Addressing the Rise in Violent Crime: Nino Marchese on The Lars Larson Show
We want the people, the dangerous criminals who are committing violent crime, found and tried accordingly with due process, but ultimately brought to justice.
Nino Marchese, ALEC Civil Justice and Criminal Justice Task Force Director, was on The Lars Larson Show discussing a community-centered approach to policing that is surgical in striking against violence and efforts to strengthen law enforcement and community relations.
We’ve seen a significant increase in violent crime starting during the pandemic back in 2020. And calls to defund the police are obviously not the solution. That’s why ALEC teamed up with a coalition effort designed to provide local and state-level solutions that address violent crime. The four principles of our coalition – known as the Public Safety Solutions for American Coalition – are to properly fund police, make sure law enforcement is focusing time and resources on solving serious violent crimes, more focus on evidence-based practices that are proven to reduce violent crime, and an expert or smarter crime policy.
Poor policy guidance and prosecutors’ offices are being hamstrung by incentives and especially tight budgets. We saw the murder rate shoot up 34% between 2019 and 2022 nationally. So there has been pressure put on political leaders and law enforcement to get the results. But the deeper issue is that we’re not utilizing our law enforcement in the best ways that we can.
Not that they’re targeting the wrong things necessarily, but we need to support them in ways that better fund them so they can focus their efforts more so on violent crime. We point to cities like Dallas and Boston. Dallas recently enacted a violence reduction plan, which focuses law enforcement on certain zones within a city that are known to be hotspots of criminal activity.