Well, OK, that’s not exactly true. But in July, Oakland police announced that, due to budget problems, police will no longer respond to a long list of crimes, including residential burglary where the home invaders are unknown.
I’m sure it didn’t help that the city had to spend so much money responding to the recent liberation of sports shoes and consumer electronics in the name of Oscar Grant.
Shoe Locker Looter Wearing an Oscar Grant Mask
That’s a lot of money that could be spent on doing things like protecting people’s property, going instead to prevent protesters from destroying even more Mom and Pop franchises and delis and phone kiosks and other symbols of oppression.
Maybe there should be an enhanced penalty for premeditated rioting.
Meanwhile, want to train to become a burglar? Move to Oakland. Though I don’t recommend living there, because home insurance rates are about to shoot up. For everyone, of course, not just burglars and looters. Funny how that works.
I spent way too much time yesterday fruitlessly searching for a comment I’d seen on a police blog, one that perfectly sums up the dangers of lowering the bar on criminal behavior this way. The commenter, a cop himself, was writing about the war on cops. He pointed out that virtually every cop killer has repeatedly cycled through the court system, learning along the way that he could get away with practically anything.
Even more troubling, the widespread belief that so-called non-violent crimes like drug trafficking and residential burglary don’t merit prison terms is creating a generation of criminals who not only have no fear of consequences but actually feel entitled to commit crimes. Whenever they find naive people to support them in their belief in these “rights,” they also feel more entitled to direct their resentment and rage at symbols of law enforcement, namely cops.
We should not underestimate the perniciousness of reinforcing the notion that it is “unjust” to punish people for things like breaking into other people’s houses.
Oakland has actually codified that mindset.
These trends are especially dangerous for women. Back when Georgia was implementing its DNA database by collecting DNA from all felons, not just sex offenders, something really shocking showed up in the first few hundred “hits” (where a felon’s sample matched previously unsolved crimes). Many men who only had prior records for burglary or drugs or aggravated assault were identified as rapists in stranger rapes that had gone unsolved.
That begs a few questions, questions which, sadly, law professors and criminologists are utterly disinterested in asking. Too bad, because they’re extremely relevant in the ongoing debate about prosecuting or not prosecuting certain crimes and how we choose to spend our shrinking justice budgets.
For example, how many of these men were previously caught committing rapes but were granted non-sex offense pleas by money-conscious prosecutors who didn’t think they could get rape charges to stick? In one of his several trips to prison, my own rapist got more time for resisting arrest and B&E than for sexually assaulting another victim — more time for breaking into a window than a woman’s body — thanks to one such money-saving plea. I’ve got a file cabinet stuffed with other examples of serial rapists — and serial killers — given multiple chances to rape and kill, thanks to routine, money-saving courtroom shortcuts.
They don’t call them “bargains” for nothing. These types of offenders also now have enhanced abilities to do pre-assault dry runs in Oakland and other places that are ratcheting back law enforcement.
Now, with less enforcement of these lesser crimes, more serious offenders stand to get away with even higher quantities of violent crime. A sex offender operating in Oakland can rest confident knowing that the police won’t be showing up to investigate his fishing expeditions. Does anybody believe the that the tiny fraction of burglars who end up in a courtroom in Oakland won’t benefit from the downgrading of this crime?
And what is happening in Oakland is the future for everyone, the logical consequence of decades of pricing justice out of reach — for us non-offenders, that is. We spend so much on largely useless “rehabilitation” and frivolous appeals that there is no money left to actually enforce the law. This is how violent recidivists are made, and how cops get killed, and why the rest of us are forced to spend more and more of our money insuring our lives and looking over our shoulders.
In the 1990’s, elected officials were able to turn New York City around by doing precisely the opposite of what Oakland is doing today. Expect opposite results, as well.
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