Former Vice President Joe Biden is on the defensive over the latest message from the campaign of President Donald Trump.
It’s a single line, simple and memorable: “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”
Biden tried to counter that early by naming the supposedly tough-on-crime ex-prosecutor Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., as his running mate – but a look at her recent past could offer big clues for where this ticket will take America in the future.
And it’s a message the left hopes voters never hear.
Before being elected the Senate, Harris was the attorney general of California. And prior to that, she was district attorney for San Francisco from 2004-2011.
And it’s safe to say the city still hasn’t recovered.
In fact, critics of the Biden-Harris agenda say San Francisco might be the model they’re seeking – a soft-on-crime city wracked by violence, homelessness and a plunging quality of life.
It’s in many ways the liberals’ ultimate goal for all of America’s cities – one with cuts to police, fewer arrests, and prosecutors who don’t pursue justice for suspects.
The present-day result speaks for itself.
San Francisco today is one the most dangerous cities in California and even in the nation as a whole.
The AreaVibes website gives San Francisco a “F” rating, noting the city’s crime rates are far above the national average, especially in these key categories:
• Violent crime: 82% higher
• Property crime: 152% higher
• Total crime: 141% higher
The city’s robbery rate per 100,000 residents is nearly four times higher than the national average, and thefts are nearly triple.
“In San Francisco you have a 1 in 17 chance of becoming a victim of crime,” the website notes.
It’s in the bottom 5 percent of American cities in terms of crime by many measures and has even plummeted as far as the bottom 2 percent in other categories.
Yet for all that crime… there’s very little punishment.
The Chronicle said many cops know those perpetrators they arrest will often be right back out on the street because, according to the report, “there is a lower likelihood of consequences for committing lower-level, or misdemeanor, crimes.”
One police spokesman also threw some not-so-subtle criticism at the state’s liberal-leaning government, where Democrats control every branch and have been rapidly rewriting laws to go even softer on crime.
“We have to work within the parameters of the laws that are passed by legislators or voted on by the public,” San Francisco police spokesman David Stevenson told the newspaper.
In addition, the state’s Proposition 47 ballot initiative softened drug possession laws, and changed theft of anything below $950 in value to a misdemeanor, again making it harder to prosecute criminals.
That has the city’s resident fed up and in some cases fleeing, even before the pandemic emptied out many urban areas.
“A lot of people are ready to leave because the crimes are causing depression,” Susan Dyer Reynolds, editor-in-chief of the community newspaper Marina Times, told City Journal.
Nancy Tung, who sought but did not win Harris’ old job as the city’s district attorney last year, also sounded the warning.
“Property and low-level crimes shrink the space for everyday people and enlarge them for the people committing them,” she told the website. “If we continue down this path, we will see more people leave San Francisco.”
No one can blame Biden and Harris directly for the city’s many problems – which, along with crime, includes a massive population of homeless drug addicts, filling the streets with everything from needles to feces.
But critics say it’s a glimpse of the future under liberal politics – critics including the President himself, who shared a message on Twitter about what the “most dangerous” cities in America have in common:
The Ten Most Dangerous Cities in the U.S. are ALL run by Democrats, and this has gone on for DECADES!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 27, 2020
Two paths for the future exist – a future voters will have to decide on in November.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”