Sunny days aren’t news; they’re weather reports. It takes a storm to sow fear among the masses. Lately, the White House has gotten very good at convincing its people the sky is falling in Washington D.C., despite all evidence that violent crime is actually a much worse threat in several major MAGA cities.
Violent crime has dropped by 27% during the past year in D.C. as reported by the Metropolitan Police Department. Their local Attorney General reported that violent crime was the lowest it had been in 30 years. While specific statistics vary depending on the focus of the reporting agencies, this downward trend is echoed time and again by numerous reputable federal and district sources.
Metro Police have already done their part to protect and serve their fine city without the White House’s meddling. Their dedication to community policing and personal sacrifices for the Blue Line should not be so easily discarded and mocked by the nation’s leaders, many of whom have never served on their local Scout troop let alone in the Armed Forces.
Instead, it is the nation’s leading MAGA cities that boast the highest crime rates. If the president, a convicted felon himself, is truly concerned with fighting crime, he would do well to send guardsmen into Memphis, which had the highest rate of violent crime in 2023 among cities with populations greater than 100,000.
Among those top cities for violent crime, St. Louis regularly leads the list. For the record, 58% of their state went red in the last election. Given the number of Missouri Republicans suffering under a clear and obvious crime wave, one of the highest in the nation, one would think the president would be equally keen to protect their lives and livelihoods as he seems to be for their blue neighbors.
Houston Republicans are facing an equally daunting threat to their safety, but have not received a single guardsman from their dear leader. A perennial leader in urban crime — now fourth in the nation as reported by security.org — the city’s rate of violent crime increased last year by 4%. Further, in 2022, the city’s rate of violent crime actually surpassed that of Los Angeles during the same period, the Houston Chronicle noted.
The Fake Fox “just fighting crime” narrative that the president has goose-stepped over the Constitution is blatantly false. While there are arrests being made, the motivating factor is not public safety but public retribution for those patriots who would dare decry his blatant authoritarian overreach.
Authoritarian power grows in the shadows of a crisis, siphoned from established agencies under the guise of an emergency. The trick is convincing the nation there is a crisis when you need one, despite all hard evidence to the contrary. The White House first manufactured an undocumented immigrant crisis, then an alleged crime wave on its front steps.
It is a dangerous overreach that imperils not only anyone of color in the nation’s capital, but furthers our nation’s tolerance of blatant lies from our elected officials. It turns communities against their local law enforcement officers and creates a dangerous divide of distrust and fear. It disparages the integrity and dedication of the true crime fighters in our communities – our local officers, deputies, and detectives, who consistently work to create a safe place for all of our American neighbors, not just those in red hats.
As reported by Congress on its website, “the Constitution makes no allowance for the suspension of any of its provisions during a national emergency. Both the Judiciary and Congress, as co-equal branches, can restrain the executive regarding emergency powers. So can public opinion.”
There will always be those among us who recognize others’ pain and seek out avenues to assuage it. The key is to create a society where those who seek to ease suffering among the masses outweighs those who relish human misery as the cost of their own comfort. The move to install armed soldiers on our own shores does nothing to alleviate our cities’ very real suffering. It is gasoline disguised as medicine, but it will burn us all the same.
It is the very situation James Madison warned us of while penning Federalist Paper 47:
“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. Were the federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with the accumulation of power, … no further arguments would be necessary to inspire a universal reprobation of the system.”
One hopes more of us will find cause to reprobate the president’s crime wave scheme, before fans of the Constitution find themselves at the wrong end of the president’s vindictive police force.
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