Free Republic

Oakland has removed the traffic lights from one intersection and replaced them with 4-way stop signs due to people stealing copper and then tampering with an electrical box. It's a sight that has made drivers do a double take: a stop sign hanging overhead where a traffic light would normally be, located above the intersection of E. 12th Street and 16th Avenue in Oakland. Neighbors said city workers removed the all the traffic lights in the last week and replaced them with four-way stop signs. The installation came after months of people stealing copper wires and tampering with the city...

New York City is losing drugstores as retail theft continues to surge. Gotham has logged 21,578 shoplifting complaints this year through May 12, up 5% from the 20,552 thefts during the same period last year. Manhattan has seen 8,896 incidents of retail theft alone. Crime is so rampant, national chains like Target, CVS and Walgreens are closing locations and tempering expansion plans. Target announced at the end of last year the closure of nine stores across four states, including one in Harlem, due to theft.

A report recently released by US News & World Report has revealed that Washington and Oregon are among the most dangerous states in the nation. The report, which relied on the latest data from the Federal Bureau of Investigations for corrections outcomes and public safety, put Oregon, the Beaver State, in 46th place while its neighbor to the north came in 39th. According to the data, Oregon had an incarceration rate of 295 per 100,000 residents, and a juvenile incarceration rate of 121 per 100,000 juveniles. The violent crime rate sat at 342 per 100,000 residents, slightly lower than the...

Americans can be forgiven for suffering from whiplash regarding law and order. In recent weeks the Biden administration and many news outlets, including USA Today and The Hill, have touted declines in violent crime statistics to argue that America is becoming a safer place. “Right now, with 2023 figures and early 2024, the trends are all pointing down, in a positive direction,” Jeff Asher, whose New Orleans-based AH Datalytics is developing his own “Real-Time Crime Index,” told RealClearInvestigations. Conservative outlets, including City Journal and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, assert that minor declines in headline grabbers like...

Denver is a sanctuary city. Last month Mayor Mike Johnson announced he was cutting $45M from city agency budgets to pay for the influx of over 40,000 illegal aliens into the city. Of the budget cuts, $8.4M is being taken from the Denver Police Department. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been targeting Denver by sending illegal aliens to the sanctuary city. Why not? Sanctuary cities said they would welcome anyone, regardless of legal status. Abbott is giving them what they asked for with the added bonus of spotlighting the burden on Texas and other border states created by Biden's border...

Robberies in New York City are surging, police data show. While most major crimes are down, including shootings and murders, robberies shot up 5.6% so far in 2024 over the same period in 2023 — to 5,522 from 5,228 as of May 5. Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, pointed out that robberies have a low arrest rate — with only about 25% of cases solved because victims typically don’t know their attackers.

Chicago, like so many of our major cities, is out of control. Homelessness, smash-and-grab robberies, carjackings, gangs effectively taking over parts of the city - Chicago is in free fall. On Sunday, another incident in Chicago's meltdown was revealed when the Chicago Police Department canceled the city's Cinco de Mayo parade "out of an abundance of caution," due to gang violence and large-scale fighting in the area of the parade.Families in Democrat-run Chicago hoping to enjoy a Cinco de Mayo parade will have to wait until next year – after the city canceled the festivities due to "gang violence."The Chicago...

Move over California and New York, a new state is in contention for the 'most dysfunctional' in America. Illinois is grappling with a string of issues which have triggered a rise in residents departing the state. The state has struggled to add jobs and its public pension debt has ballooned to nearly $150 billion. Meanwhile, its population has declined, hurting tax income.

Americans are worried about crime on their streets, but President Biden and the mainstream press corps don’t think that they should be. ABC News claims that “violent crime is dramatically falling.” NBC News asserts that “the drop in crime does not appear to be well understood by large majorities of Americans.” And in his State of the Union address, Biden bragged about a purported drop in crime that was allegedly a result of his efforts. While the administration and its allies are trying to convince Americans that the crime spike that they think they’ve seen in recent years has been...

The writers of our Constitution placed their faith not in specific guarantees of rights—those came later—but in a system of checks on government power. Foremost is the separation of powers among the three branches of the federal government, as well as between the federal government and the states. For this system to work as designed, people in each branch of the federal government and in the state governments must do their jobs and stay in their respective lanes. But what happens when district attorneys—members of their states’ executive branches—refuse to execute the laws of the land? We are witnessing the...

This is a different kind of cancel culture. Even President Ronald Reagan’s failed assassin-turned-folk singer is too afraid to step foot in the Big Apple — calling it a “cesspool of crime” after canceling an upcoming gig. “I’m afraid of New York City and I just don’t want to go there right now,” John Hinckley Jr. — who tried to kill Reagan in 1981 — told The Post days after pulling the plug on a June show scheduled on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Hinckley announced the performance on X last week but pulled out because “he said New York is...

The Seattle Police Department released video of a purse theft and assault and the arrest of a 13-year-old male suspect on Wednesday. The incident happened April 6 in the Westwood Village shopping center in West Seattle. The video shows someone grabbing a woman’s purse inside the Rite Aid pharmacy entrance and running outside. The woman ran after the suspect and confronted him. You can see him dropping her purse, spilling its contents onto the ground. The woman says at that point, the suspect grabbed her shirt and threw her to the ground. She says as she got back up and...

Trump was right- again. Only 3 years ago our country was MAGA. America was great again. The economy, prosperity, inflation, interest rates, jobs, incomes, the border, crime, peace around the world. Three short years later we’ve gone from MAGA to Gaza. Trump was right about a lot of things. Here are just a few. Trump predicted if the border was open and millions came into our country illegally, we’d be turned into a third world craphole. It happened exactly as he predicted. Look around. Illegal aliens are murdering Americans from coast to coast. Illegals are fighting with pipes and belts...

Hello to the city, goodbye to your luggage. That was Senatorial candidate Adam Schiff’s rude introduction to San Francisco’s vexing reputation for car burglaries Thursday when thieves swiped the bags from his car while it sat in a downtown parking garage. The heist meant the Democratic congressman got stuck at a fancy dinner party in his shirt sleeves and a hiking vest while everyone else sat in suits. Not quite the look the man from Burbank was aiming for as he rose to thank powerhouse attorney Joe Cotchett for his support in his bid to replace the late Dianne Feinstein...

An illegal open-air 'flea market' operating in Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's district has popped back up days days after it was raided by police officers. Many of those operating on the sidewalks of Queens are believed to be illegal migrants hawking counterfeit goods and other wares. The sellers have been blocking sidewalks and causing general quality of life issues for the residents of Jackson Heights, Corona, and Elmhurst.

When I was 12 years old, we moved to the Navy base on Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. We moved in the summer and by the time school started I’d made friends and was feeling pretty comfortable. One day during the first week of class, I was sitting in the back of Mr. Scroch’s Social Studies classroom before he arrived. While we waited, some friends and I were messing around, throwing erasers at one another and calling each other names. Then we noticed a man sitting in the front row. We immediately settled down, but I remember ducking my head and yelling...

NYC Now has a $4.4 billion shoplifting economy. Theft is so rampant, retailers are forced to make tough choices... Cash takes a serious look at stores starting to flee the big apple. The fall of a once great city. And one shining mall in the city is now completely vacant due in most part to shoplifting and violent crime.

Plenty of people think Joe Biden's open borders is mainly about millions of illegals rolling into the U.S., while the billions rolling into Mexico's notorious crime cartels as a result is Mexico's problem, not ours. But that's not quite what's going on. Mexico's cartels have grown so big and so powerful from migrant and drug smuggling that they not only threaten Mexico, they are now taking their internecine warfare on the road into the U.S., which now faces a Tijuana-like future. If you recall the sight of all those Tijuana cars burning as that city shut down from cartel warfare,...

A paper at the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), founded by researcher John Lott, shows how faith in the police, arrest rates, and crime reporting are all interrelated. The paper is titled " The Collapse in Law Enforcement: As Arrest Rates Plummet, People Have Been Less Willing to Report Crime", published on April 5, 2024. As faith in the police collapses, reporting of crime drops, and so do arrest rates and clearance rates for both violent crimes and property crimes. This has the classic look of a positive feedback loop. The consequences are far from positive. It is not a...

A paper at the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), founded by researcher John Lott, shows how faith in the police, arrest rates, and crime reporting are all interrelated. The paper is titled ” The Collapse in Law Enforcement: As Arrest Rates Plummet, People Have Been Less Willing to Report Crime,” published on April 5, 2024. As faith in the police collapses, reporting of crime drops, and so do arrest rates and clearance rates for both violent crimes and property crimes. This has the classic look of a positive feedback loop. The consequences are far from positive. It is not a...