ICYMI | Grassley Leads Press Conference on Rising Crime in America
“We must back the blue and take crime more seriously than this administration is doing. The Biden administration can no longer ignore what Iowans and Americans are living through every day.”
WASHINGTON – Yesterday, Senate Judiciary
Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) led several of his Republican
colleagues in a press conference to shine a light on rising crime rates across
the country. Noting that “violent crime is very much on the rise,” Grassley
pointed to soaring homicide rates and carjackings doubling or tripling in several cities.
“Violence is up in the blue cities due to
de-policing, progressive prosecutors and failed bail reforms. Can you imagine
prosecutors saying we aren’t going to prosecute this crime or that crime? Now,
we all know there has to be prosecutorial discretion, but you don’t tell people
what crimes you aren’t going to punish,” Grassley
said.
Grassley also expressed frustration that
Democrats are pushing back against his effort to schedule fentanyl drugs, after a new report released yesterday found that the U.S. reached a record 100,000
overdose deaths in 2021 – largely driven by fentanyl drugs. Grassley is also leading a bipartisan bill to implement penalties for producing counterfeit
pills that contain deadly fentanyl and fentanyl analogues.
Click here to
watch Grassley’s remarks
Read Grassley’s full remarks below:
Thanks to all of you for coming on a very important issue of crime in
America and rising of that crime in America. It’s something I hear in my town
meetings in Iowa, and I’m sure people in larger cities hear it even more than
we do in our part of the country.
Violent crime is very much on the rise. Homicide is up 30 percent.
Carjackings doubled and tripled in some cities. And those are only a couple
statistics – of many different statistics we get.
Violence is up in the blue cities due to de-policing, progressive
prosecutors and failed bail reforms. Can you imagine prosecutors saying we
aren’t going to prosecute this crime or that crime? Now, we all know there has
to be prosecutorial discretion, but you don’t tell people what crimes you
aren’t going to punish… you get a big rise in those crimes in the big cities in
America.
Now, with this rise in crime in larger cities, Democrats blame that
rise on violence also in red states with higher crime rates. But the data show
that blue cities in these states cause the crime. So, set aside the blue
cities, and red states are much, much safer.
Law enforcement is under attack at an alarming rate. More law
enforcement officers were killed in 2021 than any year since the disaster of
9/11. Iowa in 2021 had nine law enforcement officers dying.
The Biden crime plan is, as you know, gun control. That will not
reduce crime.
We also have this fentanyl problem. Democrats are fighting the
scheduling of fentanyl. And why? I don’t know because fentanyl kills so many
people. Probably 70,000 of the 104,000 that die because of drug overdose.
We must back the blue and take crime more seriously than this
administration is doing. The Biden administration can no longer ignore what
Iowans and Americans are living through every day.
Every time we see a policeman we ought to thank them. I am not for
defunding police.
I think it would also help, tying this in with some of the
demonstrations that we’ve seen lately about the Supreme Court, the president
should back the institutions of the courts. He doesn’t do that by being quiet
on recent attempts by crowds to intimidate our justices on the Roe case. It
would help if the president would speak up, because respect for the Supreme
Court has something to do with respect for law, and I think we have this rising
crime because there’s been a disregard of the respect for law.
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