These days, when I turn on the local morning news, I hear only two stories: The number of new reported cases of COVID-19 and related deaths and the number of shootings and homicides in New York City. This past year violent crime in NYC has increased by 95-percent. And it is not just endemic to NYC. Last month alone Washington D.C. had 170 homicides. That means that in November alone they had more homicides than in all of 2019. Overall, in most American cities, crime is now at a 12-year high.

Is there a common denominator for the cities with the highest crime increases? YES!!! These are cities that have already, or are in the process, of defunding the police and getting soft on crime. In many cases, bail is being done away with and violent felons are being released from prisons.

The strange part is that many who live in these urban crime centers refuse to accept this new reality.

I have a relative who is a NYC resident. He has been lucky enough not to have been affected by this crime wave. So, to him (let me add that he is also very Left-wing) everything is just fine. He ignores what is happening by grudgingly admitting that murder and shootings “MAY be up a bit” but most violent crimes, like rape, are actually down and that life within a pandemic city is perfectly normal. No matter what statistics you present to him his opinion will not change. As long as he can go about his day-to-day activities everything is just fine. Sadly, he is not alone in this thinking.

It would be easy to urge family and friends who live in major cities to up and move to the suburbs. However, for many, that is not all that easy. A large number of urbanites are tied to cities due to work, school, and a variety of other reasons. But there is a larger and more prevalent problem:

A large percentage of urbanites embrace progressive ideas and ideologies. These progressive ideas are, arguably, what is causing the sharp increase in urban crime. As these people move from the city to the suburbs they are going to bring their progressive ideas with them which will lead, quite logically, to the same problems facing cities affecting suburban communities. There is very little defense for a policy of “no bail” while young children are being shot in the street or, in some cases, sitting in their own bedrooms.

During the Giuliani years as New York’s mayor there was a “broken window” policy. This meant that by actively prosecutting low-level crimes you prevent more serious crime. By any measure that policy seemed to work well with crime in NYC becoming sharply lower. Now we have district attorneys that refuse to prosecute low-level crimes and, as a result, the larger crimes are on the increase.

According to an NYPD report, in the first half of 2020, there were more than 2,000 arrests for crimes involving guns. Most of these felons had previous cases still pending in the courts and were back out on the streets.

As a result of the demand to “Defund the Police” NYC had to deny cadets in training their certification to be police officers and the next class was completely cancelled. Then add to that a high number of police officers leaving the force due to retirement and relocating and you now have a situation where criminals have complete freedom. And if all of that isn’t bad enough, the police officers that remain are being harassed and placed into situations where they are afraid of doing their jobs. In a bizarre reality, we now have citizens that are siding with criminals while treating those who are tasked with fighting crime as the enemy.

We have tried these leftist ideas and are quickly discovering that they just plain do not work. The result of these ideas is a lot of dead people including innocent children. You do not stop miscreants by allowing them to do whatever the heck they want and then makeup excuses for them. There is only one way to stop them: by making them face the full penalties and consequences of the law.