The “Black Mayors’ Coalition on Crime” gathered this week in Memphis, Tennessee to discuss the dangers of crime across the US, as well as apparent solutions to the growing threat. The question is, was the meeting really about stopping crime, or, was it all about maintaining optics and making the public believe crime is going down when it’s not?
It’s difficult to say because public and media access to the event was strictly limited. In many states private meetings between public officials related to policy are illegal. However, in Tennessee the regulations are a bit more lax in terms of what constitutes a “meeting subject to law.”
The Tennessee Open Meetings Act defines a “meeting” as “the convening of a governing body of a public body for which a quorum is required to make a decision or to deliberate toward a decision.” A “governing body” is “any public body [consisting] of two or more members, with the authority to make decisions for or recommendations to a public body on policy or administration.”
In other words, a quorum is required, which means Tennessee was very carefully chosen by the Black Mayor’s Coalition (the vast majority of them Democrats) because it allowed them more legal room to hold closed door meetings. But why not include the press and the public in this discourse?
Perhaps because the event is in itself an admission that crime is rising; a reality which Democrat representatives have tried to deny for the past few years. Another reason may be because the solutions being discussed are not something the voting population would agree with.
In the interview below the Mayor of St. Louis, Tishaura Jones, mentions that gas stations and convenience stores attract a high rate of crime and asks how the business owners can be ‘held accountable’ for this, rather than how they can be protected from it?
“We have a lot of violence around convenience stores and gas stations…So how can we hold those business owners accountable and also bring down crime? Some of the things are already doing, we’re finding other mayors are doing as well.”
In other words, how can these mayors blame businesses for the crime rate instead of taking responsibility as elected representatives?
There are the obvious ironies to mention here, including the fact that many of these mayors supported far-left measures to defund police departments, only to quietly remove those measures a few years later. Then there’s the plethora of statistical tricks used by city politicians to hide real crime data.
This includes greatly reduced prosecution and conviction rates; in many Democrat controlled cities the conviction rate is less than 5 out of every 100 arrests. From 2018 to 2023, conviction rates dropped over 58%, and convictions sharply declined specifically from 2020 onward. From 2011 to 2021 prison populations dropped over 22%, despite the fact that criminal activity increased over the same period.
The less prosecutions, the less convictions, the lower the crime stats. It’s that simple. Democrats have also taken advantage of a change in the FBI criminal reporting policies which was conveniently initiated in 2020. Because of this change, numerous US cities will not be reporting full numbers to the FBI until 2025. This is why the FBI recently reported a “drop” in violent crime nationally – Because they don’t have complete statistics.
Then of course there’s the disproportionate number of crimes committed by minorities in these same cities. Black on black crime rates in places like St. Louis are stunning. Studies from 2022 show that 92% of homicide suspects and 86% of victims in St. Louis and St. Louis County were black. Around 84% of them were repeat offenders. Blacks make up 43% of the population in that region.
Leftist mayors have long suggested that public perception of crime deviates from the reality of crime; yet, here they are holding closed-door meetings to discuss the growing crime problem in their own towns. Perhaps the issue is not public perception mismatching reality, maybe the issue is political spin mismatching reality. The populace deals with these crimes on a daily basis; it’s going to be hard to gaslight people into thinking criminal activity isn’t a problem.
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