Fox News
August 20, 2024
https://www.foxnews.com/us/gop-crime-policies-restore-safety-black-communities-failed-dems-georgia-ag
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr has a simple solution for blue cities fed up with violence and thieves: enforce the law, lock up criminals and keep American citizens and their businesses safe from crime.
“Elections have consequences,” he told Fox News Digital as he ripped Vice President Harris as the “patron saint of leftist prosecutors” while slamming progressive crime policies that have failed the communities they purport to benefit.
“She was for defund the police, sanctuary cities, cashless bail,” he said.
Harris, a former California attorney general who touts her past as a prosecutor on the campaign trail, has also publicly supported bail funds that help get criminal defendants out of jail when they are held on bail. Her office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“All the DAs that we’ve seen around the country, from Los Angeles to San Francisco, where she was a DA, to St. Louis and even in our state in Athens and even in Atlanta, Georgia … she is the model for what they really aspired to,” Carr told Fox News Digital. “And that is the new criminal justice reform, which is don’t enforce the law.”
He added the past few years of such policies have amounted to “a roadmap for higher crime.”
In Athens, a college town known for the University of Georgia and its football team, leftist policies caused a nightmare earlier this year when a violent illegal immigrant was accused of abducting and murdering nursing student Laken Riley as she jogged in a park on campus. Incensed residents blasted local officials for espousing “sanctuary” policies during a news briefing after her death.
“Look at the communities that are most often impacted by this violent crime,” he told Fox News Digital. “It’s the communities that Democrats and leftists purport to want to protect, but instead it’s actually conservatives and Republicans that are doing the things to keep people safe. I think that’s critically important.”
Chicago, host city of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, has a population one-third the size of New York City yet outpaces it in homicides, police statistics show.
“You can either go down one path where you ignore the law, you avoid the law, crime goes up, or you can enforce the laws,” he said. “And you’re seeing exactly what’s happening.”
It’s a move that police organizations have been seeking for years: undo the bail reforms that let repeat offenders out on the streets almost immediately so they can re-offend. That lack of consequences, combined with leftist prosecutors’ reluctance to charge suspects to the fullest extent of the law, has battered police morale around the country, leading cities to struggle with hiring and retention.
Former Chicago Police Chief Gene Roy told Fox News Digital this week that the city police roster has thousands of vacancies.
Democrat elites have been criticized as entirely removed from the reality of Chicago crime as they hold the convention just blocks from where a 7-year-old boy, Jai’Mani Rivera, was gunned down earlier this year. The suspect could have been behind bars but was freed on home supervision, which he allegedly ignored.
Even understaffed, Chicago police deftly handled anti-Israel protests outside the country’s Chicago consulate on Tuesday night, gently corralling rowdy protesters until, after warning them to disperse, they made about 70 arrests when protesters refused to go home.
Carr said Chicago has historically been one of the country’s great cities. But in recent years, as “an incubator of these leftist policies,” it’s been plagued by gun violence, robberies, carjackings and population loss.
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr is speaking out against progressive prosecutors who he says are hurting the very communities that they claim to champion.
“I think it’s absolutely ironic that the Democrats have gone to Chicago, which now continues to elect folks that just don’t believe in the rule of law, don’t believe in enforcing the law – but then also some of the security measures that they’ve taken to put walls around the convention center,” he said. “When the border is not secure, and they fought any conversation about walls or more safety in our southern border.”
Carr is also a proponent of the Protecting Americans Action Fund, which was set up to counter the financial support that left-wing donors like billionaire George Soros have given to progressive prosecutor campaigns around the country, resulting in DA offices run by Los Angeles’ George Gascon, Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg and Chicago’s Kim Foxx.