Five people were violently killed this weekend. In Iraq? Nope - in my own 'hood, San Francisco, a "safe" big city. To date, there have been 62 homicides in the City by the Bay, on pace to equal 2005's homicide total of 96, the most in a decade. And most observors project this year's total to actually exceed that number.
In this San Francisco is not alone. Across the bay in working class Oakland, where I work, there were already 67 homicides by mid-year at the end of June, 1.7 times more murders than the year before, itself a banner year for blood on the streets. At this pace, Oakland will have more homicides than at the PEAK of the crack-fueled crime wave of the late-80s/early 90s.
On every street, in every city and town in this country, there is more blood on the streets than we have seen in a decade.
And Bush and the GOP is a big reason why.
More on the flip
Under President Clinton, this country saw a miracle happen - the turning back of decades of rising crime in America's cities. So much so that the idea of a new urban renaissance stopped sounding like the pipe-dreams of idealists. If Rip Van Winkle feel asleep in Times Square in 1984 and woke up 15 years later, he would have thought he'd landed on the moon. THAT's how big a difference it was. Think I'm joking? Alphabet City in New York's Lower East Side used to be where you went to score some heroin. Now its where drunken suburban New Jersey fratboys hope to score with Paris Hilton wannabes.
Until, that is, George Bush and the Republican Congress came along. First on the chopping block, to help pay for tax cuts to the wealthy, was the Clinton-era's direct federal funding of police forces. These were the 100,000 new cops Clinton put on the street. Bush and the GOP wasted no time cutting those funds. That was the first cut. Combined with the post dot-com bust and its impact on local and state budgets, urban police forces were forced to trim their budgets - which meant less cops on the street.
Then came 9/11 - which as we all know, "changed everything." What that meant for our cops was federal "homeland security" directives which took cops off our streets and relegated to pointless security details "guarding" so-called terrorist targets. Ask a cop what he thinks of these details and he'll tell you: a clusterfuck. That was the second cut.
And then came Iraq, which called up thousands upon thousands of National Guardsmen and Reserves, countless many of whom are cops. And that was the third cut.
Blood on the streets of Baghdad. Blood on the streets of Oakland. Blood on Bush and the GOP's hands.