The Patriot Post® · A Dozen Cities Set an Awful Record
Trying to carve out a living in Joe Biden’s America can be murder. Literally.
In one big city after another, the homicide rate is shattering old records and shattering American lives. Albuquerque, Austin, Baton Rouge, Columbus, Indianapolis, Louisville, Philadelphia, Portland, Rochester, St. Paul, Toledo, and Tucson — each of these cities has eclipsed what had previously been the deadliest year in its history. One of them, Albuquerque, broke its previous mark for murders, 82, way back in August. And with three weeks left in the year, a handful of other cities will likely join this sad fraternity.
Not surprisingly, the mayor in each of these record-setting cities is — you guessed it — a Democrat. And why not? As we’ve noted before, and as grim statistics continue to bear out, the Defund Democrats are hard on cops and soft on crime.
As ABC News reports: “Philadelphia, a city of roughly 1.5 million people, has had more homicides this year (521 as of December 6) than the nation’s two largest cities, New York (443 as of December 5) and Los Angeles (352 as of November 27). That’s an increase of 13% from 2020, a year that nearly broke the 1990 record.”
Philly may be killing it, but when it comes to mayhem, the City of Brotherly Love can’t compare to Chicago. As it turns out, the city that Carl Sandburg once called Hog Butcher for the World does a pretty good job of butchering people, too. Chicago may only be the nation’s third-largest city, but through November, it led the pack with 739 homicides, up 3% from 2020. If there’s any solace to be found in this appalling body count, it’s that the city’s deadliest year, 1970, is safe for at least another year. Not even the Windy City’s incompetent racist mayor, Lori Lightfoot, who along with New York City’s Bill de Blasio is among the very worst mayors in the nation, could hope to match Chicago’s stunning total from more than half a century ago: 974.
Drugs, of course, tend to go hand-in-hand with violence, so it’s not surprising that the U.S. surpassed another awful milestone this year: 100,000 overdose deaths. That number, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, covers a 12-month span rather than a calendar year, but the total is no less terrible. As NBC News reports: “The number of overdose deaths rose 29 percent, from 78,056 from April 2019 to April 2020, to 100,306 in the following 12 months. The data, from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, is considered provisional but is a good indication of what the final numbers will show next month.”
What does our president have to say for his country? “As we continue to make strides to defeat the COVID-19 pandemic, we cannot overlook this epidemic of loss, which has touched families and communities across the country,” said Joe Biden in what must be one of his most misleading and meaningless utterances of the year.
This administration’s efforts to impose a permanent pandemic on all of us have no doubt contributed to the loneliness and hopelessness of untold millions of Americans, and so the soaring rate of overdose deaths isn’t at all surprising. But overdoses don’t happen without drugs, and thus Biden’s open-borders immigration policy is also to blame. As Vince Bielski of RealClearInvestigations rightly notes, our nation’s fentanyl crisis begins at our porous southern border.
Yesterday, we reported on the brutal stabbing murders of two Columbia University students, two years apart, in Manhattan’s Morningside Park. And we noted that the Democrats just don’t get it. They want us to believe that this rise in criminality is about guns and root causes and COVID-19, when in fact it’s about culture, cops, and crime and punishment.