Youth profiling, that is!
Bring back the curfew!
Kids, children, teens — anyone under the age of 18 — have no rights that adults are bound to respect.
Gawd help us if police were allowed to round up unsupervised teenagers loitering on State Street at 1 in the morning of an August weekend before the mayhem begins. ACLU attorneys are on standby, as are EMTs. Because downtown Madison WI is already feeling the heat from rowdy teens fighting each other and threatening passersby. There goes your hotel room tax.
If it wasn’t for pure dumb luck and the tremendous police intervention, there would have been a shooting. — Ald. Mike Verveer quoted by the Wisconsin State Journal.
On Langdon Street in March a 16 year old did, however accidentally, shoot himself’ another teen was found with a firearm.
Don’t ask Ald. Will Ochowicz to reinstitute youth curfews. That could lead to racial profiling, he frets. Don’t ask Mayor Satya for leadership. “Rhodes-Conway didn’t commit to any solutions to the problems downtown but said the police department is one of a number of groups assessing options to keep young people safe in our community.” Madame Mayor, commit to this solution:
Reinstate the curfew!
Madison alders abolished the youth curfew three years ago. Kids under age 17 had to be off the streets by 11 p.m. on weeknights or midnight on weekends. Predictably, fights have increased since.
While Madison WI was abolishing the curfew, dozens of cities and counties were reinstating them, including Washington DC, Memphis, New Smyrna Beach FL, Sea Isle City NJ, and Fulton County GA. Philadelphia and Chicago made their curfews permanent in 2023, according to Governing magazine.
Never thought we would be holding up San Francisco as a role model. But there’s a new mayor in the city by the bay — Daniel Lurie, one of those billionaires we’re supposed to hate. (Levi Straus & Co.) This headline, in the failing New York Times (of all places) caught our eye:
San Francisco sobers up from progressivism
Democratic rule, particularly at the local level, has been marked by a rise in public disorder not just in San Francisco but also in progressive bastions nationwide. It’s one reason the Democratic party is less popular than President Trump, ICE, and artificial intelligence.
When I visited San Francisco in 2023, parts of the city looked like open-air drug dens. Users made homes in tents that lined block after block. … Until recently, the city was a model of Democratic governance gone wrong. — New York Times
Mayor Lurie pretty much cleared out the street poopers; he just announced a crackdown on turnstile jumpers on its public transit systems. Which reminds us of America’s mayor. Rudy Giuliani may have disgraced himself by touting the stolen election lie, but let us not forget how he cleaned up New York City. The former federal prosecutor:
Ignored the cliché that you could cut crime only by addressing so-called root causes, poverty and racism. He instinctively grasped the theory of social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling that stopping small crimes would prevent more serious crimes, just as replacing a broken window halts more window-breaking by showing that somebody watches and acts. — Wall Street Journal
Blaska’s Bottom Line: goes to that writer, also author of The Dream and the Nightmare: “The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass:”
“Policy can change culture, Mr. Giuliani showed. It wasn’t the legacy of slavery that had created the disproportionately black urban underclass, he understood, but the message of victimhood and helplessness sent by framing crime as an inevitable response to oppression and welfare as deserved reparations. Criminals, not society, were to blame for crime.”
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