Horowitz: Anarchy! California to release another 76,000 criminals as crime surges and police quit

It's still a mystery to the media why crime is skyrocketing in much of the country, but any sane person knows that when you let criminals back onto the streets, you get more criminal behavior. When you treat the police like criminals, you get less policing. The result is utter anarchy.

Evidently, in California, the only crimes one can commit are not wearing a mask or opening a business against coronavirus edicts. Murder, robbery, or assault? Not so much. The AP is reporting that "with little notice," California decided to increase good behavior credits for 76,000 inmates, "including violent and repeat felons," which will enable them to trim their already diminishing sentences by as much as one third. So much for the promise of only offering more chances to "first-time, nonviolent" offenders. More than 20,000 people serving life without parole – something very hard to achieve in California these days – will be eligible for early release.

The changes were approved as an emergency regulation with almost no public notice. There is an emergency for them to get as many violent criminals as possible out on the streets before the public can protest. The prison population has already dropped by nearly 20% because of coronavirus jailbreak and will wind up being roughly half its level earlier last decade. Just last month, the state announced the closure of a second prison this year because the prison population is dwindling.

Now, is the prison population declining because crime is becoming scarcer? Not a chance. According to Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore, shootings have increased by 73% over the same period in 2020. Motor vehicle thefts are up 20%. Nearly half the shootings, according to Moore, are by gang members, yet District Attorney George Gascón is prohibiting his prosecutors from pushing sentencing enhancements for nearly 20,000 convicted criminals, including gang members.

Not only are there exponentially more criminals on the streets, but the thin blue line that stands between them and the citizenry is getting thinner. A recent survey showed that 40% of LAPD officers are considering quitting.

This comes as police around the country face a surge in retirements. The Philadelphia police department experienced a sevenfold increase in the number of officers being accepted into the city's Deferred Retirement Option Program during the first four months of this year relative to the same time period last year. The NYPD, the largest metro police force in the country, saw a 75% increase in retirements in 2020. 2,600 officers quit and 2,746 filed for retirement, accounting for roughly 15% of the entire NYPD.

The message being telegraphed to law enforcement is that they are the robbers and Black Lives Matter are the cops. What have George Floyd and BLM wrought upon America's major cities? Minneapolis experienced the second highest number of murders on record. Just last week, there were 107 violent crimes reported across Minneapolis, which is nearly double the number during the same week in 2020, before the BLM riots began at the end of May. Carjackings were up 331% last year.

Police now understand that even if they are able to successfully arrest violent criminals and rioters without getting themselves killed or getting prosecuted, the justice system will just let them go. CBS is reporting that District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine is personally informing more than 200 rioters who perpetrated last summer's violent uprisings that they will not be prosecuted and he is requesting a judge to seal their arrest records. In Portland, 92% of those arrested during the interminable rioting have not been prosecuted, and it's unlikely that the remaining suspects will receive more than a slap on the wrist.

The twisted irony is that the woke white liberals whose families are not yet affected by the crime bubble think they are doing black neighborhoods a favor by releasing black criminals, but in fact almost every victim of those crimes will be black. The Daily Mail reports that during the week after the Floyd incident, 80% of the victims in the record number of shootings in Minneapolis were black. As one Minneapolis police officer so depressingly summed it up: "One of us is gonna get killed and nobody cares. And that's what's sad. Nobody cares. Not the citizens, not our brass. Not our administration, not our city. They don't care. They don't care one bit."

The results?

"We're getting fed up. All of us. And there's only a few of us left that really want to work for the city. We're not gonna be here. We're gonna all leave. So this is gonna get worse before it gets better."