Even Tony Evers is wising up!
Forget that Ivy League nonsense recommending Madison police fade into the woodwork during the next “mostly peaceful protest.” (See: “Madison encourages more Rittenhouses.“)
Even Wisconsin’s one-term governor can learn from his mistakes. We turn it over to the New York Post (always a must-read):
Fearing violence, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers sent the National Guard in to Kenosha in advance of the jury verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case. Wise enough — except that, if he’d had the guard out in force as soon as the riots started last year, there probably wouldn’t be a trial now.
That is: If Kenosha hadn’t descended into chaos, the chances of such a deadly encounter ever happening would have been much diminished. Two lives wouldn’t have been ended, and Rittenhouse would still be just another basically normal kid.
When rioting starts to break out — whatever the cause and whether or not it sprang out of peaceful and legitimate protest — every authority’s only proper response is to shut it down, fast. … Rioting attracts trouble-makers, whether Antifa goons or militia loons. In the chaos, even sane people can go mad. …
Those in power should reflect on their role in allowing such an incident unfold. The effort to frame these issues in political terms only adds to the madness. Joe Biden last year called Rittenhouse a “white supremacist”; no one’s ever shown the least evidence of that. The men he shot were all as white as he is.
The governor shares some blame with “hyper-aggressive” Joseph Rosenbaum (as he was described by prosecution witnesses during the Rittenhouse trial.) Only hours after the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha last August, Tony Evers burnished his credentials as a guilty white Democrat with standard-issue Woke cop bashing.
‘Please refrain …’
Dan McLaughlin in National Review: “The city and, in particular, Wisconsin governor Tony Evers chose not to enforce the law or use the National Guard to restore order. Governor Evers issued an incendiary statement on August 23″:
“While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.”
Wisconsin police responded with a statement pleading with Evers to …
“Discontinue and refrain from making statements … until the facts of the investigation are known. Previous remarks and statements made by each of you are premature, judgmental, inflammatory and only add to the anger and divisiveness of an already dangerous situation. A continued pattern of statements and press releases based on opinion and unsubstantiated claims puts people’s lives at risk.”
McLaughlin continues:
Governor Evers refused federal help, and waited days to accept National Guard help from other states, even as local officials in Kenosha pleaded with him to send in several hundred National Guardsmen to restore order. He belatedly declared a state of emergency and announced a doubling of the National Guard presence from 125 to 250 the night of August 25, a fraction of what local leaders wanted.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: A good first step is to stop listening to elite boutiques and re-learn good policing from George Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s proven “Broken Windows” school of policing.
Education
Blaska Policy Werkes 
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You give Evers way too much credit.
I don’t think this is about anything as noble as personal growth. More likely, he sees his poll numbers tanking.
A real leader and decent human being would have put the people of Kenosha and Madison and every other city under siege by leftist anarchists before what he thought might win favor with his Progressive base.
It wasn’t just his failure to order more National Guard to Kenosha. Remember this?
“Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, in Kenosha, Wisconsin,” he said. “While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.”
https://www.maciverinstitute.com/2021/08/the-lies-that-burned-kenosha/
MacIver makes an excellent point.
“At no point did Evers urge calm or warn against committing acts of violence, he just admitted that he didn’t know the details of the shooting, but passed judgment on it anyway and all but gave his blessing to the chaos that followed.”
Evers sending the National Guard? Great. That’s his job. No medals here.
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Skeletor just wants to be re-elected (like THAT’S gonna happen!)
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A real shame the post had to close with a glowing reference to Kelling & Wilson’s Broken Windows (BW) philosophy.
A. Anyone concerned with overreach of State power infringing on our constitutional rights should be against preventative policing tactics (I know BW isn’t strictly preventative but it’s so closely related in research and practice that most lump them together). It by definition inserts State power into innocent people’s lives. Don’t think they’ll only always be targeting liberals and it can’t impact you because “I’m not a criminal”.
B. The article linked to admits that it’s risky to put the BW responsibility on police, and only does so because there weren’t/aren’t other municipal entities that had the same capacity. They acknowledge that the tactic could easily lead to the violation of constitutional rights and racial discrimination but washed that down with a vague hope that police training programs would keep that from happening.
C. I’m actually not against BW, I’m just against using the police for it. It’s a waste of our most highly trained and highly paid employees to put them on the low-level issues BW aims to deal with. It’s sending cops on a bunch of BS runs instead of finding violent criminals. I support the police and want them to have tasks commensurate with their skill set. Start another agency staffed with people at half the salary to do this stuff. There’s a defund the police tactic they could satisfy both sides: have police focus on dangerous stuff and other people focus on quality of life issues. Police get to do the kinds of stuff they signed up for like arrest violent criminals and defend innocent people while someone else mentors little Johnny after he gets caught spray painting a garage. Win-Win.
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The Wilson hypothesis goes back to 1982. More recent research is available as well as many societal changes since then.
The violent crime rate fell 49% between 1993 and 2019, with large decreases in the rates of robbery (-68%), murder/non-negligent manslaughter (-47%) and aggravated assault (-43%).Property crime rate fell 55%, with big declines in the rates of burglary (-69%), motor vehicle theft (-64%) and larceny/theft (-49%).
How did this happen?
1) We lock more people up. The 1994 Crime Act insured that.
2) The rate of pregnancies ending in abortion approaches 50% in the inner city resulting in fewer young men between the ages of 18-24.
3) Crack use has declined dramatically.
4) Comp-stat deploys police resources very efficiently.
5) The elimnation of lead from the gasoline and paint decreases violent behavior.
There are many more aspects to this issue. Broken windows is just one of them.
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Thanks for the insightful comment. Yes, so many variables. That’s why simplistic statements like “let’s just get back to BW policing” are things I have a hard time not pushing back against. There’s no magic bullet and every approach has pros and cons that should be honestly and critically thought about. That’s part of why I have an overarching goal of focusing police missions/assignments and no longer using crime rate as a measure of police success in the first place.
But I think I hijacked, this blog was mostly about Evers…
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Rollie, You make a couple good points, but let’s not ignore that BW policies made a HUGE difference in many city’s crime rates -including capital crimes. Let’s NOT throw the baby out w/ the bath…
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Thank you. I’m aware of a bunch of the research and I’m not convinced that BW is what drove down crime rates. There are so many variables, and I find criminal justice research to too often overstate effectiveness of tactics. There’s lots and lots of grant money slushing around this field funding “research projects”, and you have to write something. Again, I understand the idea and think the basic premise has some merit.
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Rollie wrote, “I’m aware of a bunch of the research and I’m not convinced that BW is what drove down crime rates. There are so many variables, and I find criminal justice research to too often overstate effectiveness of tactics.”
Doesn’t anyone or any group that’s involved in these kind of efforts engage in correlation = causation arguments and overstate their own effectiveness? It’s a shared effort and it’s difficult and maybe impossible to isolate the effectiveness of any one effort in the overall perceived result.
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That should have read, “It’s a shared result and it’s difficult and maybe impossible to isolate the effectiveness of any one effort in the overall perceived result.”
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It’s riot season already?
Mano, man, tempus fugit!
I still have my Covid decorations up.
As Paul Harvey always said, “Here’s the Rest Of The Story ……. ”
If you haven’t been following the Rittenhouse trial, you should watch the whole thing:
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6282341025001?playlist_id=5198073478001#sp=show-clip
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Good Dog, Happy Man wrote, “It’s riot season already? Mano, man, tempus fugit! I still have my Covid decorations up.”
That got an audible chuckle out of me.
Thanks for the smile.
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Then my job here is done. Mission accomplished, spoons.
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Yes, at this moment in time it appears that Governor Evers may have learned his lesson about rioting; however, time will tell if he really learned his lesson or is this just a moment of intentional virtue signalling towards the unwoke to boost his ratings. I’m not going to judge the Governor and give him lots of praise based on this one forethought response when other words and actions from him tend to tell us a different story.
The verdict is still out both on the Rittenhouse trial and the Governor’s actions.
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Watching this continuing tragedy unfold, which would likely have never happened had Evers called out a sufficient number of the National Guard to put a blanket on the simmering flames. I’m in agreement, this one’s on Evers.
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Had these rules been in place in 2020, America would have ended the year with much less property damage and fewer dead people than the two dozen dead that BLM and Antifa left in their wake.
Mayor Richard J. Daley was a good Democrat, but he wasn’t very clean or articulate. I still remember his (in)famous quote during the Democrat Convention Riots in 1968, “The police aren’t there to cause disorder, they’re there to preserve” disorder.”
Given the violence already taking place and the threat of more violence to an already broken Kenosha, it’s reasonable to believe that the jury is struggling between principle (acquit Kyle) and fear (find him guilty and let the appellate court figure it out). After all, we already have reason to believe that two of the jurors are worried about direct mob attacks against them.
Knowing the jury’s fear, Judge Peterson tried to stiffen their spines by quoting Lincoln,
“Good men, men who love tranquility, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits, who would gladly spill their blood in the defense of their country; seeing their property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered; their persons injured; and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better; become tired of, and disgusted with, a Government that offers them no protection; and are not much averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing to lose. Thus, then, by the operation of this mobocractic spirit, which all must admit, is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed, … I mean the attachment of the People. Whenever this effect shall be produced among us; whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last.”
Lady Justice wears a blindfold and wields a sword for a reason.
Keep the faith. Stay Kenosha strong. Render a just verdict.
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