(Jerry Holt/Star Tribune via AP)
The capture of the city by leftist politics has left urban leaders unable to respond to crime and other challenges like metastasizing homelessness. Aaron M. Renn writes:
Partisan polarization has gotten considerable press, but there’s another kind of emerging division flying under the radar: cities and suburbs pulling apart as an urban flight to the burbs picked up steam in the wake of Covid-19. This is happening for many reasons, but looming large among them are skyrocketing crime and disorder, as well as increasingly extreme politics in urban centers that degrades the rule of law.
Covid-19 restrictions meant most white-collar workers who used to commute to downtowns have instead worked from home for over a year. They may not be in a hurry to return due to reports of soaring violence in cities. According to the New York Times, murders were up 30% on average among major cities last year, and are up 24% so far this year. While some cities like New York remain well below their early 90s murder peak, many others reached all-time record high murder levels last year, including Louisville and Milwaukee. There’s also been a stunning surge in crimes like carjacking, with rates up by 300% in Minneapolis and more than doubling in Chicago and Washington, DC. In some places, this isn’t just affecting select neighborhoods, but places in the heart of the city where crime had been seen as vanquished. Multiple people have been shot in Times Square recently, and Chicago has seen killings and carjackings in its downtown.
Crime itself is kryptonite to cities, but what’s also disturbing is the civic response to it. The leadership class in most American cities has embraced the rhetoric and sometimes even the substance of de-policing. As activists issued calls to “defund the police,” twenty major cities, including Austin, Seattle, and Minneapolis, answered those demands by cutting their police budgets even as crime soared. Though often these moves were limited in scope, they show that rising progressive movements in these cities, often with extreme objectives, are now setting the political agenda.
[Aaron M. Renn, "Flight From the Activist Cities,” Law & Liberty, July 7]
