“Finding her like that is something that will be with me forever. What happened to her was her worst nightmare. It’s most people’s worst nightmare.”

So said Michael Bowles, who’d come home to the affluent Buckhead section of Atlanta on Saturday to visit his 77-year-old mom, Eleanor, for the holidays. He found her dead, stabbed to death in broad daylight in the garage of her home. The suspect, 23-year-old Antonio Brown, was arrested Monday. Seems he wanted her car. Earlier, he’d stolen a bottle of vodka from a nearby liquor store, then he hopped the fence into the gated community where Eleanor Bowles lived.

An employee of the liquor store said that the locals knew Brown and that he was “always under the influence.” Many thought he was homeless.

In the days ahead, we’ll likely learn whether this suspected killer had a prior criminal record, and whether he should even have been on the streets in the first place.

This story reminds us, sadly, of another random, broad-daylight stabbing murder that occurred back in January — that of a 24-year-old architectural design graduate student at UCLA named Brianna Kupfer. Miss Kupfer worked at a high-end furniture store in LA, and she was stabbed to death in that store, allegedly by a 31-year-old homeless man named Shawn Laval Smith in what authorities called a random attack.

In addition to Eleanor Bowles and Brianna Kupfer, many thousands of others — black, brown, and white — have been victims of an undeniably Democrat-induced crime surge in the big cities and surrounding towns all across our nation. And in many of these cases, the murderer would never have been on the street but for the progressive law enforcement policies that allowed him to be there. As Scott Erickson and Craig Trainor write at City Journal:

America’s great metropolises risk sliding into violence, disorder, and decline. The chief cause is the progressive belief that social-justice priorities can and should be addressed through the manipulation of law enforcement policies. Social-justice concerns are animated by an impulse to address undesirable outcomes in economics, politics, education, race, sex, and even health care. These matters are more properly understood as complex social processes. The criminal law’s purpose, however, is more straightforward: to prevent crime, preserve public order, and protect law-abiding citizens.

Nevertheless, this progressive thinking has gripped America’s urban centers and informed their law enforcement procedures, and the consequences have been predictably disastrous — enabling more crime, demoralizing the police, and weakening the institutions created to preserve the rule of law.

Trainor is a former New York City criminal defense attorney, and Erickson is a former San Francisco Bay Area cop, so they have collectively known and experienced the range of bad ideas and even worse consequences of law enforcement held hostage by progressive ideology.

They especially lament The Ferguson Effect, which is author and researcher Heather Mac Donald’s term to describe the dire but perfectly understandable consequence of the progressive hostility, both public and political, toward law enforcement. When we demonize our cops, we render them “unwilling or unable to engage in the kind of proactive efforts proven to reduce crime and disorder.”

The formula is pretty simple: Less engagement results in fewer arrests and therefore more crime.

From this simple formula, Trainor and Erickson suggest two equally simple lessons: First, that ideological progressives have no business leading law enforcement agencies. Second, that public hostility toward our cops causes them to stand down.

We ignore these lessons at our peril.