The Liberals Who Won’t Acknowledge the Crime Problem
Updated at 11:50 a.m. ET on June 21, 2022.
On a recent June weekend, 10 people were killed in shootings across cities in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Tennessee, and South Carolina. In Philadelphia, multiple active shooters fired into a crowd in the popular nighttime destination of South Street. “It was chaos,” one witness told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “People were coming off the street with blood splatters on white sneakers and skinned knees and skinned elbows.”
Coming so soon after the horrific Uvalde school shooting, these other killings were perhaps unlikely to garner much national attention. These stories were primarily of concern to the people living in the cities in question. But perhaps more importantly, this was “just” crime—no political motives, no obvious political solution, no broader lesson to be learned, with no wisdom to be gained.
Crime is rising nationally, but it is still experienced locally. In an , the number of Americans who believe that crime is up in their local area is the highest it’s been in 25 years. underscore crime and personal safety as a top concern among registered voters. In Washington, D.C., where I live, many of my own friends and acquaintances can relay a recent experience with petty crime—and the sense of fatalism that comes from realizing that authorities and institutions probably won’t do much,
