We’ll always have Virginia

Just two weeks into the brand new yr, and already crime in Washington, D.C., is rising quickly. Simply within the first 12 days of 2023, there have been 189 automotive thefts within the district. That is an 89% improve from this time final yr. Homicides are up by 40%, and shootings have gotten an everyday prevalence. Simply final week, two youngsters had been shot whereas getting off a Metrobus.

You’d suppose native officers would take a look at these numbers and notice they’ve a disaster on their arms requiring instant, agency motion. However you’d be mistaken. The Council of the District of Columbia has little interest in punishing the criminals answerable for Washington’s crime wave. Actually, its members are doing all the pieces they will to lighten legal punishments, giving them much more of an incentive to wreak havoc within the district.

A invoice earlier than the D.C. Council, known as the Revised Felony Code Act of 2022, would overhaul the district’s legal code in quite a lot of methods. It could get rid of most obligatory minimal sentences, enable for jury trials in most misdemeanor circumstances, and cut back the utmost penalties for critical crimes, together with burglaries and homicides.

The invoice is so excessive that Washington’s liberal mayor, Muriel Bowser, vetoed it. Washington’s metropolis administrator and police chief have additionally spoken out in opposition to it.

However the council gained’t see cause. Certainly, its members have traded no matter frequent sense they’d left for a progressive badge of honor, ignoring reliable considerations in regards to the metropolis’s crime charges and waxing poetic about systemic injustice and the necessity for “fairness.” The invoice itself features a 42-page “racial fairness impression evaluation.”

“At the moment, [Councilman Charles Allen] and I are shifting to override the Mayor’s veto of the Revised Felony Code Act,” Councilwoman Brooke Pinto tweeted final week. “The veto threatens to unravel years of labor and thorough examine that has culminated in a legal code that’s extra simply, equitable, & clear — making us all safer.”

If the district council strikes ahead with this invoice, it shouldn’t be shocked when the district’s residents (and their tax {dollars}) begin shifting to safer locations resembling Virginia, the place their rights and considerations might be taken extra critically.