Free Republic

Robberies in New York City are surging, police data show. While most major crimes are down, including shootings and murders, robberies shot up 5.6% so far in 2024 over the same period in 2023 — to 5,522 from 5,228 as of May 5. Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, pointed out that robberies have a low arrest rate — with only about 25% of cases solved because victims typically don’t know their attackers.

The man who caused a four-car accident on I-95 in April, leaving an Albion woman dead and her husband in critical condition, had entered the United States illegally from Mexico in January, the Maine Wire can confirm. According to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security official, the Customs and Border Protection’s resident agent in Albion was contacted when Oguzhan Cildir, 23, was arrested at the scene of the accident because the arresting agency found that he “had immigration status from when he crossed on the Southwest border.” The arresting agency then turned the individual over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s...

Chicago, like so many of our major cities, is out of control. Homelessness, smash-and-grab robberies, carjackings, gangs effectively taking over parts of the city - Chicago is in free fall. On Sunday, another incident in Chicago's meltdown was revealed when the Chicago Police Department canceled the city's Cinco de Mayo parade "out of an abundance of caution," due to gang violence and large-scale fighting in the area of the parade.Families in Democrat-run Chicago hoping to enjoy a Cinco de Mayo parade will have to wait until next year – after the city canceled the festivities due to "gang violence."The Chicago...

Move over California and New York, a new state is in contention for the 'most dysfunctional' in America. Illinois is grappling with a string of issues which have triggered a rise in residents departing the state. The state has struggled to add jobs and its public pension debt has ballooned to nearly $150 billion. Meanwhile, its population has declined, hurting tax income.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass vowed Wednesday to prosecute pro-Israel vigilantes who attacked the illegal “Palestine Solidarity Encampment” at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) overnight. In a statement, Bass said she wanted those involved in the violence held responsible, noting actions reportedly taken by both the vigilantes and the pro-Palestinian activists — though only the vigilantes were said to use fireworks.

The Democrat mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, didn’t send police onto the campus of UCLA when pro-Hamas demonstrators took over parts of it and prevented Jews from entering, just as Nazis once blocked Jewish students from the University of Vienna. A Jewish girl being beaten unconscious and hospitalized also drew no police response to the state government-owned campus. But when non-student members of the Jewish community of Los Angeles entered the campus and began physically confronting the pro-Hamas demonstrators and videos of fights went out on internet, after two-plus hours [update: 3+ hours] of mayhem, the Mayor decided to...

Americans are worried about crime on their streets, but President Biden and the mainstream press corps don’t think that they should be. ABC News claims that “violent crime is dramatically falling.” NBC News asserts that “the drop in crime does not appear to be well understood by large majorities of Americans.” And in his State of the Union address, Biden bragged about a purported drop in crime that was allegedly a result of his efforts. While the administration and its allies are trying to convince Americans that the crime spike that they think they’ve seen in recent years has been...

The writers of our Constitution placed their faith not in specific guarantees of rights—those came later—but in a system of checks on government power. Foremost is the separation of powers among the three branches of the federal government, as well as between the federal government and the states. For this system to work as designed, people in each branch of the federal government and in the state governments must do their jobs and stay in their respective lanes. But what happens when district attorneys—members of their states’ executive branches—refuse to execute the laws of the land? We are witnessing the...

This is a different kind of cancel culture. Even President Ronald Reagan’s failed assassin-turned-folk singer is too afraid to step foot in the Big Apple — calling it a “cesspool of crime” after canceling an upcoming gig. “I’m afraid of New York City and I just don’t want to go there right now,” John Hinckley Jr. — who tried to kill Reagan in 1981 — told The Post days after pulling the plug on a June show scheduled on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Hinckley announced the performance on X last week but pulled out because “he said New York is...

The Seattle Police Department released video of a purse theft and assault and the arrest of a 13-year-old male suspect on Wednesday. The incident happened April 6 in the Westwood Village shopping center in West Seattle. The video shows someone grabbing a woman’s purse inside the Rite Aid pharmacy entrance and running outside. The woman ran after the suspect and confronted him. You can see him dropping her purse, spilling its contents onto the ground. The woman says at that point, the suspect grabbed her shirt and threw her to the ground. She says as she got back up and...

Trump was right- again. Only 3 years ago our country was MAGA. America was great again. The economy, prosperity, inflation, interest rates, jobs, incomes, the border, crime, peace around the world. Three short years later we’ve gone from MAGA to Gaza. Trump was right about a lot of things. Here are just a few. Trump predicted if the border was open and millions came into our country illegally, we’d be turned into a third world craphole. It happened exactly as he predicted. Look around. Illegal aliens are murdering Americans from coast to coast. Illegals are fighting with pipes and belts...

Hello to the city, goodbye to your luggage. That was Senatorial candidate Adam Schiff’s rude introduction to San Francisco’s vexing reputation for car burglaries Thursday when thieves swiped the bags from his car while it sat in a downtown parking garage. The heist meant the Democratic congressman got stuck at a fancy dinner party in his shirt sleeves and a hiking vest while everyone else sat in suits. Not quite the look the man from Burbank was aiming for as he rose to thank powerhouse attorney Joe Cotchett for his support in his bid to replace the late Dianne Feinstein...

An illegal open-air 'flea market' operating in Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's district has popped back up days days after it was raided by police officers. Many of those operating on the sidewalks of Queens are believed to be illegal migrants hawking counterfeit goods and other wares. The sellers have been blocking sidewalks and causing general quality of life issues for the residents of Jackson Heights, Corona, and Elmhurst.

When I was 12 years old, we moved to the Navy base on Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. We moved in the summer and by the time school started I’d made friends and was feeling pretty comfortable. One day during the first week of class, I was sitting in the back of Mr. Scroch’s Social Studies classroom before he arrived. While we waited, some friends and I were messing around, throwing erasers at one another and calling each other names. Then we noticed a man sitting in the front row. We immediately settled down, but I remember ducking my head and yelling...

NYC Now has a $4.4 billion shoplifting economy. Theft is so rampant, retailers are forced to make tough choices... Cash takes a serious look at stores starting to flee the big apple. The fall of a once great city. And one shining mall in the city is now completely vacant due in most part to shoplifting and violent crime.

Plenty of people think Joe Biden's open borders is mainly about millions of illegals rolling into the U.S., while the billions rolling into Mexico's notorious crime cartels as a result is Mexico's problem, not ours. But that's not quite what's going on. Mexico's cartels have grown so big and so powerful from migrant and drug smuggling that they not only threaten Mexico, they are now taking their internecine warfare on the road into the U.S., which now faces a Tijuana-like future. If you recall the sight of all those Tijuana cars burning as that city shut down from cartel warfare,...

A paper at the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), founded by researcher John Lott, shows how faith in the police, arrest rates, and crime reporting are all interrelated. The paper is titled " The Collapse in Law Enforcement: As Arrest Rates Plummet, People Have Been Less Willing to Report Crime", published on April 5, 2024. As faith in the police collapses, reporting of crime drops, and so do arrest rates and clearance rates for both violent crimes and property crimes. This has the classic look of a positive feedback loop. The consequences are far from positive. It is not a...

A paper at the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), founded by researcher John Lott, shows how faith in the police, arrest rates, and crime reporting are all interrelated. The paper is titled ” The Collapse in Law Enforcement: As Arrest Rates Plummet, People Have Been Less Willing to Report Crime,” published on April 5, 2024. As faith in the police collapses, reporting of crime drops, and so do arrest rates and clearance rates for both violent crimes and property crimes. This has the classic look of a positive feedback loop. The consequences are far from positive. It is not a...

A stretch of Jackson Heights has devolved into an illegal migrant shopping district — an unchecked open-air market where everything from women to stolen goods can be had, The Post has learned. Roosevelt Avenue near 91st Street is littered daily with migrant vendors hawking goods they ripped off from shopkeepers just steps away, while prostitutes proposition passersby at all hours — and frustrated merchants and residents say they’re helpless to do anything about it. “It’s relentless,” said Milton Reyes, who manages Mi Farmacia pharmacy on the avenue. “You should see it on Saturdays. It’s so heavy you can’t even step...

News from the Big Apple these days is as discouraging as it is unsurprising. Who could have imagined that when America’s largest city decriminalized crime, defunded its police, harassed and prosecuted police officers, praised criminals and declared them protected members of an oppressed class, did away with bail, and virtue signaled praise for criminal illegal immigrants, crime might increase and run rampant? We’ve been treated to daily stories of illegals assaulting police officers, thugs pushing people onto subway tracks, sometimes killing them, out of control robberies, carjackings, organized shoplifting, most crimes committed by people with prodigious arrest/conviction records who were...