Posted on 01/26/2022 4:56:50 AM PST by Kaslin
There's nothing petty about petty crime. Tolerate it, and society descends into disorder.
You're standing in line at Starbucks and watch a freeloader go to the front, pick out a sandwich and walk out without paying. No one says a word.
Or you pay your bills, then find out thieves have robbed the blue USPS box to abscond with your checking information and empty your account. That happened to me last week.
The thieves fish mail out of the box or use stolen USPS keys sold on the internet. This crime is surging, but the police and banks shrug their shoulders and advise going directly to the post office or using electronic banking.
Walk into a drug store to buy deodorant and toothpaste. They're locked up behind glass. A distraught Duane Reade employee explained why. Shoplifters waltz in, fill bags with merchandise and walk out. Management prohibits employees from stopping them.
Banks and retailers are forced to accept these crimes as a cost of doing business. Law enforcement officials are downgrading the penalties for many petty crimes. But the public is rattled and rightly so.
Batman, the cloaked crime fighter from Gotham, got it right. Criminals take advantage of weak laws and weak law enforcement.
Allowing petty crime -- shoplifting, carjacking, turnstile hopping, check forging and vandalism -- is a choice. California led the way, adopting Proposition 47 in 2014 to reduce penalties for these crimes. Many other states followed and no surprise, crimes increased.
Prosecutors are too ready to assign victimhood to perpetrators instead of to the rest of us, who are disgusted by the lawlessness.
You'd think that Jean Lugo-Romero, caught after robbing five Walgreens stores in San Francisco last May and June, would be in jail now. Absolutely not. The San Francisco Public Defender's office states that "as an indigent individual suffering from housing instability," Lugo-Romero "needed services and he's now getting them."
Manhattan's previous District Attorney Cyrus Vance announced in 2017 he would stop prosecuting farebeaters. Now, a steady stream of them walks right by cops, while the rest of us patsies pay to ride.
Vance's successor, Alvin Bragg, is ceding even more to the criminals, refusing to jail armed shoplifters.
Wielding a pocket knife, 43-year-old William Rolon was arrested two weeks ago for stealing $2,000 worth of cold medicine from a Duane Reade in Manhattan, his 39th arrest overall and the second time he hit that store. But he was charged only with misdemeanor shoplifting, not first-degree robbery, the charge he would have faced before Bragg's new policy.
Worried about locking your car at a stop light? There's good reason. Carjackings have doubled and even tripled since last year in major cities. It's making it harder to get an Uber or Lyft because gig drivers are quitting. More than one-third feel unsafe, according to Pew Research.
But apparently municipal leaders don't believe prosecuting carjackers is the answer. In Chicago, only 4.5% of offenses result in charges. In Minneapolis, it's a discouraging 2%. Several Minneapolis aldermen blame Hyundai and Kia manufacturers because the cars can be broken into without an alarm sounding.
Anything to avoid blaming the criminal.
Sunday, California's Gov. Gavin Newsom appeared at the Los Angeles railway terminal, the target of repeated looting. Standing amid the ransacked packages, he said, "I don't think anyone particularly cares who's to blame."
Wrong, Governor. Your message invites more crime.
To restore civility, voters need to elect serious crime fighters. New Yorkers might have a shot with newly elected Mayor Eric Adams, if his actions match his words.
Tuesday morning, he said, "We can't continue to create an environment in our city where anything goes," including farebeating and shoplifting.
Californians failed to recall Newsom, but they're fighting to recall ultra-lefty DAs in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The fate of these cities depends on voters choosing leaders determined to crack down on all lawbreakers, not just murderers.
Because no crime is minor if it happens to you.
When authorities refuse to prosecute crime, people will turn to their own vigilante justice. If not, they must live with anarchy.
Rudy Giuliani explained all of this to New Yorkers two decades ago, but they insisted that ideology made reality irrelevant.
Well….at least these prosecutors don’t offend their snowflake citizens with mean and nasty tweets.
Actually, it wasn’t the voters but the Democrat State government that changed the rules so Giuliani couldn’t get a third term. Even the Democrats voted for him because they could finally walk in Central Park and not worry about getting mugged or raped.
But Sheldon Silver didn’t want any Republican to stay in the city too long, so he got the Senate to term limit the position.
If they don’t prosecute these crimes it means they approve of them even if they claim they don’t condone them.
I personally believe it all started with the California “rolling stop”.
Now look where we are.
If you defend yourself when the authorities don’t do their job, then you get prosecuted in most of these states. This is known as anarcho-tyranny.
For the reasons stated by the author, many of the USPS drop boxes are being removed from locations other than at actual USPS locations. My CPA’s firm had a large number of sensitive mailings stolen when they were put in the drop box rather than being taken inside because the admin assistant was running late. The firm got to pay for a year of privacy/ID protection for a large number of clients due to that. Cost was around $800/client, not including the effects of actual stolen ID.
“Crimes Are Crimes, No Matter How Petty”
Leftist Response: Well, why doesn’t she just join the KKK while she’s at it?
yep, including illegally crossing the border.
“When authorities refuse to prosecute crime, people will turn to their own vigilante justice. If not, they must live with anarchy.”
Very little vigilante justice. The problem is that the laws are STILL on the books - so a person who ‘looks like America’ can walk out of a Duane Read with $2,000 of perfume or whatever and not get charged (even if caught in the act), but a person who tries to stop them can be charged with assault, for instigating violence when a non-crime happened.
“thieves have robbed the blue USPS box”
But they leave ballot drop boxes alone!
“thieves have robbed the blue USPS box” But they leave ballot drop boxes alone!
But where is the payoff robbing ballots? Unless there are people with political agendas willing to pay by the ballot, there is no return on investment robbing the voting box.
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