'Broken Windows’ Won’t Stop the Crime Wave

Conservatives make a talisman out of arresting turnstile-jumpers, instead of documenting the Herclean rewrite of 100s of laws.

 Crime is up significantly since Obama launched his War on Cops in 2014. Soon after, the Rogue Prosecutor Movement began its own war on the courts. Clearance rates for crime have decreased, with violent crime clearance rates cut in half in big cities. Homicide clearance rates continue to plummet. Crime victimization surveys show that even more crime is going unreported. Major municipalities are not reporting their crime data to the FBI. The FBI had to revise the crime rates much higher for 2024. 

The bad olden days of daily stories of criminals with long records committing horrific crimes, have returned. The Truth-in-Sentencing (TiS) revolution from 30 years ago has been significantly rolled back. Yet conservatives are nowhere to be found, pointing this out. The Left has run an attack campaign for decades, calling the criminal justice system broken and insulting it as the prison-industrial complex or the carceral state, and calling for its abolishment. Their mass incarceration fiction campaigns hide the facts, and their published histories omit the 1960s. Leftists talk endlessly about incarceration without ever mentioning that the crime came years before and is much higher. 

Leftists dominate the internet with fiction. The progressive disinformation industry is not the Democrat Party or the partisan news media. It consists of hundreds of other organizations spending $100s of millions, perhaps $billions a year. Their mission statements show they are as insanely radical as ever. But today they are richer, more entrenched, and their propaganda libraries are massive. A search of ‘incarceration’ at just one organization website brings up links to over 400 articles tagged ‘End Mass Incarceration.’ These organizations codify leftist ideology for Democrat candidates who pretend to be moderates, but undercut traditional criminal justice at every opportunity once in office. 

A DC judge released the thugs who beat up a DOGE worker, saying that rehabilitation is her concern. This is straight out of the 1960s Revolving Door Crime Wave failures, caused by leftists claiming that they could rehabilitate criminals on the fly. Deliberate incarceration cuts were made year after year and their catastrophic effects are clear to see in objective graph data. Yet that empirical historical evidence is not brought to the fight. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani says the social safety net has failed, and they must shift money. That path has been taken before, resulting in 40 years of spectacular disaster. With their control of Congress starting in 1955, the Democrats started the biggest crime explosion. Massively increased social spending was matched by skyrocketing crime for decades. Social spending does not even slow crime down, yet conservatives do not step forward with the historical proof. 

 Republican campaigns are predictable platitudes; back the badge, support law and order, promise safe streets, propose new legislation, highlight some terrible crimes, ask for donations, and knock on doors. But these campaigns continually fail with people indoctrinated in leftist ideology. Republicans claim history is unimportant and ineffective for campaigns. So in their absence, the Left have been free to run their own slanted crime history fiction for years. 

In the October 2025 Imprimis, New York Post columnist Miranda Devine writes “Lawlessness is a Choice.” She rips leftist policies but objective historical evidence is not offered. Instead she perpetuates the myth that Rudy Giuliani’s enforcement of minor offenses is the key to fixing crime. As a prosecutor Giuliani used RICO laws to smash the mob, as mayor he got the police to do their jobs, and he deserves those accolades. However, crime was falling two years before Giuliani became mayor. A Truth-in-Sentencing (TiS) revolution, largely undocumented except here, was sweeping the country. The federal TiS law was the tip of the iceberg because every state also needed TiS. These laws were the tip of an even bigger iceberg, because at least seven categories of law also needed reforms; probation, parole, pretrial detention, early release, recreational drug use, three-strikes, and crime asset seizures. Giuliani became mayor in 1993, the federal TiS became law in 1994, New York state passed TiS laws in 1995 and 1998. The whole country was riding a TiS revolution and seeing crime fall; and Giuliani benefited directly from three TiS laws. 

 Hundreds of new laws were required because the Left is at war with the criminal justice system, and yet Republicans say nothing about it. Instead they push a silly myth that arresting turnstile jumpers and a dubious idea that the perception of order in New York City, caused crime to magically fall across the entire country. Republicans did not successfully defend the TiS revolution, which has contributed to the rolling back of these effective laws. Republicans fail to keep us safe, because they fail to win enough elections, because they message poorly. The website StopCrimeTosa.com documents crime history with objective, easy to understand graphs, and in nationally published articles.