Both candidates for mayor are claiming they will lower the crime rate in Jacksonville.
In truth, neither one of them has offered a viable solution.
Republican Daniel Davis would add more police officers. That may be needed because of the workload but is not likely to reduce the amount of crime.
Donna Deegan, Democrat, blames poverty — ignoring the fact that the six-decade. ultra-expensive liberal “war on poverty” was lost — and proposes the usual liberal solutions that never have reduced crime.
The local media is in a perpetual state of alarm over the crime rate but it is correlated with demographics and when those change it will go up or down.
If poverty is the problem, that is an easy problem to fix.
Graduate from school, get a job and don’t have a baby before getting married. Those actions, all accomplished by millions of people every year, decrease the chances of being in poverty to almost nil.
What they require are personal responsibility and a strong family unit.
Liberals work constantly to destroy the family unit and transfer personal responsibility to the public.
As for their solutions, nearly every one proposed has been tried. Taxpayers were spending some $30 million a year on the Jacksonville Journey program before it was abandoned for lack of results. They now are spending millions on the latest fad, called Cure Violence.
Its supporters say it strives to treat crime as a public health problem. But an analysis of the program in crime-ridden St. Louis raised many doubts about its effectiveness, according to Time magazine.
Supporters respond by saying the approach must be “holistic” or “organic” to be more effective. Blah, blah, blah.
The Biden administration, of course, is pledging to spend billions of dollars on this and other “intervention” programs, all of which will mean high-paying jobs for Democrat voters while doing little to reduce crime.
Meanwhile, both victims and perpetrators of crime in Jacksonville are people Democrats claim they want to help. (How well that has worked was addressed in a book by Jason Riley titled “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.”)
In the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office homicide database, there are 772 killings listed. Only 42 percent have been cleared by arrest. Of those where the ages of suspects were known, 148 of them were under 30 and 124 of those had black skin.
An alarming 75 percent of the victims had black skin.
Liberals simply don’t care about victims. Their solution is to disarm victims – a certain way to increase crime because armed victims stop thousands of crimes each year.
Liberals will wring their hands and deplore violence but their policies only make violence worse. Those policies invariably are costly, shift responsibility, reduce individual freedom and increase the power of politicians and bureaucrats.
Actually, there is little a politician can do about the crime rate. But if the candidates for mayor want to reduce crime they should be talking about increasing responsibility and accountability, and strengthening the family, not mouthing cliches.
