It seems that even The Washington Post is fed up with Antifa, at least now that Donald Trump is no longer President.
Anarchists and an increase in violent crime hijack Portland’s social justice movement
By Scott Wilson | May 31, 2021 | 6:00 AM EDT
PORTLAND, Ore. — The church, on the edge of this city, was built to hold thousands, and on this drizzly day the pews of Mannahouse were filled with hundreds of mourners, scattered throughout the broad, high-ceilinged chamber to comply with pandemic rules.
Nearly all of them were Black.
They had gathered to memorialize Jalon Yoakum, 33, whose body lay in a clear casket at the front of the stage. The wounds on his face had been brushed over; a blue suit and white open-collar shirt hid the rest of the scars from the daylight gunshots that killed him in a pizza restaurant parking lot this month.
Portland is a White city, overwhelmingly so — African Americans account for just 6 percent of the population. But it is Black people such as Yoakum, an aspiring union electrician, who are dying at near-historic rates and filling churches with grief.
Why is anybody surprised? Conservatives told you what would happen! When you promote lawlessness, is it any surprise that you get lawlessness? When you allow the anarchists free run of your city for three months, can you really be surprised if anarchy continues?
On May 12, Yoakum, a father of two young boys, became the city’s 30th homicide victim this year. That is five times the number recorded during the same period in 2020, a frightening pace that could see more slayings here by the end of the year than in the past four decades.
This was not how the year following George Floyd’s murder was supposed to end, not with Bishop Garry Tyson, of the General Baptist Convention of the Northwest, telling mourners that “Jalon didn’t die. He was killed. His life was taken.”
None of this was supposed to happen. But I noted, on Twitter, the last sentence from a Philadelphia Inquirer article:
Since 2015, nearly 8,500 shootings have been recorded in Philadelphia, but only 21% have resulted in a someone being charged.
When the police aren’t respected, when the public do not help the cops catch the bad guys, why should the bad guys be deterred from trying to kill people? In foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, if you shoot someone, you have four chances out of five that you’ll never get caught!
The nightly confrontations with police and federal agents deployed here by President Donald Trump have been replaced by a kind of generational hopelessness, a tenuous sense of security across an under-policed city and a return to an old-school style of gun violence reminiscent of a tit-for-tat cycle of deadly reprisals, almost always among young men of color. Through April, the police reported 348 shootings, more than double those recorded over the first four months of last year.
And the first four months of 2020 were significantly higher than the first four months of 2019. 2020 saw 891 shootings in very liberal Portland, more than 2¼ times as many as the 389 in 2019.
When even The Washington Post says that a city is “under-policed,” you know it’s bad.
Our Democrat-controlled cities have been trying to placate the mob, and their citizens are paying the price . . . in blood.
Also in the Post:
Amid surge in violent crime, Atlanta’s wealthiest neighborhood ponders new city
By Tim Craig | May 31, 2021 | 9:00 AM EDT
ATLANTA — Just a few days after Beth Weaver moved from the suburbs to a new townhouse in this city’s wealthy Buckhead district, she began to worry that she had made a mistake.
One night she sat on her balcony and watched a thief rifle through her BMW. A few weeks later, someone broke into her family’s truck. In November, there was a shootout on her narrow street lined with townhouses that start at a half-million dollars.
“They would come through here on a bicycle and just start picking up packages and right out of your garage in broad daylight,” said Weaver, who lives in the area’s Broadview Place neighborhood.
“You did not feel safe,” said Weaver, whose neighbors have installed a network of surveillance cameras and are pushing city leaders to allow them to gate their development.
That feeling of not being safe has persisted as crime in the city has skyrocketed — the result, some say, of the pandemic and the civil unrest that followed the killing of George Floyd last summer. Some residents and business leaders in this affluent, predominantly White enclave north of downtown think they have a solution: They want Buckhead to become its own municipality.
There’s more at the original, but it’s unsurprising: the black population of Atlanta are upset that their mostly white, more affluent residents want to leave the disaster that the poorer neighborhoods have become, and the municipal government policies which have allowed it.
“It makes me angry because the crime they are seeing in Buckhead is the same crime we on the Southside have been dealing with for years,” said Stephanie Flowers, chair of Atlanta Neighborhood Planning Unit V, which oversees a group of neighborhood associations in predominantly Black neighborhoods southwest of downtown.
“We on the Southside, because of our demographics. We can’t pay our way out” of Atlanta, Flowers said. “This is just a way to separate the haves from the have-nots.”
In other words, Miss Flowers wants other neighborhoods to suffer what her neighborhoods have, rather than try to fix the problems in their own neighborhoods!
Crime exists because neighborhoods tolerate it. When someone gets shot, there are almost always other people who know who did it, or at least have valuable clues that they can give the police. When the neighborhood don’t help the police, they enable the criminals, and it’s not much of a surprise that they wind up with more criminals.
The Post continued to tell its readers that Buckhead was one of Atlanta’s safest communities, but now the crime wave has spread there. Is it any surprise that residents are alarmed and want to do something about it?
Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat, of course, pushed the same types of policies that other liberal municipal government leaders have done: keep more low-level offenders out of jail and the elimination of cash bail for “minor” crimes.
Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R-New York City) led the way in the 1990s, not by being nice, but by being tough on crime. He didn’t look the other way on ‘minor’ offenses, but had the NYPD aggressively go after the ‘squeegee boys‘ and the lower level wannabe thugs before they became big time criminals. Some might have been scared straight, and some might simply have been in jail when they would otherwise have been out committing more crimes, but crime dropped rapidly in New York City under Mr Giuliani’s ‘broken windows‘ policing. ‘Broken windows’ worked, but the left still didn’t like it, didn’t like that poor, wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly boys had criminal records.
Me? I look at John “Jordan” Lewis, a young punk in Philadelphia. He was arrested on small-time drug charges, and then-District Attorney Lynne Abraham treated him leniently. Mr Lewis never went to jail, and he spent his time knocking over small businesses for money to buy drugs. On Hallowe’en of 2007, Mr Jordan was robbing the Dunkin’ Donuts store on the corner of 66th Avenue and Broad Street, the second time he’d hit the place, when Philadelphia Police Officer Charles Cassidy, 54, walked in, checking on a store which had been previously robbed. Mr Jordan spun and fired a shot into Officer Cassidy’s head; the officer died the following day.
Had Miss Abraham treated Mr Jordan seriously during his initial drug charges, he could have been in jail on that fateful day in 2007. Yeah, he’d have a record, a misdemeanor record, and he probably wouldn’t have liked jail, but he’d have been out of jail a long time ago, with at least a chance to straighten out his life.
Instead, he languishes on death row in Pennsylvania, and even if he is never executed — in Pennsylvania, he almost certainly never will be — he’s going to spend the rest of his miserable life in prison. Did Miss Abraham really do Mr Jordan any favor by not treating him harshly for his earlier offenses?
The way to fight crime is to fight crime, to fight all crime, and to lock up the small time wannabes before they become big-time thugs. Some might reform, some might just get scared straight, and some will still be behind bars at times when they would otherwise be out committing more crimes.
“America’s Mayor” showed us the way, but today’s left don’t like it. They think that being nice to bad guys will make them see the way of goodness and light.
Well, we’ve tried that, and stupid governments in Minneapolis, in Portland, in Philadelphia and Atlanta, are seeing the results, as the results spill out blood in the streets.
It might not be quite as egregious as some others, because the man has some notoriety due to having been pardoned on a murder conviction, but there’s still the McClatchy Company’s policy on mugshots:
