Miami – once the home of Al Capone – has become an example of how to suppress crime, according to Tucker Carlson of Fox News.
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez told Carlson this week that hiring more police officers and prosecuting criminals were two reasons for the decline in crime in Miami.
The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office would like to emulate the South Florida metropolis in that regard.
Carlson compared Miami’s crime reduction to the crime wave being experienced in most large cities, such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. In those Democrat-run cities, the police have little respect or support, and criminals are given free rein.
Prosecutors backed by socialist George Soros, such as the ones Los Angeles citizens tried to oust, release criminals without bail and fail to prosecute many crimes.
This is the direct opposite of the “broken window” philosophy that drove down crime statistics in big cities decades ago.
In Miami, from 2015 to 2020 robberies went from 5,366 to 2,687, burglaries from 14,534 to 6,399 and larcenies from 76,400 to 52,896.
Violent crimes, such as murders, are a different situation. They are more dependent upon demographics and not as subject to control. They are not repeated by the same persons, for the most part, like property crimes. Miami had 217 murders in 2015 and 224 in 2020.
In Duval County, the number of murders went from 97 to 143 in those years, but property crimes also have dropped.
But in the overall comparison of major crimes to population, Miami has seen a 36 percent drop compared to Duval’s 20 percent.
The Democrat media tries to minimize the big-city crime spree.
Yahoo News says the homicide rate in Florida was 5.9 murders per 100,000 people and the violent crime rate was 384 per 100,000. New York, meanwhile, allegedly had a murder rate of 4.2 and a violent crime rate of 364 in the same time frame.
For New York City, the homicide rate in 2020 was 5.6 per 100,000 people, slightly below the national average of 6.5. Miami, however, experienced a 12.8 homicide rate per 100,000 in 2020—more than twice that of NYC, Yahoo said. Miami’s violent crime rate of 556 in 2020, however, was somewhat lower than New York City’s 584.
But if any sane person was asked whether he would feel safer in any Florida city than in the Big Apple, it is not difficult to guess his answer.
Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry and interim sheriff are asking for $37.5 million more for the sheriff’s office next year, to hire more officers.
“Make no mistake, the ability to have cops on the street is the most effective tool for our neighborhoods to be safe,” Curry said in his budget address. “That is why I added 224 new positions with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office since first taking office.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis has made it clear that he will not tolerate prosecutors who refuse to prosecute. He recently suspended the state attorney in Tampa, who had declared he would not enforce laws he did not like. With the arrogance typical of a liberal Democrat, the attorney filed suit to stop DeSantis from removing him.
