Who Doesn’t Want to Talk about Crime and Policing?

Wisconsin Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mandela Barnes last week released a list of current and former law enforcement officers who purportedly supported him.

But Barnes’ campaign since scrubbed two of those names from its website after one officer said he hadn’t endorsed Barnes and another reportedly indicated he wasn’t aware his name and occupation were going to be used on an endorsement list.

Meanwhile in Pennsylvania the U.S. Senate campaign of Lt. Gov.

John Fetterman

(D.) will be working overtime to explain his disturbing recent history on issues of crime and punishment.

When political candidates talk about criminal justice reform, they often mean releasing nonviolent offenders who have been imprisoned for relatively minor offenses. Mr. Fetterman has advocated something else entirely. Jessica Chasmar of Fox News reports:

The campaign of Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman is walking back comments he made last year that appeared to call for the release of all second-degree murderers from Pennsylvania’s prisons.

Fetterman, the Pennsylvania lieutenant governor who chairs the state’s Board of Pardons (BOP), commissioned two reports last year released by Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity (PLSE) that recommended the BOP consider merit-based clemency for currently incarcerated second-degree murderers, as well as for the state legislature to reform the law that mandates life sentences without parole for second-degree murder convictions.

Ms. Chasmar reports on Mr. Fetterman’s comments during a March 2021 press conference staged by the activist attorneys:

“I hope that it could lead to a conversation that would free close to 1,200 people of a legacy that never made sense, that encompasses victims’ input, encompasses their conduct and behavior in prison, it takes a look at the resources that are wasted that…,” he said.

At the time, PLSE reported that there were 1,166 people incarcerated in the state serving life sentences without parole for second-degree murder.

Now in 2022, Ms. Chasmar reports Team Fetterman’s effort at a clarification:

The campaign said Fetterman does not support releasing all prisoners serving life without parole for second-degree murder and that he believes there are individuals imprisoned for life without parole who deserve to remain in prison.

In response to a follow-up inquiry, the Fetterman campaign said his 2021 remarks at the PLSE conference “are being taken out of context,” and that it is not clear, based on Fetterman’s phrasing at the time, that he was talking about freeing people from prison.

The context seems straightforward. But even if one wanted to give Mr. Fetterman every benefit of the doubt and assume that he didn’t really mean releasing everyone serving such a sentence but just meant symbolically freeing them “of a legacy,” in 2021 he still seemed to be suggesting that every single person serving such a sentence for a heinous crime had gotten a raw deal.

To believe such a thing, one would have to believe that the justice system itself is entirely unjust and oppressive. In 2020 Mr. Fetterman wrote:

For generations, the issue of police brutality has been just one symptom of a system that rounds up Black and Brown people and throws away the key.

Does he not trust the judgment of juries? This sort of fringe thinking is of a piece with the reckless idea that police forces are a principal cause of violence on American streets.

In 2020 Mr. Fetterman wrote:

Police need to dress for the job they want. If they show up as an occupying force in riot gear, it is far more likely they will get a riot. When police are demilitarized and approach a situation with service to the community, we will get more humane outcomes.

So the riots of 2020 were mostly peaceful and might have been entirely peaceful if the police had simply remembered to dress down? In Pennsylvania and across the country police are not an occupying force but the people officially charged with enforcing the laws enacted by legitimate governments. Anyone tempted to believe that less aggressive law enforcement would result in more humane outcomes has been proven wrong by the bloody evidence in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

Expect the Fetterman campaign to be issuing plenty more clarifications as Pennsylvanians prepare to go to the polls.

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Great (Lowered) Expectations
Brian Reynolds of Reynolds Strategy writes in a note to clients this week:

Another earnings season begins next month and once again it should result in most companies beating lowered expectations based on money flows around this month’s corporate tax payment date. Strong corporate tax payments are an indication that corporate profits are above lowered expectations.

Our analysis of corporate tax payments for this quarter indicates that this earnings season will see a majority of companies beat lowered expectations. We examined corporate tax payments to the U.S. Treasury for the last five September tax seasons. Those tax payments, indicative of profitability, remain far higher than they were pre-pandemic.

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Speaking of Huge Government Revenues
The Reason Foundation’s Aaron Smith and Jordan Campbell recently noted:

Nationwide, inflation-adjusted per-pupil K-12 revenues grew by 25%—or by $3,211 per student—between 2002 and 2020. During this time, per-pupil revenues increased in all but one state (North Carolina). Sixteen states, plus D.C., increased their education funding by 30% or more during this time period…

Well before the pandemic decimated student enrollment numbers, many states were already losing students. The District of Columbia and Michigan both saw over a 24% decline in students between 2002 and 2020. Overall, 22 states and D.C. experienced enrollment declines between 2002 and 2020. All these states, with the exception of Michigan, increased their total inflation-adjusted education spending during that time.

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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”

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(Teresa Vozzo helps compile Best of the Web. Thanks to Chip Dickson.)