Socialist War on Public Safety Coming to a Town Near You

One thing is for sure about the wave of socialist Democrats being put into office: They are committed to the bit no matter how demented their policies end up in practice.

A prime example of this would be in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where putting ideology over common sense recently claimed another victim.

Department of Public Works employee Xavier Bautista was found dead on July 4; his body was spotted by a pedestrian early in the morning.

“Bautista was found between a parked vehicle and the curb and pronounced dead at the scene,” CBS Boston reported. “His cause of death was determined to be two gunshot wounds.”

Bautista had been shot over an hour earlier. And that’s where the outrage comes in.

Not long ago, a ShotSpotter device that tracks gunshot sounds would have notified police about the shooting. Bautista could have received immediate medical attention and there’s a good chance he might have lived.

But the device wasn’t on.

In fact, ShotSpotter has been abandoned throughout the city.

Community members are understandably outraged and demanding answers.

The answer wasn’t hard to find.

Thanks to the infinite wisdom of the Cambridge City Council, ShotSpotter was shut down after it voted to remove the system in May. The effort was led by the socialist councilor Ayah A. Al-Zubi, who said the technology poses a “privacy and safety” risk for residents.

Leftists don’t like ShotSpotter because they say it perpetuates systemic racism. And they think that since it receives funding from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the tech must be a threat to democracy or something.

Yes, that really is their logic.

Even the reliably liberal Boston Globe threw water on these ideas following Bautista’s shooting.

The Globe noted in an editorial on Thursday that Cambridge city officials need to face up to the fact that Bautista was “the victim of their own opposition to a technology intended to save lives.” It further dismissed the complaint that using this technology in certain neighborhoods leads to racial profiling.

“Microphones don’t discriminate,” the editorial noted.

Well said.

Unfortunately, that kind of common sense escaped the City Council when it voted to abandon ShotSpotter to satiate the mob.

When the City Council debated the issue back in May, the hearing was flooded with mostly young, orange-haired democratic socialists of America members denouncing this “intrusive” and “oppressive” system to detect gunfire and shorten emergency response times.

The coalition of clueless young wokes seen in the following video is exactly the one that’s putting politicians like New York’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani and many others in office.

I’d say they collectively look unflappable in the face of reality, but you’d think the adults in the room would know better.

Police Commissioner Pauline Wells pleaded with the council to see reason and reconsider. She said that she counted “at least 11 times” in which ShotSpotter detected gunfire and no 911 calls had been made.

“That means 11 moments when no one reached for the phone, 11 moments when officers would have no direction, 11 moments when seconds were slipping away when ShotSpotter was the only reason there was help at all,” she said at the hearing.

A majority of the council members didn’t care and voted to abolish it anyway.

And now Cambridge paid the real-world price for socialist lunacy.

It should be noted that ShotSpotter is not some kind of magic system that can eliminate crime. Other policies, like harsher penalties for repeat offenders would do a far better job of that.

This is simply a useful technological innovation that would make it easier for police to do their jobs, especially in high-crime areas, and could save a few lives in the meantime.

“ShotSpotter is not a panacea for gun violence or a racist ploy to surveil minority communities,” Manhattan Institute scholar Robert VerBruggen wrote in October. “It is, instead, a tool for improving gunshot response at the margin, which may be a worthwhile investment for departments that can make the most of it.”

But with socialists, ideology always comes first.

These are the same people who believe that abolishing the police and even prisons will make our society safer, that if only we signed onto their schemes of redistribution, if we abolished restrictions on marriage, if we recognized the 47-plus genders, and, of course, gave them unlimited power over our lives, then the world would be a perfect place without crime, without sadness, and without any need to work around the occasionally nasty side-effects of human nature, which totally doesn’t exist in their minds.

How many times must we be warned not to give real socialism another try?

Unfortunately, this madness will be something we must all suffer if they continue to gain power. Slowly but surely, you can say goodbye to public safety, prosperity, and every part of the American dream as they ruthlessly pursue their dream of utopia.

Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.”

Reprinted with Permission from The Daily Signal – By Jarrett Stepman

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.