#Joe Biden’s response to rising crime: Pander to anti-police radicals

The most serious issue in policing today is a skyrocketing homicide rate — not “systemic racism,” the issue that animates those “mostly peaceful protestors” who are looting businesses and destroying public property across the land.

Joe Biden should show leadership on the slay spree. Instead, he panders to the anti-police left.

The recent uptick in violence is no mere blip. Homicides in Minneapolis have nearly doubled compared to this point in 2019. Chicago just saw its deadliest month in 28 years, part of a nearly 50 percent spike in homicides over the past year. In Gotham, the first six months of 2020 saw a 21 percent increase in murders over the same period last year, only to be followed by a 50 percent increase for July.

It’s a pattern extending nationwide — 36 of the country’s 50 largest cities have experienced double-digit homicide increases in 2020, and the trend is getting worse, not better.

Biden’s hard-left policy platform is utterly divorced from this reality. The Democratic presidential nominee has failed to address the crime wave and to formulate a serious plan for restoring order. Instead, he has chosen to treat the broader law-enforcement issue merely as a platform for touting his anti-police and anti-Trump bona fides.

His official Twitter account, for example, shows no messages about murder victims yet took time to condemn President Trump for deploying federal agents in Democratic-run cities whose leaders were unable or unwilling to restore order.

In addition to assisting with riot control, these federal law enforcers are tasked with helping reduce the violent crime afflicting so many of our urban centers. Polling shows that those deployments are broadly popular, even when the federal presence is confined to protecting federal buildings in riot-stricken cities.

What’s going on with Biden? The ex-veep, it seems, is far more interested in pandering to an anti-police fringe movement than in protecting the American people from rising violent crime and federal property from destruction — even though the latter course is objectively more popular.

That is a disturbing way to run a campaign. It would be a shameful way to run the country.

Like it or not, we are at an inflection point with violent crime in this country. There hasn’t been a spike in murder this rapid since the late 1960s. Last time around, we endured a quarter-century of ruinous crime rates, the decay and hollowing out of America’s great cities and an entire generation marred by rampant criminality and victimization.

The country enjoyed a precipitous drop in crime starting in the early-to-mid 1990s, and no one is eager to return to the “bad old days.” We need not. Spikes in crime can be stymied before they turn into lost generations.

Trump has already begun taking the necessary actions. A smaller rise in crime that started under the Obama-Biden administration led Team Trump to deploy federal resources and fix the onerous federal mandates imposed on police departments around the country during the Obama years.

In the first two years of the Trump administration, the spike was crushed, and crime rates overall returned to the “new normal” established in the 1990s, before rising again in response to the recent unrest. We can achieve the same success again, but it won’t be easy. It will take exactly the kind of federal support for local crime-fighting that Biden claims is “tearing us apart.”

It should be obvious that it is Biden, not Trump, who is putting politics ahead of public safety and the rule of law. The rising crime rate in this country demands a leader who prioritizes enforcing the law and protecting citizens first, not scoring points with radical constituencies.

Enfeebled by and beholden to the hard left, Joe Biden is proving utterly incapable of providing the sort of leadership our country needs in this moment of peril.

Matt Whitaker served as former acting US attorney general under President Trump.