Police

A crime wave haunts blue-state America, and nowhere more so than in super-blue California. Los Angeles police chief Michel Moore is trying to assure residents and tourists that violent crime is not out of control, which is not at all reassuring. Police departments statewide are stressed, and finding able recruits is a struggle. Faced with surging gun violence and a dwindling number of police officers, Oakland has proposed $50,000 signing bonuses to veteran cops. Since 2014, California voters have unshackled a fast-expanding criminal class that rolls expertly with the dice. Starting with Proposition 47, the state penal code has reduced many felonies to misdemeanors. Shoplifting and petty theft have been effectively decriminalized. Serious crimes go unprosecuted.

Preventing crime and punishing offenders is primarily the responsibility of local authorities. They have no greater obligation to the citizens who elected them and who fund the government. It is up to local police, supervised by political leaders and subject to the law themselves, to provide a safe environment for citizens to go about their lives, pursuing their own goals in peace and security. It is up to local politicians to ensure that police are adequately funded and properly trained. It is up to local prosecutors to follow up all justified arrests and prosecute offenders when the evidence is adequate. When police overstep their limits, prosecutors should pursue them too. The goal is a safe environment, subject to the rule of law.

For the fourth time in the last four years, Minnesota is trying a police officer for excessive use of force in a highly-publicized case watched by people around the world. In three of the four cases, an officer killed a black man during an alleged misdemeanor stop in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. On April 11, 2021, Kim Potter, a former police officer from Brooklyn Center, Minnesota was training a new officer, Anthony Luckey, when they pulled over twenty-year old Daunte Wright. Luckey told Wright he was questioning him for displaying in his white Buick both an air freshener from his rearview mirror and  expired license plate tabs.

Dealing with crime is a political necessity for the Tories, I say in the Times today. Whenever Labour outflanks them on the issue, as Tony Blair did, the Conservatives are in trouble. But law and order has taken on even more importance for this government because of its link to levelling up: Boris Johnson is convinced you can level up only if you deal with crime. He believes that places are poor because of crime, rather than the other way round. So, next week we’ll see a slew of announcements, with a particular focus on increasing drug rehabilitation efforts. Tackling crime and antisocial behaviour can show rapid progress The public are not sure what levelling up means but, as far as anyone can guess, dealing with disorder is seen to be part of it.

The theme of Priti Patel's party conference speech this afternoon was very much 'large and in charge'. She devoted much of her address to talking about the immigration system, as you'd expect, promising stronger crackdowns on people being smuggled across the Channel in boats. Patel focused on the Vote Leave favourite: taking back control Whereas Boris Johnson and Michael Gove have talked about Britain 'voting for change' in 2016, Patel focused on the Vote Leave favourite: taking back control. She told the conference hall this was the key theme of her reforms to immigration, saying: 'My new plan for immigration is already making its way through parliament. At the heart of this plan is a simple principle. Control. That is not unreasonable.

‘We are sickened, angered and devastated by this man’s crimes which betray everything we stand for,’ said the Metropolitan Police in response to the sentencing of Wayne Couzens. He is the former police officer who, when in service, kidnapped, raped and murdered Sarah Everard, later setting fire to her body. The case in March sparked national outrage about the levels of male violence towards women and girls. Not only do significant numbers of police officers spectacularly fail women when it comes to sexual and domestic violence, but they commit these crimes themselves. The two things are connected. If male police officers see women as worthless, and if there is little accountability when it comes to violence against women, they will feel double impunity.

Ah, the last days of summer. Long evenings, sunny weekends, and crusty Extinction Rebellion hippies blocking arterial traffic lanes to the audible grinding of teeth from the police officers tasked with standing by and politely watching their sub-art-school amdram productions, rather than getting on with the business of giving them a much-needed hosing down with Boris’s water cannons. As Charlie Peters has pointed out for the Mail, the impression of police impotence has nothing to do with the willingness of the bobby on the beat to break out a truncheon and apply it liberally to the thorax of middle-class graduates enjoying their day off by making everyone else late for work.

The season is almost upon us of lachrymose memorials to the victims of 9/11. As a nation we choke each year as the anniversary approaches. We can talk about the heroic firefighters and cops, those first-responders who that day sometimes made their last response. We can recount the lists of the dead and the daring of some survivors. A great many Americans remember in vivid detail how the horrors of that day intersected their own lives. What we don’t have is a strong sense of what 9/11 meant and still means to the nation. Even in this age of declining historical literacy, we have a ready sense of the defining importance of more remote occurrences: Plymouth Rock, Valley Forge, Gettysburg, D-Day. These days, we should add 1619, Wounded Knee and the Tulsa race massacre of 1921.

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.

The position of Home Secretary Priti Patel is clearly untenable. Presumably this means she must resign. Who says so? Why, only her Labour shadow Nick Thomas-Symonds. At least, he has said the first bit from which we can infer the second. And what has reduced Patel to this miserable status in his eyes? Could it be the fact that 18 months after she first promised to halt the cross-Channel boats that spill migrants onto our shores, there are more of them arriving than ever? No, not a bit of it. Thomas-Symonds is not interested in that. In fact, whenever he and the Home Secretary debate migration policy she runs enough rings around him to decorate an Olympic flag.

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.

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced to over 22 years in prison by Judge Peter Cahill on Friday for the murder of George Floyd. Prosecutors had asked the imposing punishment be closer to 30 years. State guidelines recommend a 12-and-a-half-year sentence for a first-time offender. Cahill went beyond the guidelines, citing Chauvin’s ‘abuse of a position of trust and authority and also the particular cruelty’ to Floyd. A 22-year sentence tends to be associated with more grizzly offenders. Last year, 17-year-old Jered Ohsman was sentenced as an adult by a Hennepin County District Court — the same court that sentenced Chauvin — for killing 39-year-old Steven Markey during a botched robbery.