The Republican mayor of one of the country’s biggest cities — Miami — pointed the finger at left-wing-light-on-crime measures like eliminating cash bail as being instrumental in dramatic rises in crime in other major metropolises run by Democrats around the country.
On a panel of mayors from major cities who appeared on Sunday’s “Face the Nation” program on CBS, Mayor Francis Suarez said that so-called ‘bail reform’ has led to “lawlessness” and that soft-on-crime policies have also led to an increase in crimes like petty theft, which is harming the economy.
“What I’m focusing on is that the no cash bail is creating lawlessness in a lot of our cities,” said Suarez. “What’s happening is, for example, people get out right away, they’re not even, you know, they don’t even have to post bail. So they’re able to get out right away.
“And so we’re seeing someone go into like a CVS, for example, and take thousands of dollars worth of merchandise, which is causing a CVSs to close, which hurts the, you know, the rest of the city, but that’s not particularly related to, to the gun violence issue. It’s related more to petty crime, which is creating lawlessness in some of our cities,” he said, while going on to praise his city’s approach to policing.
“We are funding our police,” he said. “A lot of cities cut into the defunding police movement. And we’re seeing [police funding] as a bipartisan issue.”
Just last week, some restaurant and bar owners began sleeping in their establishments to deter criminals, blaming the city’s lax bail policies.
“I have been burglarized 15 times in the last year,” Lindsey Rae, owner of Two-Headed Dog, said during a recent city council meeting, according to the New York Post. “We’re seeing, if they are getting caught, they’re getting re-released because of the cash bond issues we’re having,” she added. “They can come back and rob us again.”
“We’ve been broken into six times now,” Tod Jones, the owner of Glitter, a karaoke bar in Midtown Houston, told local news outlet KHOU. “They’re coming in, grabbing as many bottles as they can, throwing it in a bag and then they’re out. Both my windows are broken, and I’m like, ‘Man, I don’t even want to fix them because they’re going to be broken again in the next few days.’”
He went on to say that thieves have caused in excess of $20,000 in damages and stolen liquor. “At this point, you don’t even want to claim it on your insurance, because you don’t want to lose your insurance,” he said. “You just have to fix it yourself.”
Raul Jacobo, the owner of Cobos Barbecue in the East Downtown neighborhood, has started sleeping, armed, in his establishment after it was broken into twice in less than two weeks. Worse, the eatery’s location is less than a block from a Houston Police Dept. precinct.
In one instance, Jacobo and a security guard caught a would-be thief and held him until police arrived. “Police got there, he had his bag with all his tools in it, ski mask,” he said. “Then, next thing I find out, he’s out the next day.”
“We are literally one street away from an [HPD] substation and we have a criminal that is breaking in twice in four days and doesn’t care about any consequence,” he added.
