Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

Milwaukee's progressive D.A. said the $1,000 bail that released a man who killed 6 at the Waukesha Christmas parade was "unacceptably low," but the D.A. diverted other homicidal criminals with low cash bails as recently as Nov 11 & 13

My latest scoop

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…

On November 11, Kenneth Burney was charged with four counts of attempted murder. Burney reportedly shot & wounded 3 police while he awaited trial for 'disorderly conduct with use of a dangerous weapon as a habitual criminality repeater and with domestic abuse assessments.'

Burney was reportedly released on a $1,000 signature bond in March. A signature bond does not require a defendant to deposit any money. It only asks for a promise to pay the bond if they fail to show up at trial.

On November 13, Michael Dabney was charged with 1st-Degree Intentional Homicide, while he awaited trial for 1st-Degree Recklessly Endangering Safety involving use of a weapon. His bail was set higher at $10,000.

But Dabney posted bail and was later accused by police of killing a woman and attempting to make it look like a suicide.

All three men had supposedly been under the supervision of the same non-profit diversion program, JusticePoint.

How many lives could have been saved and how many fewer people would have been victimized, had Brooks, Burney, and Dabney, been kept in jail?

We do not yet know because the reports that JusticePoint was supposed to file are not available and/or are incomplete.

What we do know is that some defendants facing serious crimes, some sickeningly similar to the circumstances of the Waukesha Christmas parade tragedy, were given low cash bails and released awaiting trial in Milwaukee county.

The Waukesha killings points to how progressive prosecutors, judges, & policymakers are sacrificing public safety on the altar of reducing incarceration at all costs, ostensibly to reduce racial inequities.

But the main reason for high levels of incarceration isn't because America is a racist society, it's because we're a violent society. The homicide rate in the United States is four times as high as that of France and Britain and more than five times higher than Australia's.

Rising incarceration rates in the past reflected rising rates of violent crime. From 1990 to 2010, two-thirds of the increase in inmates nationwide came from people convicted of violent offenses.

It's true that black people are more likely to receive higher bail requirements for the same crime, to be offered plea bargains that include jail time, and to be incarcerated while waiting for trial, than white people, and more likely to be charged with low-level offenses.

But black Americans are also 7x more likely to commit and die from homicide than whites. The homicide rate for whites is 2.3 per 100,000 and 17.4 for black people. According to FBI, 81% of white victims are killed by whites, and 89% of black victims are killed by black offenders.

Our goal should thus be first and foremost on reducing violent crime, which has the secondary benefit of reducing incarceration. And yet the focus of progressives has over the last two decades been narrowly on reducing racial inequity in incarceration.

When District Attorney Chisholm was elected in 2007, he announced that he was seeking to send fewer people to prison even though he knew it would result in homicides. 'Is there going to be an individual I divert, or put into a program, who's going to go out and kill? You bet.'

By diverting even people who attempted homicide, like Brooks, Jr. did of his girlfriend, progressives like Chisholm have been removing the threat of jail from the calculus of criminals.

In 2007, the homicide rate in Milwaukee rose from 12 per 100k people to 25 per 100,000 in 2015, fell to 17 per 100,000 in 2019, and leapt to 33 in 2020.

In 2019, Milwaukee judges diverted every one of the 19 people charged with murder into JusticePoint, rather than jail them.

And, between 2017 and 2018, the share of defendants that committed a new crime while under Justice Point's supervision increased from 8 percent to 13 percent.

Another factor behind rising homicides has been the progressive demonization of police which, demoralizes officers.

Demoralization has led them to withdraw from policing, which further emboldens criminals. In 2014, the police chief of St. Louis described less aggressive policing and more empowered criminals as the 'Ferguson effect.'

Three months earlier, a white police officer in nearby Ferguson had killed an unarmed eighteen-year-old black teenager. 'I see it not only on the law enforcement side,' said the chief, 'but the criminal element is feeling empowered by the environment.'

In 2015, the US Department of Justice asked one of the country's leading criminologists, Richard Rosenfeld, to investigate whether homicides had, in fact, risen. At first, Rosenfeld was skeptical. He noted that homicides in St. Louis had already started rising before 2014.

But after looking at the evidence, Rosenfeld changed his mind. 'The homicide increase in the nation's large cities was real and nearly unprecedented,' he wrote in his 2016 report. Rosenfeld had found a 17 percent rise in homicide in the nation's largest cities, between 2014-15

In the wake of the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests against police violence, the homicide rate increased on average by more than one-third in America's 57 largest cities. Homicides rose in 51 cities and declined in just 6 of them.

Rosenfeld told me when I interviewed him that he believed the 2020 homicide increase was in some significant amount caused by anti-police protests, which undermines belief in the police, particularly among black people.

Researchers find that negative publicity about the police has a powerful impact on police officers, making them more likely to believe that the public's attitude toward them has worsened and that their legitimacy is being questioned. And it makes them fearful of false allegations

Continued here:

It is time to rebalance our concerns. It's not just that Brooks, Jr's bail was 'unacceptably low.' It's that progressives are unacceptably focused on protecting the rights of criminals while sacrificing the rights, including to life itself, of victims.

/END