Wirepoints in the Wall Street Journal Column: Democrats Pay a Political Price for Going Easy on Crime*

From the column linked here:

In 2021 Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a criminal-justice bill called the SAFE-T Act, and in less than two months the state is set to eliminate cash bail entirely and impose stricter limits on pretrial detention. Under the new law, which is supported by Chicago’s left-wing mayor, Lori Lightfoot, the “threat to the community” detention standard will be abandoned, and it will become much harder to detain suspects accused of battery, assault, arson and various weapons felonies.

According to Wirepoints, since 2017 more than 15,000 crimes have been committed by suspects released on bond while awaiting trial. When officers risk their lives arresting dangerous suspects only to see them quickly released, disrespect for police increases and department morale suffers. The Chicago Police Department is down 1,700 officers, or about 13%, since 2019, while attacks on cops have risen, and nothing in the SAFE-T Act seems likely to reverse these unsettling trends.

Matt Rosenberg, a journalist for Wirepoints and author of “What Next, Chicago?,” a book about the city’s social disorder, told me in an interview last week that proponents of the legislation were not unaware of how these criminal-justice reforms have played out elsewhere in the country. They just didn’t care.

“There was little hesitation on the part of Democrats to pass this bill,” he said. “They have supermajorities. This is effectively a one-party state, and particularly so in the state Legislature. The political culture of Chicago, which is where most of the bill’s lead sponsors came from, is also a hard-left, progressive monoculture, so there was no threat of real pushback.”