Bari Weiss is very, very wrong—and she's helping fuel the backlash against reform

"Real Time with Bill Maher" is not exactly the BBC, but you'd expect a stab at avoiding major falsehoods.

Bari Weiss has had enough. “I’m done!” she proclaimed on last night’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” regarding the pandemic.

Having thus dispatched of Covid-19, Weiss and Maher moved on to discuss an epidemic—of crime! Maher put on his Smug Face™ to list all of the very serious crimes progressive DAs are refusing to prosecute. “Shoplifting. Disorderly conduct. Public transportation fare evasion,” he read, in a tone suggesting the DAs have green-lit cannibalism. “Receiving stolen property …. I mean, it goes on and on.”

Maher then praised San Francisco Mayor London Breed for taking a hard line on “the criminals who are destroying our city” and pledging to be “less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city,” as Breed put it in a statement.

“MHHHMMMM,” Weiss emphatically murmured. She went on to explain that Breed’s position is a “great sign” because she had previously espoused a “soft on crime” approach. OK I don’t think “I’m soft on crime,” has ever been uttered by a politician in the history of the world, but point taken: Breed once positioned herself as a progressive politico on criminal justice and has now done what virtually all politicians do, which is abandon their values in response to the public mood.

That public mood, meanwhile, appears to be: everyone is worried about rising crime. According to an Axios/Ipsos poll from last October, although three quarters of Americans say they feel safe in their communities (only half of the concerned Americans cited crime) a majority not only feel that violent crime is on the rise but that it’s higher than it was 30 years ago (it is not).

What could account for the discrepancy between what Americans see in their communities with their own eyes—and what they’re being told to fear by the media?

Case in point: Let’s go back to our thought leaders. Weiss wastes no time honing in on the records of DAs like Chesa Boudin in San Francisco and Alvin Bragg in Manhattan and Larry Krassner in Philly. She cites conflict between Mayor Eric Adams and Bragg in New York, and points to Chesa Boudin’s recall, as symptoms of DAs gone wild allowing havoc in their respective cities.

“We were walking in a park San Francisco and there was a sign that read, “This is a carjacking zone!” she exclaimed.

So the blame for carjackings can be pinned on Chesa Boudin? That’s exactly what the enterprising reporter Dion Lim tried to do this summer when she revealed that a 16-year-old involved in a violent carjacking had been released. As Radley Balko reported in the Washington Post, the boy was still in custody, but his status wasn’t public because he was a juvenile.

Even as tech giants funded recalls against Boudin, crime in San Francisco fell in 2020. Meanwhile, some districts with tough-on-crime prosecutors saw increases. As we previously reported, neighboring Sacramento’s DA Anne Marie Schubert has pledged to reign in the excesses of Boudin, et al, if she’s elected state attorney general.

Yet, in 2015, the year Schubert was sworn into office, crime jumped from 2,968 to 3,611, a 22% increase, according to FBI data. After that year, crime rates slowly declined, although not to the levels in 2014 and 2013. As in many of parts of the country, there was a sharp increase in 2020.

Not in San Francisco though. Crime has fallen steadily since 2013. And the sharpest drop occurred in 2020, Boudin’s first year in office. According to the San Francisco Police Department, major crimes dropped 23 percent in 2020.

Anyway, when the other panelist, Bronx congressman Ritchie Torres, noted that the rise in shooting deaths might have something to do with the number of guns in America (a number that seems to have increased in the pandemic).

Maher shifted to the alleged wave of retail theft. “This isn’t what this crime is really about, this is people going into Targets and stores like that and just robbing them and no one’s stopping them.”

It’s no mystery why Maher thinks this. “San Francisco Has Become a Shoplifter's Paradise ,” declared the Wall Street Journal last October. Newsweek, Business Insider, Fox News (obvs) and multiple other outlets have suggested that the city is experiencing a tsunami of brazen theft.

Walgreens craftily got in on the trend by claiming they were closing five locations in the city due to retail theft. In fact, it turned out they were likely closing them because of decreased sales due to over-saturation and pandemic-driven shopping changes. The San Francisco Chronicle found that the five locations Walgreens planned to close had not seen a drastic increase in retail theft.

Yet the story went viral, even though rates of retail theft have trended down since the 1990s and dropped in 2020. The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice found shoplifting rates were lower in San Francisco than nearby conservative Kern County, which jails far more of its people per capita.

Yet, even before Maher had even finished lamenting the spike in shoplifting, Weiss jumped in to explain the sad plight of San Francisco’s Walgreens to Torres in a quavering voice. “If the government announces, or the DA in a city announces, that happened somewhere like San Francisco, ‘You can steal hundreds of dollars of stuff at Walgreens and nothing can happen to you … that is why there’s private security in Walgreens and the floss is behind lock and key!”

Boudin did make an announcement about stealing. In September, he pledged to work with police and the mayor’s office to “disrupt, dismantle and deter the networks behind organized retail theft.” In November Boudin levied 128 charges against a woman accused of stealing more than $40,000 from Target. He charged nine people with felonies in a series of shoplifting incidents including smashing Union Square luxury store windows.

Torres tried to talk about gun violence again, but Weiss countered that the shooting deaths in blue cities were the result of police pulling back after calls to defund. Personally I’ve never understood the point of claiming police are letting violence occur because of a collective hissy fit over protests—that’s not a ringing endorsement of the institution.

What no one brought up—maybe because it’s totally over now, as Weiss contends —is the pandemic.

While experts caution to avoid drawing conclusions about crime trends as they are happening, there are many factors that point to the pandemic as the main culprit.

“Covid disrupted every aspect of life in the past two years,” wrote the New York Times’ German Lopez. “Social services and supports that help keep crime down vanished overnight. Schools could no longer keep unruly teens safe and distracted. A broader sense of disorder and chaos could have fueled a so-called moral holiday, in which people disregard laws and norms.”

Everyone went insane in the pandemic. And the people who commit almost all violent crime—e.g. very young men—were sitting at home bored.

“Dense clusters of young men stuck at home with little to do carrying the burden of past trauma, knowing those with whom they hold deep grudges are close by and home too,” wrote John Roman in External Processing. Roman even crunched the numbers to determine why there’s a higher likelihood of a killing with everyone stuck at home.

Suppose that in normal times, these young men were home half the time and out and working some, or in school some, or just out, the other half. If this is also true of their enemies, then the chance that both are home at once is small, maybe 1 in 4. With a 25% chance, you are both around at the same time, the search costs for finding your target are high. Now suppose the pandemic forces you both home three-fourths of the time. Now the chance you are both home about doubles. Suppose during the most intense period of closures, you are home 90% of the time and your enemy is too. Now the chance that they are home when you are home and looking for them has more than tripled. It’s easy to see why there would be more deadly encounters.

Lopez, however, dismisses the pandemic as the primary cause.

A weakness for this theory is timing: The murder spike took off in May and June 2020, months after Covid began to spread in the U.S. Other countries didn’t experience similar spikes during the pandemic.

But that doesn’t rule out the pandemic’s role. There could have been something specific to America’s pandemic response that led to more deadly violence, which could have taken months to emerge.

The delay makes sense, since you don’t lose your mind and start shooting your guns Yosemite Sam style the first day of lockdown. Stressors build up over time. But what about other countries? How come there wasn’t a huge increase of gun violence there? I’m no NYT columnist but I’ll give it a … shot. What does America have a LOT of, that other countries don’t have a LOT of? (guns)*

*critics note that Latin American countries also didn’t see a spike in shootings, but a dig into the research suggests that the cartels, led by a younger generation not as keen to die gruesomely, have toned down the violence, which may balance out the rates of gun deaths.