Crime
Orleans Parish, Louisiana District Attorney, Jason Williams, was elected in 2020 with the backing of George Soros’s political action committee, which is dedicated to electing reformer prosecutors. True to the reform effort, Williams, in his first year in office dismissed 937 of the city’s 1,411 pending violent felonies. At the time, Williams stated that, “being more selective about prosecutions will allow us to focus on the crimes that matter most to all of us. We’ve got to go beyond punishment and invest in our communities.” A 2022 study from the Metropolitan Crime Commission found that Williams’s policies resulted in “a drastic decline in accountability for violent felony offenders.”
Last week, some three years later, Williams, the sitting elected prosecutor for Orleans Parish, Louisiana, was carjacked in his own city. Soros prosecutor as carjacking victim is a poignant example of the fallout from the wayward criminal justice reform movement. Even prior to being carjacked, Williams had changed his tune about how to deal with crime. Earlier this year he stated, “I am quoted as saying Rome is burning, and that is not meant to be hyperbolic…I’ve been ringing the alarm for over a year now.” “Not just in New Orleans but the entire country,” he said. “The level of repeated violence is unparalleled, and we need national and local responses to it.” Williams deserves credit for changing his thinking.
More crime
I have mentioned here before that I am a big fan of psychologist Rob Henderson’s Substack. In his most recent column, Henderson presents data comparing the propensity for crime and violence between men and women. Compared to women, men are 19 times more likely to be incarcerated. Men kill 26 times more often than women. More than 90% of homicides are committed by men, and men are 70% of homicide victims. The source of this criminality is not just any men, but primarily young men. In the U.S., a 20-year-old man is ten times more likely to be arrested for a violent crime than a 60-year-old man. There are reasons for this that Henderson writes about. If you are interested, you can read the piece here.
Free Speech
The U.S. Supreme Court announced last week that it will be taking up Missouri v. Biden this term. I have written extensively about this case, here and here. The Biden administration has been colluding with social media platforms to censor conservative speech. The U.S. District Court Judge, Terry Doughty, called this case the most important free speech case in American history. It is good news for the country that the Supreme Court has decided to weigh in.