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Crime is a complex problem. Blaming prosecutorial policy is an odd, and likely deliberate choice. Talking about cities, Chicago has a crime rate in between Jacksonville FL and Oklahoma City OK, which are both very conservative cities. Among the highest crime states, conservative ones are very well represented.

To me, this sounds like the precursor for a planned political career wherever he's moving to. Chicago is the icon for terrible awful no-good very bad liberal crime policies in popular conservative politics and an Illinois prosecutor who's moving because they just can't take it anymore would be optimally positioned to capitalize on that. Ah, politics.



Ah, statistics. Violent crime is 8.7 in Chicago, vs 6.3 and 6.9 for the other two cities. Property crime is higher though.

[https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ok/oklahoma-city/crime]


Does that negate my point? I didn't say anything about violent crime, specifically.


When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Of course a career prosecutor would see a ‘crime problem’ as a result of insufficient prosecution.

Crime is complex, but largely related to poverty and economic opportunity. The interventions that are likely to matter most are so far outside this person’s perspective, that they are unable to see how modest judicial reform is merely the nearest corner of the iceberg.


Or, someone looking to get into hammer manufacturing might try to convince everybody else that everything is a nail.


This is an important point. Conservatives seem to love ranting about how rampant crime is in blue cities but when you do per capita comparisons of violent crime, especially involving guns, you see that conservative areas are far more crime ridden


At the city level? No.

You can look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b..., sort by the homicide rate and almost all of the top 50 voted Democrat in the 2020 election. Not Tulsa or Oklahoma City, not Mobile. Eyeballing it, I don't see any other cities that voted Republican.

High homicide rates are a blue city thing, almost exclusively.


It's flat-out ridiculous to pin it on something as broad partisan membership at one spot in a governmental body without considering any of the vastly more consequential facets of crime. Reverse the list and count the number of red and blue cities there.

I'm happy to look at pre and post policy implementation compared with similar entities, taking national and regional trends into account. Anything else is posturing.


When I sorted by homicide rate descending, all of the cities existed in red states. I'm not sure why they think that blue cities in red states somehow have different laws. Generally red States have worse social safety nets which is one thing that impacts crime overall


Remember that cities have limited autonomy in the American system. A blue city in a red state has red laws.


We're talking about "prosecutorial policy": here. That's typically a local thing.


It's relevant at every level of the court system at which there are prosecutors.





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