Democrats champion 'equity' but shrug as radical criminal justice reforms hit minorities the hardest
Fox News
The Republican Party has an advantage over the Democratic Party when it comes to crime. But there still is a critical mass of Democrats who support radical criminal justice reform.
Rafael A. Mangual is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Nick Ohnell fellow and head of research for the Manhattan Institute’s Policing and Public Safety Initiative. He is also the author of "Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most" (Center Street, July 26, 2022).
Democrats held off what many predicted would be a "red wave" election, but the GOP enjoyed a massive advantage among the 11 percent of voters who told exit pollsters that crime was the biggest issue. Absent any clear political price imposed on the party, at least judging by the midterm results, there remains in office a critical mass of Democrats unwilling to roll back the most misguided reforms passed to date, or to resist newer efforts to go even further.
In November, for example, the Democratic city council in Washington, D.C., voted to move forward with a plan to rewrite the city’s criminal code—all but doing away with mandatory minimum sentences, extending the right to a jury trial to misdemeanor cases, expanding the rights of convicts to petition judges for sentence reductions, and lowering the maximum penalties for various serious offenses such as burglary, robbery, and carjacking.