From the Washington Post:

Don’t buy the hype: The U.S. is not experiencing a terrible new crime wave

By Mark Holden and Ronal Serpas August 11 at 7:44 PM

Mark Holden is general counsel and senior vice president at Koch Industries. Ronal Serpas is a former superintendent of the New Orleans and Nashville police departments and the chairman of Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration.

There has been a surge of assertions about rising crime recently. At the Republican convention in July, GOP nominee Donald Trump said, “Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement.” The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald echoed these concerns, noting that homicides increased by nearly 17 percent in the 56 largest U.S. cities last year and citing sharp rises in Baltimore, Chicago and the District. In an op-ed in last Sunday’s Post, Sean Kennedy and Parker Abt made the same case.

As two strong conservatives, let us set the record straight. These statements on rising murders are highly misleading. The truth is that Americans are still experiencing hard-won historic lows in crime. … By 2014, violent crime had fallen by half from its 1991 peak. …

This rise in homicide is alarming on its face. But half of 2015’s murder increase occurred in Baltimore, Chicago and the District — the very cities that those pushing the crime panic repeatedly use as examples. While we must work to address the issues driving this unacceptable localized violence, it is not the norm. These cities are outliers.

… Turning to 2016, data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association show homicides rising 15 percent at midyear. But, again, Chicago caused nearly one-third of that increase.

In other words, the national spike in homicides since Ferguson two years ago has largely been concentrated in precisely those places, such as Baltimore and Chicago, that have been targeted by the establishment’s new conventional wisdom that the real problem with America’s cities is too much law and order.

So, having field-tested the new elite consensus approach in Baltimore, Chicago, and the District, it’s time to roll it out nationally!

What could possibly go wrong with the BLM/Hillary/Koch/Soros/NYT plan for betting the country on less law and order?

Heck, we did that back in the Sixties and all that happened was that we wrecked our greatest cities for a generation (in the case of New York) or maybe forever (in the case of Detroit).

Seriously, I’d be more optimistic about the elite consensus about Ending Mass Incarceration if the elites would first apologize for what their predecessors did wrong in the Sixties and explain what they’d learned from 1960s mistakes.

But instead, we keep hearing about how history began in 1991, so compared to 1991, things are now peachy. I mean, who can possibly remember what happened between 1963 and 1991? Whoever heard of The Sixties? That’s ancient history lost in the mists of time!

[Comment at Unz.com]