’Frisco beat: The Wonders of Crime-Fighting

“Today, we have an exciting new report from Obvious Land,” scoffs Robby Soave at The Hill.

“San Francisco’s public transportation system has raised revenue, dramatically improved customer safety, and is cleaner and more orderly than ever, and they accomplished it all with one neat trick”: They racked down on crime.

Turns out “when you install new gates that it make impossible for fare-evaders” to “jump the gate, you magically improve everything about the subway.”

This finding “was bitterly opposed by so-called criminal justice reformers.” Yet “San Francisco has not solved its homelessness problem or its mental illness problem. It hasn’t addressed the so-called root causes of crime. It has simply installed gates, or walls, that the criminals can’t jump over.”

“Maybe there’s a lesson in that.” 

City desk: Sealed Rap Sheets’ Deadly Toll

“A machete-wielding maniac,” shot and killed by police after attacking “three straphangers” at Grand Central Station,” had a rap sheet with “more than a dozen arrests,” yet was free to roam, sighs City Journal’s Rafael A. Mangual.

“Why does the city keep releasing such obvious hard cases?” One answer: “The NYPD is subject to a court order prohibiting the use and disclosure of sealed arrest histories.”

“Sealing prior arrests has grown more common” since the passage “of the 2023 Clean Slate Act.”

Under the law, any “disposition favorable to the defendant,” including “not guilty” and “a dismissal,” is sealed.

The state should fix its “clean slate and other record-related rules” to permit “police, prosecutors, and judges to access rap sheets while still keeping them hidden from civilian employers.”

Conservative: Charlottesville Smear’s Twist

For years, Democrats and their media allies “spread the damnable Charlottesville Hoax” — “that President Trump praised bigots who rioted in 2017 in the Virginia town,” huffs Steve Cortes at RealClearPolitics.

He didn’t. But now we learn “the entire hoax of Trump and Charlottesville” was “built upon another grand lie” — that “the ‘Unite the Right’ rally was organized and financed by the highly partisan, left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center.”

In an 11-count indictment, the DOJ charged the group with the “criminal defrauding of donors and ‘manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.’”

As a result, “America endured years of propaganda that convinced a large segment of the population” Trump “supported violent hate” — “an insidious lie” that did “grave damage to the cohesion of our society.”

Economist: A More ‘Credible’ Fed

The hearing “to vet Kevin Warsh as the next Fed chairman generated an unusual quantity of heat and light,” notes The Wall Street Journal’s Joseph Sternberg, “particularly surrounding questions of the Fed’s institutional independence.”

But Warsh’s “public career ought to instill confidence that he can think for himself.”

Still, “the underlying question here isn’t whether Fed decision-making should be political. It already is.”

Warsh has said “he’d welcome more open disagreement” in an institution whose “thrust toward near-unanimity instead has become discrediting.” 

Encouraging officials “to vote their minds” is an “essential element” of any plan “to reassure voters that the Fed is acting deliberately and humbly.”

Warsh’s “efforts to bolster the Fed’s credibility will safeguard its independence as well.”

Conservative: Piker’s Invitation to Chaos

The New York Times’ “rambling group chat” with Hasan Piker showed “disdain toward the fundamental rules that keep our society together,” observes National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke.

Piker “defended the murder” of a health-insurance executive and spoke favorably of stealing cars and shoplifting from “big corporations” on the grounds that “social” crimes deserve punishment.

But this is just “solipsistic special pleading.” Hasan assumes “that the stability he enjoys every day is an intrinsic feature of the natural world,” but without the observance of the rule of law “our society would become chaotic within a matter of weeks.”

It is a key insight of conservatism that “civilizations are fragile and that it takes constant effort to sustain them.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board