They say that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. That could be one way to describe Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.), a one-time House progressive who in 2020 and 2021 voted to support the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill that would have made it significantly easier to hold federal, state, and local law enforcement officers criminally and civilly liable for alleged misconduct. (The bill, strongly opposed by Republicans, passed the Democrat-controlled House but died in the Senate.)
Then, on the morning of Feb. 9, Craig was assaulted in the elevator of her Capitol Hill apartment building: punched in the chin and grabbed by the neck. She escaped by flinging hot coffee at her assailant.
On both occasions, he was promptly released under a 1990s D.C. law that largely did away with cash bail on the grounds that it discriminated against poor people. Hamlin failed to keep several scheduled court dates and roamed free until Nov. 21, 2022, when he was arrested on four counts of assaulting a police officer, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Thanks to a plea bargain that dropped most of the charges, however, Hamlin spent only a little more than a month behind bars for all those alleged crimes.
Furthermore, the U.S. Attorney’s Office pointed out, Hamlin had 12 previous convictions dating back to 2014, including multiple instances of assault, robbery, larceny, unlawful entry, disorderly conduct, and attempted possession of drugs. He was on supervised release in the state of Maryland for one of those convictions when he allegedly attacked Craig—but had failed to keep a scheduled appointment with a probation officer, generating one of the 25 bench warrants for nonappearance in court that he had accumulated when police picked him up on Feb. 9. He’s finally in jail pending trial on the Craig charges, after the U.S. Attorney’s Office filed papers arguing that he was a flight risk.
The new sentencing structure was the brainchild of the district’s notoriously liberal city council, which had enacted a “defund the police” budget reduction for law enforcement in 2020. The district’s otherwise proudly progressive mayor, Muriel Bowser, had vetoed the rewrite, saying that it “sends the wrong message to criminals,” but the city council overrode her veto in January. The House, now Republican-controlled, voted 250–173 to reject the new code as part of Congress’s oversight of district affairs.
Some 31 Democrats voted with the Republican majority, and one of those 31 was Craig. On Feb. 14, she delivered a blistering attack on the District of Columbia’s justice system.
The Hamlin fiasco represents a massive fail, not just in the District of Columbia but in every liberal-dominated city, where such notions as “defund the police” and “decarceration” took hold as policy in at least 20 Democrat-controlled cities across America that slashed police-department budgets and relaxed arrest and conviction standards after the death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody on May 25, 2020.
In St. Louis, where residents voted 82 percent Democratic in the last presidential election, 17-year-old Janae Edmondson, in town to play in a volleyball tournament, was crushed and mangled on Feb. 18 when a speeding car blew through a yield sign and crashed into another vehicle while she and her parents were crossing the street. She had to have both legs amputated.
The suspect, 21-year-old Daniel Riley, was supposed to be under house arrest for an alleged robbery that took place nearly three years ago, in August 2020, but has yet to go to trial under a slow-prosecution policy initiated by St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner, who had taken office in 2017 on a promise to deemphasize incarceration in criminal cases.
These are just some of the calamitous consequences of the recent misguided efforts by America’s liberal cities and citizens to make crime go away by weakening the criminal justice system. Craig saw the light. We hope that other progressives will follow.
