https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/george-soros-funded-da-rationalizes-crime-wave-bruce-thornton/
Like other cities run by Democrats, Los Angeles is going through an epidemic of violent crime. Its Soros-funded DA George Gascón has a lot of blood on his hands for increasing the mayhem. When he was sworn in, he said his office would not prosecute a host of misdemeanor crimes, or seek the death penalty for even the most heinous murders. No surprise that, as Broken Windows policing confirmed nearly two decades ago, tolerating “non-violent” crimes has increased violent ones.
“The data,” as City Journal’s Soledad Ursúa, reports on LA, “show staggering surges of homicides, gun violence, and sexual assaults, and one can see with one’s own eyes the open-air drug scenes, rampant homelessness, streets lined with human excrement and needles, prostitution, filth, and squalor. Last year saw 52 percent more homicides than in 2019; shooting incidents were up 59 percent over the same period, according to the LAPD.” Much of this violence has come at the hands of street-bums and addicts.
In response to this carnage, Ursúa continues, Gascón has fallen back on old sociological nostrums about crime that blame everybody and everything except the criminal: “In many ways we cannot prosecute our way out of social inequalities, income inequalities, the unhoused, the desperation that we have.”
When it comes to crime, progressives who fancy themselves “brights” who just “follow the science,” are in fact slaves of some defunct sociologist.
But even before sociology and criminology became full-fledged “scientific” disciplines, this idea that crime was a response to an unjust social order could be found in popular novels in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A common theme of these thrillers was the role injustice played in driving the protagonist to crime. Later, the new “science” of sociology turned this literary motif into a “scientific” explanation for crime, one that, as we are witnessing today, worsens the problem by distorting their causes, and abandoning both common sense and the moral imperative in a free society to hold people responsible for their actions.
