.jpg) |
| Bronin -- Hartford Courant |
The headline in a Hartford paper screams, “Mayors take on gun violence: Leaders from some of the state’s biggest cities want crackdown on firearm crimes by repeat offenders.”
One of the cities is Hartford, the Capital city of
Connecticut whose mayor, Luke Bronin, recently announced he will not be running
for office again.
The mayors,” according to the paper, “are focusing on a
narrow set of criminals – often already convicted felons – who are responsible
for a large share of the shootings in Hartford, Waterbury, Bridgeport and New
Haven.
In Waterbury according to the report, “40% of those arrested
for shootings were in probation and 30% were on pretrial release.”
How long, urbanites may want to know, has this been going
on? How long have police chiefs in large Connecticut cities known that 39% of
criminals arrested in shootings were on pretrial release, 14% on probation, and
5% on parole? During his tenure in office, did Hartford’s police chief ever mention
to the departing mayor that the same small knot of criminals in the city over
which he presided for 7 years were committing the preponderance of the city’s’
crimes? Surely the subject must have arisen, perhaps more than once, over a
donut and coffee at the mayor’s residence.
Most rational people in Hartford probably know that the
fault lies not with the police, who know who the repeat offenders are, but with
other public officials, many of them politicians who for political reasons seem
to have decided over the years that fair punishments no longer deter crime.
Bronin is not a political newbie. Prior to becoming Mayor of
Hartford for 7 years, he served in the administration of President Barack Obama
as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes at
the U.S. Department of the Treasury. He was tapped by Dannel Malloy to serve as
the Governor’s General Council, after which he became Hartford’s 67th Mayor.
“As the governor’s chief lawyer,” the outgoing mayor’s
official biography notes, “Bronin was deeply
involved in developing policies to combat veterans’ homelessness, pass
common sense gun laws (emphasis mine), expand economic opportunities, reform
our criminal justice system (emphasis mine), and protect our
environment.”
Somewhere on his political journey, Bronin must have
developed a nodding acquaintance with the notion of just punishment as an
efficacious crime deterrent; so too with the other mayors of Connecticut’s
crime ridden cities.
Democrats have controlled the mayor’s office in Hartford –
with one exception, that of Mayor Ann Uccello, 1967-71 – for 68 years.
Postmodern progressive notions that condign sentencing does not deter criminal
activity and that guns, not criminals, kill people are relatively new penological
fables.
Like Chicago and California, Connecticut is generally
recognized as a gun control state. And state laws regarding gun control, touted
as often as possible by Connecticut’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and
Chris Murphy, have not stemmed criminal violence – not gun violence -- in their
state’s largest cities.
The governors of Connecticut’s major cities mentioned above,
all Democrats, are now turning – better late than never – a new page on urban
violence, and Governor Ned Lamont is on board. “We are
talking about that small group of repeat offenders that provide 90% of the
shootings and 90% of the murders. And that is avoidable," Lamont said.
“If you’ve got a history of serious offenses, and you commit
a new firearms offense, you should have to post at least 30% of your bail, the
bond that's set, in order to get out on pretrial release,” Bronin said.
These were always good ideas, spurned in large part by
progressive justices, Democrat legislators, and left leaning professors of
penology such as former co-chair of the General Assembly Judiciary Committee Mike Lawlor, Malloy’s prison czar and creator of Connecticut’s
get-out-of-jail-early-release credits.
While it is rarely mentioned in commentary pieces and editorials
among Connecticut’s surviving investigative reporters, the root of social
disintegration in large cities lies in the destruction of the family unit. Persistent
poverty in urban areas persists because the state for years has been financing
marginal poverty through its welfare system, what this writer has called a fool’s
gold gilded cage that prevents the general public from seizing upon real
solutions to urban poverty.
Chris Powell, now retired as
Managing Editor and Editorial Page Editor of the combative Journal Inquirer,
continues to hammer away in his columns at various false solutions. Powell,
very early on, along with Daniel Patrick Moynihan among others, identified
urban poverty’s main culprit as the absence of traditional family structures,
most importantly the absence of responsible fathers in households: “For
starters, most children in the cities have little if any parenting. More than
80% are living without a father in their home, many having no contact with
their fathers at all. Many of their mothers are badly stressed by single
parenting and trying to make a living, even with welfare benefits. Some have
drug problems. Some are so addled that their children are being raised by a
grandparent.”
Forcing convicted criminals to post 30% bail when they are
rearrested may not be nearly enough to reverse-engineer a half decade of
destructive “solutions” to urban anarchy.
Comments