Yes, I’m using the word “soars” a lot when it comes to bad things happening under our Democratic regime. It is accurate. Here is my full column that ran in the Washington County Daily News earlier this week

According to FBI statistics, America experienced the highest annual increase in the murder rate last year since the FBI began tracking national crime statistics. In 2020, America’s murder rate increased by about 29% over 2019. That is over twice the increase of the previous record-setting year, 1968. The increase in murders is not accidental. It is the direct result of bad policies being implemented across America as the bloody tip of the Democratic Party’s agenda.

 

Statistics are always dry and do not convey the true horror that they tabulate. For every “1” entered into a database, there is a life brutally ended, a family in mourning, and a community in anguish. But statistics do help us understand the scale of the problem.

 

In 2020, there were about 21,500 murders across the nation. That is the equivalent of the entire population of Germantown being slaughtered in a single year. There were about 5,000 more people murdered in 2020 than were murdered in 2019.

 

Milwaukee was even worse. While the nation experienced an average murder rate increase of about 29%, Milwaukee’s murder rate increased by 93%. More people were murdered in Milwaukee in 2020 than in any other year on record.

 

The reasons are plain to see. There has been an organized effort to demonize and demoralize the police for several years. In reaction to the sometimes real, often contrived, abusive behavior of some police officers, anarchist and Marxist organizations have seized the opportunity to demand collective punishment for individual transgressions. Not content with America’s judicial system that protects individual rights and liberties, these groups have waged war rhetorically and violently in the streets of our communities.

 

With the police’s traditional defenders cowed into silence, many police took a noticeable step back from aggressively enforcing the law. As the blue line faltered, empowered criminals pushed the boundary.

 

The real changes started to happen when Democrats — particularly those who run America’s largest cities — converted anti-police rhetoric into pro-criminal policies. They took the “defund the police” slogan to heart and cut police budgets. They changed policies to make it more difficult for officers on the streets to do their jobs. They gave criminal advocates a seat at the table to oversee police actions. They replaced the bars in the jails with turnstiles with destructive ideas like no-bail policies.

 

We are now all suffering the results of those policies. Democrats will try to claim that overall crime is down even though the murder rate is up. That is a lie. Just because they are intentionally arresting and prosecuting fewer crimes does not mean that they did not happen. If an antifa rioter punches you in the throat and the police do not arrest her, does that mean that the assault did not happen? Of course, it did, even though the assault will not show up in any crime statistics. When the police are prevented from enforcing the laws by policy and lack of resources, that does not mean that crimes are not occurring. In fact, more crime is happening.

 

That is why the murder rate is a key indicator. There is no way to sugar-coat or hide a murder. There is a corpse and someone has to explain why it is there. It is one of the few crimes that is recorded that does not require any action on the part of the police or prosecutors.

 

What can we do about the exploding crime rate? First, we have to collectively decide that we want to do something about it. Politics trail culture and there is a significant cultural movement that not only accepts more crime, but views its destabilizing effect as necessary to drive social change. Until our culture rejects that movement for the cancer it is, there will always be political support for the policies that empower criminals.

 

Second, assuming we actually want to change it, we must drive change in local elections. Most of the decisions about funding law enforcement, use of force policies, prosecutions, etc. are made by local governments, elected district attorneys, elected sheriffs, and elected judges. People make policy and we must elect people who will make policies that protect our communities.

 

Most things that happen are not the result of some mysterious force. They are the result of decisions that we make. Until we decide that we want to have less crime, it will not happen.