We have lived for 32 years in a neighborhood that until recently had virtually no crime incidents. We live in the Santa Monica Mountains away from major boulevards. We kept our garage door open during the day without concern. Then things changed.
Three years ago, on a Sunday, when I was at my office seven minutes from our home, a person pulled into our garage in my space. He saw no activity in the house but sat in the garage for fifteen minutes waiting for our dogs to calm down. The Beautiful Wife (TBW) was in her office on the other side of the house, so the alarm was not on. She heard the continuing barking by our three dogs and came over to the other side of the house thinking there was a critter driving the doggies crazy. On that side of the house, she was facing a man who came in from our garage. When she asked what he was doing in our house, he said “I am a visitor.” She told him to get the hell out, and he immediately exited while she called the police. That very evening, the police suspected it was same the guy casing a house around the corner, got us and TBW identified him as he was wearing the same shirt he wore when entering our home.
About three weeks later while sitting in her home office, TBW saw a woman walk into our back yard. She had entered a side gate that is barely visible from the street because of vegetation (all drought resistant). TBW went into our back yard and asked her what she was doing there. She stated she was looking for water despite having a water bottle in her hand. Again, TBW scared her off and she made a quick exit. We quickly raised both of our side gates to levels that normal humans cannot climb, added locking mechanisms and keeping the garage closed virtually all the time.
In an area where no incidents had occurred for decades it was now becoming common. We signed up for Nextdoor, a social media site allowing common neighbors to communicate with each other. There is a constant drumbeat of crimes where people’s homes are being breeched. Entering their back yards, trying to enter their homes, tampering with their cars, and doing the hot new thing – stealing catalytic converters from cars in driveways.
You may remember a year ago I worked with Los Angeles County to clear a major homeless group who had taken over a county parking lot. One of our neighbors had someone hop their eight-foot gates and tried to enter their home. I had a chat with the officers who responded. They had tracked multiple incidents to the homeless camped out down the hill from our area.
Many of these factors might also be personal to you as these incidents have become commonplace throughout our country.
My point is to direct your attention to the fact we have deserted the police policy of “Broken Windows” developed and introduced to the public in 1982 by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. It was implemented in New York City in the 1990’s and successfully crashed the level of their ridiculously high crime rates. Stopping the small things like broken windows in an area displaying a lack of care for the community is proven to lead to plummeting crimes at a low level which led to their homicide rate plunging from 2,262 per year to under 500 per year. In other words, stop the small criminal acts and they do not become the larger crimes like murder. Almost every career criminal starts with petty crimes and works their way up to felonies. A person with ill-intent feels emboldened by the lack of enforcement of lower-level crimes.
The election of Kim Foxx in Chicago started a “renaissance” of law enforcement. In cities across the United States district attorneys were elected who wanted to degrade felonies to misdemeanors, minimize or eliminate bail and let criminals out of jails based on a myriad of excuses. Crime has exploded in every area where this has occurred. The Left makes hollow arguments. One of the leading proponents of these defenses is Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s DA. He likes to blame the violence on inanimate objects instead of human behavior. He also likes to make up his owns laws instead enforcing the laws of the city, county, and state.
The Left currently is pointing fingers at Republicans because crime is “high” in Red States. They prostitute themselves because, absent the crime in Democrat run cities in those states, crime is not a problem. The Pelosi attack occurred in San Francisco, a city with rampant street crime caused by loose law enforcement. It is so bad the DA was recently recalled.
We have had some recent political violence — Congresswoman Gabby Giffords shot in 2011; the attack on Republicans at the 2017 Congressional baseball game; Congressman Lee Zeldin (candidate for NY Governor) was attacked at a rally by a man with a knife in July of this year. But I do not see the shooting outside Zeldin’s home as political violence as that was just the kind of random violence many citizens are experiencing today. The location appears to be arbitrary.
The people clamoring about political violence are also not doing anything nor speaking about increased protection for Supreme Court justices not recognizing there is a specific law against protesting in front of a judge’s home. This is despite a real death threat against Justice Kavanaugh. It took the Pelosi attack to reach fever pitch about political violence.
We recently had a burglary at the home of Los Angeles Mayoral candidate Karen Bass. She experienced the same random crime that many of her constituents experience daily and she will do little to abate it if elected.
The facts about what happened at the Pelosi home are still being sorted out. We will probably never know what happened because Speaker Pelosi is never forthright about such matters. If it were really an act of political violence, don’t you think the perpetrator would have made sure she was home? The fact that he supposed was planning to wait in the house until she returned is proof positive this person is seriously mentally ill. It was horrible what happened to her husband, but the attacker was just a deranged, illegal immigrant, homeless man who happened to rant about attacking Speaker Pelosi.
Think about this. This person was homeless and by his former wife’s account seriously mentally impaired, yet supposedly well-versed on the policies of the day. We are instructed to believe he was a nightly watcher of Sean Hannity. Not exactly plausible.
It is incredibly sad what happened to Paul Pelosi. It should not happen to any American. It was not political violence. Just the same kind of random violence you see regularly on the nightly news. It is just pitiful that elected officials do not connect the root cause to the policies that are endangering all of us. We need to return to the broken windows philosophy of policing.
Maybe if the Democrats stopped their disgusting drumbeat that our “democracy is in danger,” then people would not be so whipped up to make stupid statements threatening violence.
