As Murder Surges, the Nation's Capital Dabbles in Gibberish

Behold the Left's version of "confronting" the bloody reality it helped create

Paul began his post yesterday with characteristic sobriety:

In 2023, 272 people were murdered in Washington, D.C. That was an increase of 25 percent from 2022. It was the highest total since 1997.

Per capita, the city’s homicide rate was the fifth highest in the nation, behind only New Orleans, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Memphis. Meanwhile, the arrest rate for D.C. homicides was only 47 percent, the lowest in 16 years.

Some D.C. city officials, including the liberal mayor, are proposing measures to address the situation. One of them is stiffer sentences for gun-related crimes. However, the city council does not seem to be on board.

That’s not to say that the city council is devoid of ideas when it comes to sentencing. It has ideas, all right. One of them is to appoint a convicted murderer as its voting representative on the D.C. Sentencing Commission.

As Paul showed, the Council’s proposal is exactly what you’d expect, to wit, an attempt, only half-heartedly disguised, to load the Commission with pro-criminal voices. Not that this is new; the Left has long viewed the criminal as the real victim, and thus the agent with authority to have a say. Meanwhile, the dazed young lady who was left with a broken arm and no purse is seen, if at all, as human garbage — someone to be pushed over there, out of sight. So the criminal gets a seat on the Sentencing Commission and the victim gets her medical bills.

Still, there is one thing to be said for the Council’s proposal: It’s comprehensible. It’s all wrong, sure, and it gets the crime crisis in DC upside down, but at least it proposes a coherent response, to wit, that the sentence should be more directly influenced by the people whose criminal behavior earned it to begin with.

From the Left’s point of view, though, there’s a problem with a comprehensible answer, namely, that it’s subject to getting taken apart in the way Paul did. Better to come up with the journalistic version of street theater, where the Left gets to play on sentiment without ever having to take responsibility either for a coherent statement of the problem or anything that might work as a solution.

Hence this beauty, also in the Washington Post: “‘We’re speaking out’: Amid D.C.’s deadly violence, kids create art.”

Last year was a tough time to be a kid in the District.

More children were on either side of the trigger, with more than 100 shot in 2023 — including 16 people under 18 who died, according to D.C. police data. Police also reported making 458 arrests of juveniles for robbery, homicide or assault with a dangerous weapon in the first nine months of the year.

OK, so far so good, I guess. But it turns out to be the predicate for this zinger:

But children were also resilient — and some turned to art to process their feelings. They wrote poems, sang songs, rapped and painted as a way to make sense of what seemed senseless.

Here are their stories, their artwork and their hopes for 2024.

I don’t want to be too much of a grouchy old man here. I suppose it’s possible that legitimate journalism could produce a story about teenagers drawing stuff and singing ditties about crime and its aftermath. But it strikes the sourpuss part of my psyche as a particularly corrosive and cheap diversion, one that trades on children and children’s view of the world in order to keep behind the curtain any treatment of the problem that’s actually insightful or even just serious.

The Post’s exploration of this stuff starts off with Issa Ouarid, 15.

In [his] painting, Issa Ouarid flies high above his Ward 7 neighborhood. He wears a cape and a crown — and carries a globe that centers Africa.

While creating it last year, Issa thought about just how dangerous it has been to live here. At 3, he said, he looked out his bedroom window and saw a robbery turn into a fatal shooting. Last year, friends of his died in gun violence. He knows others who carjacked people or were victims.

This painting, he said, shows all that is possible.

“Just as hands can be used to pull a trigger, they can also be used to stop violence,” he said.

Law, and adults who take law seriously, wouldn’t hurt, either. But still, let’s give young Mr. Ouarid credit: Unlike the people writing this story, he understands that it’s not the gun or the trigger that’s the problem but the fellow who pulls the trigger.

Issa spends hours with Life Pieces to Masterpieces, an after-school program for Black and Brown students and young adults to talk about the issues affecting them and create art together. He has been named a 2024 youth ambassador for the national nonprofit group Afterschool Alliance. The role includes advocating for access to these kinds of activities.

Issa hopes his painting sends a message to other youth, “We are from the same place, but that doesn’t mean that you have to be a statistic or a person of crime. You can do whatever you put your mind to, and explore the world.”

Old coots shouldn’t forget what it’s like for a younger person to dream about the future, you bet. But even less should we forget that making that future possible — rather than an early trip to the morgue — requires more than dreaming. It requires what the article, not to mention the DC City Council, seems most determined to avoid: Telling the truth about what works to scale back crime once crime has taken hold (to wit, aggressive, unapologetic policing and earned incarceration) and doing it no matter how much the Left would prefer to divert our attention with a lighter-than-air article about kiddies’ art.

Yet more important is the truth liberals are even more eager to bury: That vigorous law enforcement is needed, yes, but only after the failure of the one thing the Left has campaigned against even more furiously — the traditional two-parent family with high expectations, respect and discipline. Ironically, long-time Post columnist, Colbert I. King, a black man, comes close to getting it in his reflections on DC’s celebration of Martin Luther King Day:

Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced that this year’s holiday theme is “Bending Toward Peace, Truth and Justice.” That message is overshadowed by daily events in this city that decidedly bend away from peace and justice, namely crime and violence. I can’t help but think about those behind bars who have made this city less safe. Or the brutality that has broken lives, the fear that has stopped neighbors in their tracks, the despair in homes and communities torn apart by criminality.

Thank God for a Post columnist willing to say it out loud — that it’s not the cops or the prosecutors or the racist oppressors who imperil peaceful life in the city but “those behind bars who have made this city less safe.”

Many of those housed in this city’s adult detention facilities are fathers. So, too, some of the youths in DYRS facilities. It follows that there are children in our nation’s capital who go off to school in the morning and come home in the afternoon to a place where the father is absent. He may or may not be in jail. He may be out and about building a life for himself, or tearing apart someone else’s world. But he’s not in his child’s world. Or the world of the child’s mother trying to make it on her own. I think of them, and a “family” like theirs, when I recall the words of the man we honor and revere this weekend.

“The family, that is, the group consisting of mother, father and child, still remains the main educational agency of mankind,” King said….

None of the foregoing is even remotely touched upon in the massive 90-page crime bill that D.C. Council member Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2), chair of the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, introduced this week, with Bowser’s strong endorsement. The measure has much to say about what to do with adults and juveniles ensnared in the criminal justice system. But it has little purchase on things that might influence a kid to not stick a gun in someone’s face and take off with a car, wallet or little dog. Or to decide not to raid a CVS, Giant or Safeway. Or to pump bullets into another person’s body.

Yes, the certainty of getting caught can be a deterrent. But there’s also the simple, moral notion that it’s wrong to harm others just because they may have what you want, or you don’t like who or what they are. Anti-crime legislation notwithstanding, that lesson isn’t learned at the time of an arrest, or in pretrial detention or when coming back into the community as a returning citizen.

It starts before thoughts even turn to guns and conquests. It begins with values learned and practiced at home…

Conservatives have said this a million times, but we need to keep saying it because there isn’t going to be any fundamental breakthrough against crime without it: Destructive behavior to the alarming extent we see now isn’t going to be cured by making excuses for it. It’s going to be cured by exactly the opposite — refusing to make excuses for it, demanding better behavior, and enforcing that demand. The “soft bigotry of low expectations” turns out, as DC’s grisly homicide statistics attest, to be not so soft, not to the children it betrays and still less to the broader society it lethally subverts.