The Outstater
Cracking Down on Crime
“Your race card has been denied, do you have another form of argument?” — anonymous.
WE CAN HOPE that our city is learning something from the crime crackdown in Washington, D.C. It turns out that if you arrest people for breaking the law, other people, regardless of their background or upbringing, decide to abide by the law, which is a good thing.
The D.C. Police Union reports that in just one week all crime categories have gone down: robbery by 46 percent; carjacking 83 percent; car theft 21 percent; violent crime 22 percent; property crime 6 percent.
Wow, but meanwhile elected leaders here prefer to just talk about crime. That is understandable, of course, arrests and prosecutions being absolutes that are difficult to fudge, which, bless their hearts, is what politicians do best.
Politics can change, however, and there are signs that officialdom understands that civic patience is wearing thin. Most concerning is the disparity between neighborhoods, one’s chance of being a victim of violent crime ranges from only 1 in 714 in our northeast neighborhoods to 1 in 287 in the central neighborhoods.
The reasons, all arguable, would fill a book. We can focus here, however, on expectations. There is the expectation by outlying neighborhoods that central-city residents can’t be law-abiding. And there is the expectation by central-city residents that they would be unequally served by more police attention to crime there.
Whatever your perspective, you can grant that such a two-tiered system unravels the social fabric. Our mayor, realizing this, has made clear that her priority is public safety. Still, the approach continues the soft-headed programs of four previous administrations, that is, to search for elusive root causes and easy sociological fixes — more meetings and discussion groups, all carefully avoiding the racial disparities in crime statistics.
She has proposed giving $10,000 checks to individuals and organizations working to reduce teen violence (details are sketchy). A manager has been named to “bridge the gap” between the community and the police. A “youth engagement council” of high school students has been formed that will host discussions on youth violence. The mayor emphasizes, oddly, that none of this is aimed at the central city where most of the teen violence is occurring but rather citywide where it is not.
You get the tone. Don’t feel cynical if you doubt any of it will work — or at least to the degree that reality demands. Of the 59 shootings recorded here in 2025 so far, 16 victims were under 18. Last year, 19 percent of homicide victims in Fort Wayne were under 18, up from 14 percent in 2023 and just 3 per cent in 2019.
Still, there’s no mention yet of an increase in police funding or a shift in prosecutorial energies, both unpopular in an increasingly Democrat electorate. Extraordinary leadership will be needed to strip this of its social baggage and declare that at certain levels of criminality the only thing that impresses a young mind is seeing the guy down the block go to jail.
And yes, we too wish it were otherwise. — tcl
The Islamist Media Gap
FORGET WORRYING about New York City. Over the weekend, Dearborn, Michigan, only a couple of hours to our northeast, hosted the largest Shia Muslim gatherings in the United States. An estimated 40,000 Shia Muslims carried flags, some threatening, and shouted “Free, Free Palestine.” Would it surprise you if we could not find a single report of same in Indiana media? — tcl
Comments...