Opinion: The 21st Century Crime Wave: Accidental or Intentional?

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

Over the past few years, certain types of crime have skyrocketed, especially crimes committed by certain specific classes of criminal.

Intentional murders, of course. But also – drug overdoses that result in lethal fentanyl poisoning – and violent rapes that result in a murder – and irresponsible drunk-or-high-driving crashes that result in fatalities – and robberies that result in the homeowner or cashier being killed – and carjackings that result in killings or road fatalities.

There have always been crimes in America, just as there have always been crimes in all civilizations.

Ever since the days of Cain and Abel, some percentage of the public has had a violent or otherwise criminal streak. It has always been the job of parents and culture to try to civilize our children, and it has always been the job of government to catch, convict, and remove from society those who just will not obey the law.

Social scientists look at our own history and see patterns; there are times when crime drops, and there are times when crime rises.

Sometimes the powers-that-be find ways to meddle with such statistics, so we must be on our guard. Presidential debate “fact checkers” were recently exposed as having playing fast and loose with the numbers, attempting to make increased crime look like a decrease, when FBI stats were properly compared with Bureau of Justice Statistics reports.

How do they manage this sleight-of-hand? Well, here’s one way: At present, most of America’s big cities have Soros-funded chief prosecutors who refuse to prosecute thefts of under $1000 each in stolen goods. This causes an explosion of crimes that don’t appear in government statistics, since this very increase in actual property crimes results in a reduction in the crimes that show up in reports – but only because of their new reporting methods.

The crimes go up nevertheless; refusing to report and prosecute doesn’t mean the business or individual wasn’t robbed.

This crime wave is reflected in increased insurance rates, the increase in locked shop cabinets, the increase in indoor/outdoor cameras and security guards, and the steep increase in product pricing to reflect all these increased costs.

Who commits these crimes? Another good question.

Well, since almost all crime is committed by recidivists, the criminals are almost always people who the government had in their hands once, but then set free anyway – for a number of reasons, some reasonable, others outrageous.

Traditional American political philosophers will agree that there are only two legitimate reasons to set a suspect free: if you can’t prove he committed the crime, or if he truly poses no risk to society. Otherwise, it is government’s duty – its primary obligation, in fact – to lock up criminals, to remove them from the population they would otherwise threaten.

It’s what we create government for, after all: the prime directive of government is to protect law-abiding citizens from those who would do them ill, both from within and from without. All other government obligations, from maintaining roadways to running a post office, pale in comparison to protecting the citizenry from known foreign enemies and domestic criminals.

And yet, what have we seen and learned in recent years?

The federal government, in collusion with the governments of blue states and sanctuary cities, has been importing criminals on purpose, setting them free on purpose, outright refusing to hold them, on purpose – outright refusing to cooperate in either deporting or jailing them to protect law-abiding American citizens from them.

We have enough of a problem with native-born American criminals who get plea-bargained down to time served or short sentences so they are back on the streets too soon. We have enough of a problem with gangs that cleverly select their youngest members to be the trigger-men so that they’ll get off easy in juvenile court. We have enough of a problem with criminals who are smart enough to be hard to catch.

Since catching, prosecuting, and convicting a criminal is so hard to begin with – in this era of understaffed police departments and internally-conflicted prosecutorial offices – it’s that much more important that on the rare occasions when we do get a conviction, we need to lock the criminals up for a long, long time, to prevent dozens, or even hundreds, of additional crimes by each and every convicted criminal who goes free.

And in this environment, it should be more obvious than ever that there is no reason at all to invite illegal alien criminals in, to add to this mix!

But the Obama-Biden regime first, and now the Biden-Harris regime all the more so – have combined to bring in tens of millions of illegal aliens, many of whom were already known to be violent criminals themselves, or if they weren’t known to be the first time, were proven to be since then.

In testimony before the U.S. House in recent months, unimpeachable sources such as ICE Deputy Director Patrick Lechleitner have reported that the known criminals whom the Biden-Harris regime has forced them to set free now count in the hundreds of thousands.

Lechleitner reports that “662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories” were on the agency’s non-detained docket as of July 21, meaning they are known and clearly identified as criminals but not held; they are just walking freely through the country, presumably committing more crimes. Of those, Lechleitner said, “435,719 are convicted criminals, and 226,847 have pending criminal charges.”

Why are all these criminals free? Why are all these non-citizens – these foreign agents who are here to rob, rape, mug, addict, or kill American citizens – not in jail? For only one reason: the Biden-Harris regime has ordered federal law enforcement to let them go.

The Biden-Harris regime wants them free.

The Biden-Harris regime has made it clear why they want tens of millions of non-Americans in our country. They want to gradually replace the American public with a non-American public.

They want to swell the voting rolls with people who were not brought up in the Judeo-Christian American tradition, people who were not raised to respect the great “Protestant work ethic” that leads to the American Dream of home ownership, middle-class (at least) financial security, and a secure retirement.

It’s not an ethnic thing, or a racial thing – as much as they’d want you to believe it is. To them, the illegal alien from Latin America takes precedence over the legal immigrant from Latin America. The illegal from Somalia outranks the legal immigrant from Nigeria. The “refugee” they fly in from Gaza outranks the Syrian Christian who waited years for a green card to do it legally. It’s the illegality that the modern Democrat prizes.

Democrats know they need to dilute the American population with non-Americans in order to win elections, so the Biden-Harris regime has opened the borders to all and sundry.

Just think of some of the awful murders that have made national headlines in recent years:

· Kate Steinle, killed for sport by a five-time Mexican deportee in San Francisco.

· Laken Riley, raped and murdered while jogging by a Venezuelan gang member who had frequently been caught and released in the past.

· The five members of the Guzman family, murdered on a killing spree in Cleveland, TX by a four-time deportee from Mexico.

· Jocelyn Nungaray, the 12-year-old girl brutally assaulted and murdered, and dumped under a bridge near Houston, by two illegals from Venezuela.

There are hundreds more such stories, committed by illegal aliens who are here only because the current regime wants them here. The current regime allocates American tax dollars – by the billions – to fund housing, food, transportation and legal aid for these illegal aliens in order to attract and keep them here. And then the Democrat regimes of state, county, and city governments allocate more tax dollars at the local level, to do the same. Despite the fact that these numbers are swollen with known criminals. Maybe even because they are swollen with known criminals.

If these were rare exceptions – just one or two violent people out of tens of thousands of law-abiding migrants – then the following conclusion would be inappropriate. But they are not.

As Patrick Lechleitner testified, the Biden-Harris policies have intentionally allowed over half a million known criminals to remain at large in the United States, doing what criminals do: robbing, raping, carjacking, drug-pushing, and killing.

A significant amount of the murders that take place in the United States are now committed by illegal aliens. It’s no longer disputable; it’s just a fact borne out by every statistic.

The Biden-Harris regime has brought many of these criminals in for political purposes, and more importantly, has specifically directed federal law enforcement to allow them to remain at large, knowing full well what these half-million plus criminals would do while they are free.

That makes their crimes the funded, authorized, intended responsibility of the Biden-Harris regime – not just Biden and Harris themselves, but their Attorney General, their Secretary of Homeland Security – and the Democratic Party as a whole, which has publicly declared such policies the official platform of their party.

It is time to acknowledge this simple but undeniable truth: the Democrats have become the party of crime. As a party, they no longer belong in government, if indeed they ever did.

And it is time for the rank and file – the decent, hard-working Americans who were raised as Democrats, committed to a historical representation of their party that no longer applies – to wake up and Walk Away. It’s time for law-abiding Americans to leave the donkey behind and give the elephant a try.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo