Progressive Crime Wave Grows -Murder, Murder, Everywhere, But Obama’s Not to Blame

by Matthew Vadum

Murder rates are skyrocketing in large U.S. cities, but President Obama’s progressive pro-crime policies and endless racial provocations have nothing to do with it, the New York Times predictably declared in a recent article.

Nowadays Americans are being killed and maimed explicitly because of their race. Execution-style cop killings are becoming distressingly common. Killings and vicious assaults based on the skin color of the civilian victim are also becoming common.

That any of this is happening shouldn’t surprise anyone who follows public events. For years media outlets have acted as uncompensated publicists for the Obama administration’s ongoing campaign to turn America into the progressive paradise that is Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

And they’re still doing it today. Some downplay the evidence of a crime wave.

Smug left-wing journalists Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post and Jesse Walker of Reasonsnickered at the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald when she argued in late May that after two decades of falling crime rates nationwide, anti-cop sentiment was boosting crime rates.

The “most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months,” wrote Mac Donald in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Walker wrote at the time that “any talk of a ‘nationwide’ crime surge is at best premature, at worst sheer fearmongering.” Linkins wrote that Mac Donald’s column contained “a load of hot nonsense.”

The legacy media has helped to inflame racial tensions in a country that had relative racial harmony before Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the news that the dead-tree and TV network media outlets are now covering up Obama’s role and their own in stirring the pot.

Murders are up, but Obama and the Left are not to blame

Reporting from Milwaukee, Wisc., the Old Gray Lady explains:

Cities across the nation are seeing a startling rise in murders after years of declines, and few places have witnessed a shift as precipitous as this city. With the summer not yet over, 104 people have been killed this year—after 86 homicides in all of 2014. More than 30 other cities have also reported increases in violence from a year ago.

According to the New York Times article dated Sept. 1, homicides committed to this point this year are outpacing homicides committed to this point in 2014.

The report highlights these troubled cities: Milwaukee (murders up 76 percent); St. Louis (up 60 percent); Baltimore (up 56 percent); Washington, D.C. (up 44 percent); New Orleans (up 22 percent); Chicago (up 20 percent); Kansas City, Mo. (up 20 percent); Dallas (up 17 percent); New York (up 9 percent); and Philadelphia (up 4 percent).

But Obama and the Left are not to blame.

Times reporters Monica Davey and Mitch Smith seem genuinely perplexed, scratching their heads wondering where all this bloody violence might be coming from.

Law enforcement experts blame “disparate factors” though “no one is claiming to know for sure why murder rates are climbing,” Davey and Smith write. Recycling boilerplate from old news article, they write that rivalries between “organized street gangs,” “the availability of guns,” and “a growing willingness among disenchanted young men in poor neighborhoods to use violence to settle ordinary disputes” as major factors.

Maybe it’s the “Ferguson effect,” they speculate, describing it as “the notion that less aggressive policing has emboldened criminals.” Although it “is a popular theory for the uptick in violence,” they write that “many experts dispute that theory.” They quote criminology professor Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University saying, “[t]he equilibrium has changed between police and offenders.”

St. Louis, Mo., police chief Sam Dotson has been credited with coining the term the “Ferguson effect.” He was referring to the Left’s never-ending drumbeat against the police which is causing some cops to refrain from using force when it is appropriate. Recently in Birmingham, Alabama, a plainclothes police officer was beaten senseless by an angry black driver. The cop admits he hesitated in defending himself because he was afraid he might be called racist.