The Calamitous Consequences of Weakening the Criminal Justice System

Commentary

They say that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. That could be one way to describe Minnesota Democratic Rep. Angie Craig, a one-time House progressive who in 2020 and 2021 voted to support the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill that would have made it significantly easier to hold federal, state, and local law enforcement officers criminally and civilly liable for alleged misconduct. (The bill, strongly opposed by Republicans, passed the Democrat-controlled House but died in the Senate.)

Then, on the morning of Feb. 9, Craig was assaulted in the elevator of her Capitol Hill apartment building: punched in the chin and grabbed by the neck. She escaped by flinging hot coffee at her assailant.

A few hours later police arrested 26-year-old Kendrid Hamlin, whose clothing and appearance matched building surveillance photos of the intruder. He turned out to be quite the veteran of the criminal justice system. Records compiled by the U.S. Attorney’s office (pdf) showed that he had been arrested on two separate occasions in September 2022, for shoplifting and indecent exposure. On both occasions he was promptly released under a 1990s DC law that largely did away with cash bail on the grounds that it discriminated against poor people. Hamlin failed to keep several scheduled court dates and roamed free until Nov. 21, 2022, when he was arrested on four counts of assaulting a police officer, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Thanks to a plea bargain that dropped most of the charges, however, Hamlin spent only a little more than a month behind bars for all those alleged crimes.

Furthermore, the U.S. Attorney’s Office pointed out, Hamlin had 12 previous convictions dating back to 2014, including multiple instances of assault, robbery, larceny, unlawful entry, disorderly conduct, and attempted possession of drugs. He was on supervised release in the state of Maryland for one of those convictions when he allegedly attacked Craig—but he had failed to keep a scheduled appointment with a probation officer, generating one of the 25 bench warrants for non-appearance in court that he had accumulated when police picked him up on Feb. 9. He’s finally in jail pending trial on the Craig charges, after the U.S. Attorney’s office filed papers arguing that he was a flight risk.

As it turned out, Feb. 9 was also the date on which the House of Representatives was scheduled to vote on a resolution (pdf) disapproving a massive overhaul of the District of Columbia’s criminal code that would have made the lax system that allowed Hamlin to elude jail even laxer. The new code would have reduced criminal penalties—and eliminated mandatory minimum sentences altogether—for a range of violent crimes, including robbery, burglary, carjacking, illegal gun possession, and even rape and murder.

The new sentencing structure was the brainchild of the District’s notoriously liberal city council, which had enacted a “defund the police” budget reduction for law enforcement in 2020. The District’s otherwise proudly progressive mayor, Muriel Bowser, had vetoed the rewrite, saying that it “sends the wrong message to criminals,” but the City Council had overridden her veto in January. The House, now Republican-controlled, voted 250–173 to reject the new code as part of Congress’s oversight of District affairs.

Some 31 Democrats voted with the Republican majority, and one of those 31 was Angie Craig. On Feb. 14 she delivered a blistering attack on the District of Columbia’s justice system.

“I got attacked by someone who the District of Columbia has not prosecuted fully over the course of almost a decade,” she said in a CBS interview. (Craig had actually inched to the political center even before she became a crime victim, withdrawing her support for the George Floyd Act, which she now says would hamper police recruitment and retention.)

The Hamlin fiasco represents a massive fail, not just in the District of Columbia but in every liberal-dominated city, where such notions as “defund the police” and “decarceration” took hold as policy in at least 20 Democrat-controlled cities across America that slashed police-department budgets and relaxed arrest and conviction standards after the death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody on May 25, 2020. This was exactly what voters wanted in all those blue cities, for it’s their elected officials—city councils, mayors, prosecutors—who have implemented measures that tell potential criminals that the legal system doesn’t take their offenses seriously. The results have been disastrous. In the District of Columbia alone, the number of homicides shot up 75 percent between 2017 and 2022, to more than 200 in both 2021 and 2022. The number of carjackings rose for five straight years, including a 14 percent increase from 2021 to 2022.

Progressive Austin, Texas, reallocated $150 million from its police budget in 2020 to social programs such as “violence prevention,” low-income-housing, and abortion access. The murder rate in Austin doubled in 2021, leading to the state legislature’s demand that the city council reinstate the funding or lose state subsidies. The city’s still-decimated police department was no match recently for a wave of street-racer takeovers of city streets that included setting fires, hurling glass bottles, vandalizing cars, and terrorizing other motorists, whose 911 calls to overburdened police dispatchers took 22 minutes on average to answer.

In St. Louis, whose residents voted 82 percent Democratic in the last presidential election, 17-year-old Janae Edmondson, in town to play in a volleyball tournament, was crushed and mangled on Feb. 18 when a speeding car blew through a yield sign and crashed into another vehicle while she and her parents were crossing the street. She had to have both legs amputated. The suspect, 21-year-old Daniel Riley, was supposed to be under house arrest for an alleged robbery that took place nearly three years ago, in August 2020, but has yet to go to trial under a slow-prosecution policy initiated by St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner, who had taken office in 2017 on a promise to de-emphasize incarceration in criminal cases. According to news reports, Riley had violated his GPS monitoring at least 50 times before the accident and didn’t have a valid driver’s license. Gardner was already under scrutiny from the Missouri legislature over soaring crime rates in St. Louis, and on Feb. 23 the state’s Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, moved to fire her. Yet St. Louis residents had given her 74 percent of their votes when she ran for reelection in 2020.

These are just some of the calamitous consequences of the recent misguided efforts by America’s liberal cities and citizens to make crime go away by weakening the criminal justice system. Angie Craig saw the light. We hope that other progressives will follow.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.