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Baltimore is now paying the price for irresponsible words and actions, not only by young thugs in the streets but also by its mayor and the state prosecutor, both of whom threw the police to the wolves in order to curry favor with local voters.

Now murders in Baltimore in May have been more than double what they were in May last year, and higher than in any May in the past 15 years. Meanwhile, the number of arrests is down by more than 50 percent.

Other communities across the country are experiencing similar explosions of crime and reductions of arrests, in the wake of anti-police mob rampages from coast to coast that the media sanitize as “protests.”

LESS POLICING, MORE CRIME

None of this should be surprising. In her carefully researched 2010 book, ”Are Cops Racist?” Heather Mac Donald pointed out that, after anti-police campaigns, cops tended to do less policing and criminals tended to commit more crimes.

If all this has been known for years, why do the same mistakes keep getting made?

Mainly because it is not a mistake for those people who are looking out for their own political careers. Critics who accuse the mayor of Baltimore and the Maryland prosecutor of incompetence for their irresponsible words and actions are ignoring the possibility that these two elected officials are protecting and promoting their own chances of remaining in office or of moving on up to higher offices.

Racial demagoguery gains votes for politicians, money for race-hustling lawyers and a combination of money, power and notoriety for armies of professional activists, ideologues and shakedown artists.

So let’s not be so quick to say that people are incompetent when they say things that make no sense to us. Attacking the police makes sense in terms of politicians’ personal interests, and often in terms of the media’s personal interests or ideological leanings.

INJUSTICE BY JUSTICE

The Barack Obama administration’s Department of Justice has been leading the charge, when it comes to presuming the police to be guilty – not only until proven innocent, but even after grand juries have gone over all the facts and acquitted the police.

The Department of Justice has threatened various police departments with lawsuits unless they adopt the its ideas about how police work should be done.

The high cost of lawsuits virtually guarantees that the local police department will settle by bowing to Justice’s demands – not on the merits, but because the federal government has a lot more money than local police.

By and large, what the federal government imposes on local police departments may be summarized as kinder, gentler policing.

That idea was tested in New York under Mayor David Dinkins more than 20 years ago. The opposite approach was tested when Dinkins was succeeded by Rudolph Giuliani, who imposed tough policing policies. Those brought the murder rate down to a fraction of what it had been. Unfortunately, when some people experience years of safety, they assume that means there are no dangers. That is why New York’s current mayor is moving back in the direction of Mayor Dinkins. It is also the politically expedient thing to do.

And innocent men, women and children – most of them black – will pay with their lives.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.