What looked last summer like a historic reconsideration of how Americans are policed is looking more like the same dismally familiar pattern. zakcheneyrice writes
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Before Joe Biden won the Democratic primary in 2020, it was an open question whether his past handling of crime would be an electoral liability. He was known in the Senate as a “tough on crime” zealot. George H.W. Bush, who won the White House after aligning his Democratic opponent with a Black man who raped and murdered a woman, was too lenient for Biden’s taste.
The president is now facing a new political context. Over the last two years, cities across the United States have seen historically large spikes in multiple categories of crime, including homicides in many places. This pattern defies the typical scapegoats — Democrats in charge, so-called progressive prosecutors, an alleged lack of financial investment in armed law enforcement — but has not deterred critics from invoking them anyway.
These numbers are consistent with the president’s generally low approval ratings, which were already making Democrats worried that the 2022 midterms and 2024 general elections could be catastrophic for the party. But that remains to be seen. What the president’s low marks on crime mean for criminal justice reform is more evident, and has been for a while.
But the slow death of criminal justice reform has also been evident in how Biden has steered local harm reduction efforts and paced his use of executive power. He has urged localities to use federal COVID funds to hire more police officers, encouraging cops as the go-to fix for pandemic-era social dysfunction. And despite early assurances that he wanted to use his clemency powers generously and soon, he hasn’t yet.
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