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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Op here. In a perfect world we wouldn’t need Republicans to step in to actually help alleviate the 320% rise in car jackings, but at this point anything we’ll help because the current modus operandi is to just let it happen, proclaim its all systemic injustice and not the perpetrators’ fault, and then to not prosecute and to release.

And this is coming from someone actually from dc. Im more Washington than anyone else on here. Born and raised. I was here throughout the crack years. When CVS was called Peoples. When Hechinger’s was a real hardware store. When Kim’s Karate and Greenberg and Betterman commercials were still on TV. So don’t act like I’m some Maryland mofo just coming on here with a suburban perspective.[/quote]

Liberal here who works in criminal justice.   Most of the violent crime is being driven by social fallout from the pandemic. Part of it is also a growing number of ghost guns in the area.  Part of it is being caused by the national conversation on police reform, and a huge push on "defunding" or basically trying to remove police from as many situations as possible. When people don't see the government as legitimate, they don't obey basic rules and laws.  And whether we like it or not, the way the conversations (and some policies) have been implemented, we have eroded police legitimacy.   Add to that the police shortage, which has been going on for years.

I am hopeful the COVID insanity will just be a phase and things will get closer to the pre-pandemic normal.  
The issue of ghost guns has to be dealt with federally.  But since some are being made by 3D printers, I think this problem is here to stay.  And it's concerning.
The police legitimacy issue requires political leadership efforts to support good policing, improve policing, and continue to invest in other non-police responses.  It isn't an either/or.  It has to be all of them.    The number one evidenced-based best practice for violence reduction is both social services supports and law enforcement presence.

What Republicans will offer is heavy-handed policing of the 90s.  While that suppresses crime, it does so in a way where the "cure" is as harmful as the disease.   
Progressives offer much less policing and lots of social service wrap-around supports.   But they fail to understand or willfully ignore the fact that crime is caused by multiple social pressures from jobs to health to education to housing.    They would have to support these areas perfectly to significantly reduce crime without law enforcement.

The solution is in the middle.[/quote]

We said, thank you.

Unfortunately in recent years progressive and conservatives have all decided (some would say been influenced) to think that middle ground and compromise is for pussies and unbelievers of the One True Way, (which is their way, whatever it is). I first saw this trending on my college alumni discussion boards, where younger graduates started explaining to us, with the hushed reverence of the newly converted, that moderates were the Worst because Reasons--and here their reasons always got convoluted or nonsensical or ideological--and that the only way forward was to dismantle the police, end corporate America, etc. Etc.

Some might dismiss that as typical twentysomething posturing, but the tone was different, and the level of zeal, disturbing. We see this kind of reductive thinking everywhere now. We have all grown smaller and more siloed because of it.

So how do we move forward? I think your ideas are good. I probably should have just said that instead of tangenting off, but I keep trying to articulate that things have changed and it's not for the better and we need to find a way back.
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