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  US President Donald Trump urged Republicans to act swiftly on ending sanctuary cities and  modifying no-cash bail policies on Monday, citing rising crime in Washington, DC. Speaking at a press conference, Trump claimed the city's murder rate is now higher than  Bogota, Colombia, and that car thefts have doubled while carjackings have more than tripled  over the past five years. He called for "rules and regulations" to restore order and said some  neighborhoods are under emergency curfews. To see more  CLICK HERE .

Jim Quinn is a former assistant district attorney in Queens, New York.  His family has lived in New York for four generations.  Jim was on the front lines as New York passed bail reform through the the budget bill in 2019 and when it went into effect in January 2020.  Jim has written numerous articles about the New York bail reform and its impact on crime.  On this episode of The Bail Post we look back at 5 years under the New York bail reform law including the three roll backs by the New York legislature.  Join us and find out whether these reforms have been a success or whether they have been a failure.  Audio Podcast- Also available on- Apple Podcasts-            CLICK HERE Spotify-                        CLICK HERE Google Podcasts-        CLICK HERE Podcast Index-            C...

by Paul Vallas To refer to Chicago as a haven for criminals is an understatement. Today, despite Mayor Brandon Johnson’s pious announcements to the contrary, Chicago remains one of the most dangerous cities in America. While there are underlying causes of crime — such as failing schools, underinvestment, and weak economic possibilities — that the city has failed to address, the undeniable truth is that there are fewer and fewer consequences for increasingly serious crimes. Meanwhile, a powerful "Criminal Industrial Complex" profits from this system — one that makes Chicagoans and visitors less safe every day. Chicago is the crime capital of the nation, leading all U.S. cities in both murders and mass  shootings year after year. If Chicago were a state, it would rank second only to California in  mass shootings. In 2023, 76 school-age children (17 years and younger) were  urdered in Chicago — more  than in any other city. Chicago also leads the nation in murders ...

The Untold Story- Selling Out Public Safety One District Attorney at a Time By Eric Granof History is full of examples where good intentions paved the way to disastrous outcomes.  Today, we are witnessing another such moment -- a social experiment in criminal justice reform that has unleashed unforeseen consequences on our urban communities. This experiment was built on two flawed premises.  The first was that bail is unnecessary and people would voluntarily appear in court without financial incentives.  The second was that “soft-on-crime” policies would not lead to increased criminal activity.  Both assumptions have proven catastrophically wrong, but the damage has already been done. A group of individuals advocating bail reform -- and criminal justice reform in general -- established a network of groups to push a series of initiatives.  It was funded by a small number of extremely deep-pocketed foundations and wealthy billionaires.  Among them, the Open S...

Let’s have a look at crime and punishment. Most of us know that crimes have changed over the years. So have enforcement, the criminal justice system and our prisons. There seems to be more and more lawlessness reported every day. I know some say that communication and reporting techniques have made it simply look like there’s more crime, and we all know that statistics can be presented in such a way to favor one side of an argument or another. We hear that crime is up in one area, down in another; higher in cities; better or worse than last year. I’m not talking about a poor family that desperately shoplifted food to try to survive, or the youngster who lifts a pack of gum. This is more directed to the “smash and grab” gangsters who are destroying the fabric of our neighborhoods. I dislike going to my local drug and convenience stores, because I have to summon a clerk several times just to unlock shaving cream or aspirin. I find it very hard to believe that everything needs to be locke...

Is crime going up or down.  We have been told for months that according to the FBI crime statistics, crime is going down and that it is only the perception of crime increasing that is the problem.  This dispute has come into full focus this week when it was discovered that the FBI had updated its crime statistics incredible results. * * * RealClearInvestigations dug into the FBI’s data and found that the law enforcement agency had been criminally misreporting crime statistics in a way that just happened to help Biden-Harris look like it’s been tough on crime. Last fall, for example, the FBI reported that violent crime had dropped by 2.1% in 2022. That number was celebrated by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the press, which said it was proof that Donald Trump was lying about a crime wave. RealClearInvestigations discovered that the FBI had secretly updated its crime statistitics, and instead of showing a 2.1% drop in violent crime, there was a 4.5% increase in 2022.   ...

  Rising Crime:  Undermining Safety, Creating Chaos & Harming City Tax Bases-  Why Is It So Political? by Ken W. Good This article was published in the Attorney at Law Magazine October 7, 2024 Crime has become a political football, kicked back and forth across the electoral playing field. The public is receiving conflicting narratives about crime. One side argues that crime is increasing, while the other claims crime is on the decline — and that any belief to the contrary is driven by mere perception rather than reality. “People will use crime data to say whatever they want,” said Jeff Asher, a criminologist and co-founder of AH Datalytics. “When you don’t have that certainty of having nearly every agency reporting data, it means that you need a lot of literacy to be able to combat items that are being stated in bad faith.” In 2014, California passed Prop. 47, reclassifying a list of felony crimes as misdemeanors. The idea was that defendants would still face accounta...

Six years after California legalized marijuana, the bodies keep piling up. Earlier this year, six men were murdered in the Mojave Desert. Four of the men had been burned after being shot with rifles. In 2020, seven people were killed at an illegal pot operation in Riverside County. Violence like this was supposed to disappear after legalization. Legalization advocates argued that making the drug trade legal would end the grip of the cartels. Instead, the legal market has failed, and the cartels are taking over sizable parts of California and the rest of the country. California's legal drug revenues have fallen consistently, as have those in other legal drug states including Colorado, whose model helped sell the idea that drug money would fix everything. Despite falling revenues, Colorado legislators brag about $282 million in drug revenue. That number may sound high, but it's a drop in the bucket considering the money that the state and cities like Denver are spending on homele...

  Jim VanBrederode, a former Gates Police Chief, pointed to the  current state of security measures in stores as an example that things have  gone too far.   “We now have concrete barriers in front of all of our stores, we have blue light  cameras in the parking lots, we have security guards at the front door. You go  to get toothpaste and you’ve got to get the associate to unlock the toothpaste.   This is what we face every day now because we’ve gone way too far on not  being able to take off the streets those that are not going to stop re-offending, ”   VanBrederode says. VanBrederode believes many of the criminal justice reforms that went into place  in 2021 have had a negative impact on the community.   “They (democratic majority) literally went through the whole criminal justice  system and made massive radical changes to create a restorative justice model,  they literally touched everything from t...

  Our guest on this episode of The Bail Post is the sitting district attorney for Harris County- Kim Ogg.  D.A. Ogg was first elected to become district attorney in 2016 with the support of a Soros political group.  She was re-elected in 2020 without the support of a Soros political group. D.A. Ogg was present for all the inside political discussions for criminal justice reform/bail reform in Harris County.  D.A. Ogg initially supported the reforms, but once she concluded that the proposed reforms went too far, she opposed them. On this episode of The Bail Post D.A. Ogg tells all.  Join us and see if you come to the same conclusion that we did-  Wow! Audio Podcast- Also available on: Apple Podcasts-            CLICK HERE Spotify-                        CLICK HERE Google Podcasts-        CLICK HERE Podcast Index- ...

  Houston Police Chief Troy Finner has released some new information regarding criminal cases that were suspended.  Last week, Finner identified 4,017 cases of alleged sexual assault administratively suspended for "lack of personnel" - investigations essentially kicked to the curb back to 2016. "Am I proud about this? No, I'm angry, okay, because I know we are better, and we are going to make it right, and we will make it right. We are still short of staff and some people say 2,000 officers, so we do the best that we can do, but that's not good enough when we are not investigating sexual assaults," said Finner. On Monday afternoon, Houston police released a new statement saying, "Our review of adult sex crime cases suspended with a code of "lack of personnel" has expanded to include all other divisions in the department found to be using that same code. We have determined that department-wide approximately 264,000 such incident reports since 2...

U.S. Supreme Court Denied Cert. Allowing Fifth Circuit to End Federal Micromanagement of Ongoing State Criminal Cases by Ken W. Good In the labyrinth of legal battles waged in the expansive landscape of Texas, the saga of Daves v. Dallas County unfolded with deceptive simplicity. Initially framed as a straightforward confrontation between plaintiffs and the legal machinery of Dallas County, this saga eventually evolved into a convoluted odyssey involving constitutional interpretations, initial rulings that were later reversed and other judicial intricacies. What was supposed to be simple turned out to be anything but. To understand this litigation, a review must go all the way back to 2016. A group of plaintiffs brought suit against misdemeanor judges, the Harris County sheriff and Harris County in ODonnell v. Harris County, alleging violations of due process and equal protection. By 2017, Judge Lee Rosenthal of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas issued a prelim...

San Francisco’s doom loop just got worse. On the heals of the Hilton Hotel in downtown defaulting on their loan, another major player is packing up and heading out. KPMG, a prominent consulting and accounting firm, has decided to vacate its prestigious, namesake $400 million office tower. * * * * The root causes of this mass exodus are multifaceted, with businesses and residents citing escalating crime rates, an uncontrolled homelessness crisis, and the rise of remote work as primary factors driving them away from downtown San Francisco. * * * * Other highlights from the article- Nearly 100 retailers have shut their doors since the pandemics onset. In the first five months of 2023 alone, San Francisco witnessed 346 overdose deaths, marking an over 40 percent increase compared to the same period in 2022. The city’s high theft rates exacerbate this situation, with incidents like Walgreens in the city center being forced to chain their freezers to deter shoplifters. In Union Square of the...

  Rising Crime- Reality or Mirage? by Ken W. Good By definition, facts typically stand firm and unchallenged.  But lately, there has been a notable disagreement regarding the very existence of certain facts.  During the closing stages of the previous national election, one end of the political spectrum contended that the reported increase in crime was merely a matter of perception, rather than an actual rise.  They asserted that the opposing side had fabricated the issue of rising crime.  Over the past two years, this disagreement has persisted, with one faction rejecting the notion of escalating crime and instead asserting a disparity between public perception and reality. In a recent debate between a representative from Civil Rights Corps and myself, the Corps argued that crime rates were declining, attributing reports to the contrary as a fallacy.  Civil Rights Corps is an activist group behind numerous lawsuits pushing bad bail reforms even as they lose...

The 4 Phases of the ‘Spiral of Death’ Facing Our Nation’s Largest Cities by Ken W. Good Across America, some of our major metropolitan cities are facing a crisis created by their own politicians seemingly intent on destroying public safety, while chasing away both businesses and citizens. Unable to keep up with lost revenue, increasingly, we will see municipalities getting overstretched and facing collapse if course corrections are not made. This dire situation is analogous to the “death spiral” experienced by ant colonies. Well-known for their self-organizing structure, ants search for food by following the ant in front of it. This behavior also allows them to find their way back to their nests. Sometimes a slight deviation occurs, typically caused by an environmental trigger, and an ant mill forms. When this happens, a group of ants will be separated from the main foraging party. If they lose track of the group’s pheromone trail, they will default to following one another, forming a ...

  Mexican cartels are behind the spike in organized retail crime and are deeply entrenched in every level of the process, according to the federal government's chief investigative agency. Retailers nationwide sustained nearly $100 billion worth of losses in 2021, the highest year on record, according to the National Retail Federation report published in September 2022. The growing number of cartel-run theft rings around the country drove that figure up from $70 billion in 2019. "Organized retail crime is leading to more brazen and more violent attacks in retail stores throughout the country. Many of the criminal rings orchestrating these thefts are also involved in other serious criminal activity such as human trafficking, narcotics trafficking, weapon trafficking, and more," said Steve Francis, acting executive associate director for Homeland Security Investigations, in a statement. HSI is part of the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcem...

Anne Marie Schubert is a career prosecutor.  Schubert earned a bachelor's degree from Saint Mary’s College of California in 1986 and a J.D. from the University of San Francisco in 1989. Her career experience includes being the Sacramento County District Attorney, Supervising Deputy District Attorney of the Sacramento District Attorney's Office, and Deputy District Attorney of Contra Costa and Solano Counties. Schubert has been a board member of the National District Attorneys Association and has been affiliated with Fight Crime: Invest in Kids and Stand Up for Victims. On this episode of The Bail Post we discuss whether California has  reached a breaking point with rising crime and criminal justice reform.   If you would like to learn more about the letter from the Oakland NAACP (referenced in this episode) demanding action on crime from their local politicians  CLICK HERE . If you would like to learn more about the News Nation townhall mentioned in this episode CLIC...

  News Nation conducted a townhall on Crime in America on July 31, 2023.  Mayors and law enforcement personnel from across the country sought to answer one of the most pressing questions in America on Monday night: What are they doing to combat crime in their cities?  On the issue of bail reform, Durham, North Carolina, Mayor Elaine O’Neal is a former judge who isn’t convinced it can work without a viable alternative to get people to show up to court.  Here is the clip- (3 minutes starting at 35:53).  "You have to have a way to get people to court . . ." A New York woman says two men responsible for her son’s death were released from prison. She called bail reform a “runaway train” that is crashing into black and brown communities. The townhall also addressed how crime is affecting the bottom lines of businesses.  More than half of consumers think retail crimes like shopping or looting stores have surged in their community since the onset of the pandem...