RECORD HOMICIDES IN CITY AFTER CITY

With three weeks still to go in 2021, at least 12 major U.S. cities have broken their annual homicide records. Two other cities are on the verge of doing so.

The cities that have already suffered a record number of homicides are:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Columbus, Ohio
Indianapolis, Indiana
Louisville, Kentucky
St. Paul, Minnesota
Portland, Oregon
Tucson, Arizona
Toledo, Ohio
Austin, Texas
Rochester, New York
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Five of these cities — Columbus, Indianapolis, Louisville, Toledo, and Baton Rouge — broke records set in 2020. That was the year when homicides increased 30 percent nationally, the largest single-year jump since the FBI began recording crime statistics 60 years ago.

The two cites that are likely to break their annual record before the end of the month are Minneapolis and Milwaukee.

Chicago will not break the record it set way back in 1970. However, it leads the nation with 739 homicides as of the end of November, a small increase from 2020.

What do the 15 homicide-plagued cities mentioned above have in common?

Every one of them has a Democrat demoncrap as mayor.

I can’t speak to the specifics of law enforcement in all 15 cities. However, we have covered the abdication, in effect, by the police forces in Portland and Minneapolis. We also know about the pro-criminal, anti-police policies of Philadelphia’s Soros-backed chief prosecutor, Larry Krasner.

Krasner, by the way, claims that Philadelphia isn’t experiencing a crime wave. This willfully ignorant statement has drawn howls of derision from Philadelphia residents and officials:

Former Philly mayor Michael Nutter did not mince words

[Krasner’s statements are] some of the worst, most ignorant, and most insulting comments I have ever heard spoken by an elected official. It takes a certain audacity of ignorance and white privilege to say that right now. . . .

I have to wonder what kind of messed-up world of white wokeness Krasner is living in to have so little regard for human lives lost, many of them Black and brown, while he advances his own national profile as a progressive district attorney.

(Emphasis added)

Darnetta Arce, executive director of the Brewerytown and Sharswood civic association in North Philadelphia, complained:

People get carjacked at the gas station. We have people getting robbed as they walk down the street. We have people getting shot. So, no, it’s not safe in our community right now.

Current Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney acknowledged:

It’s terrible to every morning get up and have to go look at the numbers and then look at the news and see the stories. It’s just crazy. It’s just crazy and this needs to stop.

But it won’t stop, not with a radical leftist chief prosecutor who refuses to acknowledge the problem, even in the face of statistics showing that his city of roughly 1.5 million people has had more homicides this year (521 as of December 6) than the nation’s two largest cities, New York (443 as of December 5) and Los Angeles (352 as of Nov. 27). The 521 homicides represent an increase of 13 percent from 2020, a near-record year in Philadelphia.

I suspect that, for Krasner, this isn’t a problem, not one he’s concerned about anyway. He’s concerned about the incarceration of Blacks — about “social justice,” not public safety or, indeed, actual justice.

Krasner may an extreme case, but his views have taken hold elsewhere. That’s a major reason why more than a dozen cities will set homicides records this year.