Crime
August 16, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Our friend Sen. Tom Cotton has written an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal opposing the latest jailbreak legislation that I discussed here. He argues: [U]nder no circumstances should Congress cut mandatory minimum sentences for serious crimes or give judges more discretion to reduce those sentences. That foolish approach is not criminal-justice reform—it’s a jailbreak that would endanger communities and undercut President Trump’s campaign promise to restore law and order.
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August 15, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Three years ago, liberal Democrats and naive Republicans pushed hard for leniency-for-criminals legislation. It provided for a sharp reduction of mandatory minimum sentences for drug felons, to be applied retroactively so as to free many thousands of drug felons before they completed their sentences. The leniency legislation also included “corrections reform.” The focus here was on ways to rehabilitate prisoners, using methods that sponsors claimed, quite speciously, have worked well
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August 9, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Earlier today, I wrote about how Philadelphia’s sanctuary city policy caused a child to be raped. Philadelphia authorities refused ICE’s request to detain a previously deported illegal immigrant. Instead, they released the man, who then committed rape. This was clear case of the left’s agenda trumping concerns for public safety. The consequences were dire for the illegal immigrant’s victim. But leftism is also producing dire consequences for entire communities. Areas
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August 9, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Last night, Department of Homeland Security head Kirstjen Nielsen appeared on Sean Hannity’s program to discuss the outrageous story of a girl who was raped by an illegal immigrant released from prison instead of being held, as ICE had requested. Mike Brest of the Daily Caller reports on the interview, which I didn’t see. Here’s what Hannity said: Let me tell the audience about a case that we just found
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August 3, 2018 — Scott Johnson
I hate to have to pick up the local news from a national daily, but I learn from USA Today that a “Minnesota man” named Mahad Aziz gouged out the eyes of his 74-year-old relative in the course of a beating at the apartment of one or the other in Rochester, Minnesota. The Mayo Clinic was conveniently at hand, but there wasn’t much the hospital could do. Aziz beat his
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July 31, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
According to the Maryland Department of Health, a record 2,282 people died in Maryland from unintentional drug-and-alcohol-related intoxication in 2017. That’s more than double the number of such deaths in Maryland in 2014. Keep that year in mind. 88 percent of the intoxication deaths in Maryland in 2017 were opioid-related. Opioid-related deaths include deaths due to heroin, prescription opioids, and nonpharmaceutical fentanyl. Large increases in the number of fentanyl-related deaths
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July 30, 2018 — John Hinderaker
As regular readers know, there have been several controversial police shootings in Minneapolis in recent years. (To be fair, all police shootings are now controversial, even when they are obviously justified.) This one occurred on June 23, a little over a month ago, when officers received a call to the effect that someone was walking down an alley and firing a gun in predominantly African-American north Minneapolis. The officers proceeded
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July 28, 2018 — John Hinderaker
CNN headlines: “Gun homicides on the rise, CDC says.” Shooting homicides are on the rise, though other common methods of murder remain flat, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This chart shows the trends: Most murders are committed with firearms, for the same reason we arm our soldiers and police officers with firearms: they are very effective. CNN fails to note, however, that homicides are committed
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July 23, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
When he was 14 years-old, Jayden Myrick was arrested for armed robbery. He agreed in a plea deal to a 15 year sentence. The final seven years were to be served in adult prison. But after just two-and-half years in juvenile detention, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Doris Downs set Myrick free. She put him on probation and placed him in a special program whose director claimed could keep tabs
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June 16, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
A few days ago, the Washington D.C. police fatally shot 22-year-old Marqueese Alston. According to the police department, Alston fired on officers who chased him into an alley. The department has produced a photo of the gun they say Alston used. The officers who chased Alston reportedly had their body cameras on, but as far as I know the footage has not been publicly released. Thus, we cannot say for
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June 12, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The Pew Research Center has released a poll showing that 54 percent of Americans favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder. That’s up from 49 percent two years ago. (As Kent Scheidegger has explained, this number understates opposition to abolishing the death penalty, but I’m focused here on the trend). The death penalty has always had the support of a plurality of Americans. However, that support declined dramatically
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June 11, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post has a long article about unsolved killings in American cities. It studied homicide data from 50 cities, encompassing 52,000 such crimes. In the process, it identified areas where killings are frequent but arrests are rare. These “areas of impunity” are located in poor neighborhoods where minorities (almost always African-Americans) reside. The first thing that jumps out at me from the Post’s study is that in the 50
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June 9, 2018 — Scott Johnson
A federal grand jury handed up an indictment against former Senate Intelligence Committee Security Director James Wolfe this past Thursday. Wolfe is alleged to have leaked classified intelligence to current New York Times reporter Ali Watkins and others, though Watkins was not working for other outfits at the time of the leaks in issue. Wolfe is charged with three counts of lying to the FBI about the leaks. I have
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June 8, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
I understood from the beginning that the Trump presidency would be a circus, but I didn’t expect a sideshow this bizarre. President Trump has asked NFL players to recommend which criminals he should pardon. Suddenly, the NFL kneelers have been transformed from unpatriotic sons-of-bitches to Trump’s partner in doling out justice and righting wrongs. I never thought the players were sons-of-bitches (unpatriotic, yes at least in some cases), but they
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June 8, 2018 — Scott Johnson
On May 14 our local Fox affiliate (Fox 9) broadcast Jeff Baillon’s striking report “Millions of dollars in suitcases fly out of MSP, but why?” The report drew a connection among “rampant fraud in a massive state program” (i.e., Minnesota’s $250 million a year Child Care Assistance Program funding daycare providers), the locus of this fraud in Minnesota’s Somali community and cash flown overseas in suitcases out of Minneapolis-St. Paul
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June 7, 2018 — Scott Johnson
In this series I follow up on Jeff Baillon’s intensely reported FOX 9 story “Millions of dollars fly out of MSP in suitcases, but why?” In part 1 I noted the media backlash to Baillon’s story at the Pioneer Press, at MPR, and, of course, at the Star Tribune. The media, however, have not followed up on Baillon’s findings regarding rampant daycare fraud. Part 1 in this series is here.
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June 6, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
At the urging of Kim Kardashian, President Trump has commuted the life sentence of Alice Johnson, a convicted drug-trafficker. Johnson served 21 years of her sentence. Johnson was, in the words of the judge who sentenced her, the “quintessential entrepreneur” in a multi-million dollar cocaine ring in the Memphis area. It dealt tons of cocaine for millions of dollars. At Johnson’s trial, the evidence linked her drug ring with Colombian
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