The newly arrived radical leftist mayor of St. Louis, Missouri, the city with the worst murder rate in America, is committed to leaving her constituents at the mercy of violent criminals by defunding the local police department and shutting down one of the city’s two jails.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, a woke black Democrat, was sworn in in April after narrowly defeating Cara Spencer, a similarly woke leftist white woman.
Jones’s campaign, which focused on “progressive” criminal justice reforms, was unabashedly racist. She said during a debate that Spencer wouldn’t be a good mayor because her skin was the wrong color.
A “white person doesn’t have to worry about their children getting hit by a stray bullet when he’s outside,” Jones said. “While I appreciate the role of white allies in this movement of progress, I don’t believe that they have the lived experiences to lead a majority-minority city.”
Her victory speech was weighted down with platitudes.
“I will not stay silent when I spot racism,” Jones said. “I will not stay silent when I spot homophobia or transphobia. I will not stay silent when I spot xenophobia. I will not stay silent when I spot religious intolerance. I will not stay silent when I spot any injustice.”
Her father is crooked former elected official Virvus Jones. Mr. Jones was the city’s chief financial officer from 1988 to 1995 when he left office after pleading guilty to felony tax fraud.
His Twitter feed is woke, incendiary, and subversive. His Twitter profile is a cross between Hillary Clinton and Nero. It reads simply: “An African Proverb: The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”
In a May 23 tweet he whined as follows: “Warrants issued for non violent or victimless crimes should not be a death sentence for black people. Police in the US are the equivalence [sic] of slave patrols[,]” he wrote, embracing a lie promoted by the 1619 Project. “Most of the warrants the police serve are not for violent crimes so there is no reason to shoot at a person fleeing.”
St. Louis is in rough shape as Mayor Jones takes the reins.
The city had 262 homicides or 87 homicides per 100,000 residents in 2020, the highest in the country, Fox News reported, and it is on track to break that record this year.
As of April 7, St. Louis had 50 homicides since January 1, 2021, an increase of 10 from April 7 the previous year.
The 262 figure for 2020 is five less than the record of 267 set in 1993, according to police. “But because the city’s population has declined since 1993, the per capita homicide rate was much higher in 2020. The homicide pace in 2021 is ahead of last year’s pace,” KMOV4 reports.
“More police doesn’t prevent crime,” Jones told The Telegraph.
The mayor wants to cut $4 million from the police department’s budget and give it to social workers and civil rights bureaucrats. She would also eliminate nearly 100 vacant police positions and zero-out funding for a medium-security jail.
“What we’ve been doing doesn’t work,” Jones said when she unveiled the proposed budget. “This revised budget will start St. Louis on a new path to tackling some of the root causes of crime.”
Of course, to left-wingers, “root causes” is a weasel phrase meant to absolve bad actors of responsibility for their crimes. It’s always society’s fault when a criminal commits a crime, they say, especially when the criminal is a minority. Spending more money on welfare giveaways will solve the problem, they claim.
“We don’t need two jails,” Jones told reporters after dropping by both of the city’s lockups with deranged racist Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) in April. “We need to move people through the system, we need to find alternatives to jails for some of the offenses,” she said.
On May 21, Bush herself tweeted, “Investing more money in policing is always bad, actually.”
St. Louis Interim Public Safety Director Daniel Isom seems to agree, saying historically there has been an overemphasis on using police to fight crime.
“There must be a balance,” Isom said. “I think it has been tipped toward policing and the criminal justice system so far and that the other parts of rehabilitation, investment in communities and investment in people, in terms of trying to change their life conditions, that portion of the strategy had always been minimized.”
“We’ve had an overemphasis on law enforcement as a solution,” he said. “I’ve talked about it throughout my tenure as police chief, that law enforcement is not the solution. The solution is investing in people, investing in communities, investing in families.”
What’s happening in St. Louis is happening all across America.
Deluded leftists have defunded –meaning reduced funding— for police or have tried to defund police in New York City; Washington D.C.; San Francisco; Baltimore; Minneapolis; Austin, Texas; Philadelphia; Los Angeles; Atlanta; Seattle; Portland, Oregon; Hartford, Connecticut; and Norman, Oklahoma.
Left-wingers claim decimating police budgets doesn’t hurt communities.
They’re lying.
In Minneapolis, where drug-addled career criminal George Floyd was not killed by police, homicides shot up 60 percent in 2020. In Atlanta, 2020 was the city’s most violent in years. Atlanta cops investigated 157 homicides last year, up from 99 in 2019, and the highest number in more than two decades.
You get the picture.
As crime begins to spiral out of control in communities they have caused to be under-policed, the Left will come up with excuses: the police budget wasn’t cut enough; not enough money was blown on welfare; Republicans sabotaged the policies; or maybe toxic masculinity or “whiteness” somehow poisoned the atmosphere.
Leftists will do anything to escape the blame for the destruction they cause.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared May 28, 2021, at FrontPageMag.