"Soft on Crime"

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In the barrage of campaign ads on TV, I hear on the ads for GOP candidates that the Dems are "soft on crime", and they talk about "revolving door prisons". I disagree with that notion.

Is it because being "tough on crime" = racism? Is repealing a whole list of unjust laws not an option?

Is it simply the GOP's need to be authoritarian, and they're doing this simply for that purpose?

The GOP are one to talk. They're really soft when it comes to white collar crime.

If the GOP had their way we'd have a police state and their supporters would be eating it up thinking blue line flag bumper stickers and sucking up is a fool proof way to protect themselves from police brutality.

But perhaps they never heard the 'first they come for.'...poem.

What's the matter with you?

Thanks to Trump the GOP has made great strides in...taking crime OFF of the streets, and putting it in the White House, where it belongs!

Jeeze!

Example: Greg Abbott's ads all paint Beto O'Rourke as soft on crime, saying he supports defunding the police and wants "open borders", and that he wants to take everybody's guns.

None of this is true.

Abbott is basically rehashing Trump's remarks about Mexicans being "drug dealers and rapists", but without Trump-style rhetoric. And people are still falling for it.

(In all fairness, Beto has to win over conservative voters who are fed up with Abbott's failed policies, and has not made much of an effort to do so. I think Julian Castro would have been a far better candidate, but it is what it is.)

Does the phrase "hell yes we're going to take your AR, your AK!" ring any bells for you?

I mostly think of your posts as low quality trolling at this point, but really, you should at least try a little bit harder.

To answer the OP's original question, the reason that the GOP is using the soft on crime rhetoric is that it works, and the reason that it works right at the moment is that everyone who lived through 2020 recalls the lawlessness amid calls to defund the police, and anyone who lives in a blue city run by progressives (who is honest about it) can tell you that quality of life is a real problem due to rampant crime issues, many created or amplified by progressive policies that don't prosecute certain low level crimes.

The GOP has used the same line for my entire adult life. It has absolutely nothing to do with what happened in 2020. It has ALWAYS worked with the targeted demographics. And it has NEVER been true. Granted, Democrats have a different approach to crime than the GOP, but that isn't necessarily "soft." Parents know full well that "tough" discipline doesn't actually work better than other forms and, in fact, can backfire spectacularly. Not that you will ever convince the disciples of tough discipline to believe the data on it (or to believe my own experience).

There is, also, a rather deep history of race baiting in connection with the claim, attaching purposeful selections of violent video and photos that somehow tend to magically feature more minorities than Caucasians. By and of itself, however, it isn't necessarily a race based claim.

It's just the same old, same old playbook. If you can't explain what you are FOR, and how you plan to achieve it, just push the emotional buttons of your audience and appeal to their deepest fears. The human desire to feel safe is one huge emotional button.

It peaked in the 90s and became an increasingly small part of their rhetorical repertoire up until quite recently, as tough on crime policies were being vilified for wrongful convictions and mass incarceration, and not just by Democrats.



Yes, it does, that's why it's back as a front and center issue and not buried deep in the GOP platform where no one who isn't a politics nerd will notice it. Why are gun sales up dramatically among groups that traditionally lean Democrat? People don't feel safe after 2020, they saw what can happen when the police can't or won't do their jobs, and that can affect how someone votes. Why do you think Adams won in NYC? He sounded more like a Republican than a Democrat, and yet he got the job in one of the most Democratic cities in the country; care to offer an alternative explanation?



Don't pretend you're any better than them, you're doing the exact same thing, refusing to believe the experience of others. How many times have I told you how bad things have gotten in Seattle, that as a life long resident I can say that this time is different, and you've pooh poohed me? Some people do in fact need tough discipline, it doesn't work for everyone and is counterproductive for some, but then so is your approach, as can be seen on the streets of many large blue cities.

As to the "never been true" part, that's debatable as well, as no one really knows what caused the precipitous drop in crime starting in the early 90s, and mass incarceration has not been ruled out as a contributing factor. You and I might find it unpalatable, but we have to recognize that it might actually work at reducing violent crime.



"Magically"? Take a look at the FBI crime statistics by race some time, you might find it illuminating (along with the explanation for the slang phrase that begins "despite making up...").



Why is this ancient playbook relevant again?

^^^ I recognize your lived experience with what happened in Seattle, but I also think there were a lot of lessons learned. My main concern has been to not taint the causes fought for in 2020 by the chaos that often hitches a ride to any and all civil unrest.

The right way to handle crime requires flexibility to time, place and facts. My way doesn't always work, either. But that doesn't make my way "bad."

I know that any political philosophy that runs fully unrestrained is going to be ineffective and possibly ridiculous. I do not believe that super majorities are ever healthy. There has to be tension in order to develop solutions that can work in a broader range of situations than either party tends to play to, a reality that an "all or nothing, never compromise" playbook ignores entirely.

But I do also feel like throwing a Seattle image in front of Texans is purely political theater. What happened in Seattle was unique to time and place, just like what happened in Portland was unique to time and place.

And the ancient playbook simply doesn't feel ancient to me. It feels like a never ending continuum that I've grown extremely weary of. But maybe that's just a perception of age.

Without me saying anything else, do you understand why I pulled this sentence out of your post?

In NYC, they overdid it when it comes to “bail reform.”

Some very violent people are released on their own recognizance, only to be arrested again for the same violent conduct.

We have to start using common sense. There are people who deserve to be in jail.

Another classic example was the Willie Horton ad in 1988, that portrayed Michael Dukakis as being soft on crime.

Here's another, from our governor, regarding the marijuana pardons:

https://abc13.com/marijuana-pardon-americans-pardoned-president-joe-biden-convictions/12303658/

If governors like Abbott, DeSantis, Youngkin, etc, complain about "defund the police", it's a sign that we *should* defund.

When I think about defending my logic I see some pretty high crater walls so, yes, I see your point. We can leave it there.

I'm going to interject a possible reason for the statistical perception gap I have, and that would be the state I live in. California has an inherent split personality, with crime concerns high on the list in state wide elections. Mix that with the highly flawed proposition system, and we're looking at an issue that is pretty much always on my ballot.

Right, I don't trust the "tough on crime" rhetoric at all. I think it's just a snappy phrase to make it look like they're interested in making the country safe, a vote-catcher for people who are worried about public order and personal safety, people who want to be protected. If it was that easy, it would have been done long ago and law-abiding citizens would be content. It gets very expensive and it doesn't do much to deter the kind of crimes people are most concerned about stopping.

And I don't see why anybody thinks a party clever enough to get elected would be so stupid as to simply sit on their hands while serious "physical" crime was running rife. I think it's just a smear against the so-called left wing, insinuating that they'll let serious criminals have a field day because of some overblown mamby-pamby sympathy for sociopaths. I've seen Labour and Tory administrations in the UK over several decades but the situation doesn't seem to get particularly worse under Labour or particularly better under the Tories.

Many people think it's just a matter of arresting and sentencing the problem away though. I can see the logic - if you've got enough police and enough jails, there seems no reason why all those monsters should still be at large. But more monsters come out of the woodwork, you end up playing whack-a-mole forever, and you have no money left to do anything else. Without money, there's more poverty and more crime. I think until you tackle the causes of crime (poverty, overcrowded cities, overwhelmed judicial system, overcrowded and understaffed prisons, poorly-paid and therefore useless prison officers, over-criminalisation of relatively harmless behaviour, bad education, bad jobs, for a start), you'll never fix it.

It's probably a lot more complicated than that, but many politicians like to pretend it's simple because most voters are poorly-educated.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... ar-AAZ8Oqd

https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/t ... doesnt-pay