UNEXPECTEDLY: Anti-anti-crime policies are ruining American cities.

Let’s get the myths out of the way: COVID-19 wasn’t the main driver behind the recent crime surge. In Gotham, murders were up by nearly 50 percent in 2020 and had risen by an additional 17 percent by the first five months of 2021.Yet as the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas noted in a typically astute column for the New York Post, murder trended down in other global cities, in some cases precipitously: London saw a 16 percent decline in the murder rate during the pandemic year; Italy, 14 percent; France, 2 percent. Japan, meanwhile, hit its lowest murder rate since World War Two in the year of COVID, while even cartel-plagued Mexico witnessed its first decline in six years.

Nor can a better safety net account for the difference. As Gelinas wrote, ‘the United States, with supplemental jobless insurance ranging from $300 to $600 a week for the past 15 months, and with anti-eviction and anti-foreclosure orders in place, acted faster and far more aggressively to curtail individual economic pain.’ Only illegal immigrants saw an income drop uncompensated by government assistance. London, too, has a huge population of jobless illegal migrants, and ‘people just aren’t stabbing each other because they’re desperate for something to eat’.

What about the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees an individual’s right to bear arms? America’s gun culture is Democratic leaders’ culprit of choice when it comes to explaining, and trying to reverse, crime waves. Most recently, President Joe Biden framed the national bloodbath as a Second Amendment problem, and New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo says he wants to create a private right to sue manufacturers for gun violence.

You might believe, as I do, that America’s gun culture is more than a bit nutty, and there is no doubt that the ready availability of semi-military-grade weapons explains the much higher incidence of incel lunatics going on rampages in schools and workplaces in America, compared with other civilized nations. But the fact is that America’s gun culture and massive private armories have been around for a very long time: a relatively constant factor like that can’t explain a wild upswing in a trend. Another explanation is needed.

That explanation is, without a doubt, the anti-anti-crime policies pursued by progressives and dutifully implemented by liberal politicians. Perhaps a large metropolitan area could withstand any one of these ‘reforms’. But no city could have endured their combined force, amplified by the general anti-police mentality that took hold of urban elites in the aftermath of the George Floyd incident in Minneapolis. New York’s case is instructive, because many of its reforms predate the COVID lockdowns. Consider some of these changes, in order of enactment:

QED: How has the Seattle mayor’s ‘call in a social worker’ approach to policing worked out? Just guess…: “Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan: ‘This past weekend serves as a reminder: there are many times and types of 911 calls that require a traditional sworn police officer to respond.’ Took over a year for that ‘reminder’ to take hold.”