they want to give Trump any credit for trying to clean up the city – in fact, they're likely to attack the move from both sides. The ramifications of Trump's takeover, under Section 740's emergency rule, will have undetermined ripple effects in the capital city, but the initial reaction to it illustrates the difficult position in which it puts the president's critics.