The Hill is out with a poll showing a massive majority — 77% — of Americans now concerned about rising crime.
And there’s more.
“At the same time they see an increase of violence and crime and are concerned that prosecutors are not prosecuting the crimes — they blame the protests and the high unemployment when asked what is responsible for the spike in violence,” said Harvard CAPS/Harris polling director Mark Penn. “They also single out social media for being used to coordinate violence and in their view not doing much to curb it.”Mark Penn was Hillary Clinton’s pollster during her run for president in 2008.
Penn’s mention of the prosecutors is interesting. Democrat prosecutors in the nation’s riot zones have been clear that they will release “mostly peaceful” protesters whose peaceful protests intensify into arson, looting, assault, and the like. In Travis County, Texas (Austin), the Democrats handed victory in their primary to Delia Garza, who explicitly ran on that very platform. Local prosecutors’ open support for the hardly peaceful protesters is what led to federal action, which the Democrats are now claiming is some foreboding portent of “martial law.”
They could have prevented the need for federal action by upholding the laws they swore to uphold. They chose poorly.
The message is getting through. It already got through to the “mostly peaceful” protesters, who have intensified their protests into nightly assaults on federal officers and the federal courthouse in Portland, and much of downtown in Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities as well.
Now it’s getting through to the rest of America, and they don’t like it.
The development comes as calls to defund police departments amid nationwide protests over racial injustice grow louder.
Those calls are growing louder among hardcore leftist activists and the activists they put on city councils, plus the mainstream media. The majority of Americans do not support defunding the police.
They also don’t like social media’s role in helping intensify these protests into kinetic and pyrotechnical activity. And Americans do explicitly blame the protests as one source of the surge in violence.
It’s all having an effect.
