Barack Obama’s Real Legacy

by Cam Edwards,

When and if honest histories about the Obama administration are written, there will be plenty of glaring failures of leadership to document. Operation Fast and Furious, Operation Choke Point, the VA and Social Security gun grabs and more come to mind. But perhaps the biggest failure of Obama’s presidency can be seen in the homicide statistics in cities like Baltimore, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Richmond and more. For decades now we’ve seen declining crime rates across the nation, but starting in 2015 we saw those declines come to an end. While we don’t have the official FBI statistics for 2016 yet, the preliminary indication from large cities across the country is that the crime spike in 2015 wasn’t a one year blip. It’s not just that this happened under Barack Obama’s watch. It happened in large part because of Obama’s policies.

Obama had time for a beer summit with a Cambridge, Mass., cop and a Harvard professor, but he didn’t have any time to talk to the young men killing others in cold blood on the streets of Chicago. His attorney general, Eric Holder, wanted to “brainwash” (his words, not mine) people to support gun control, all while the U.S. attorneys under his supervision prosecuted fewer and fewer federal weapons cases. Programs like Project Exile in Richmond, Va., helped drive down the homicide rate in the 1990s, and the nationwide version, Project Safe Neighborhoods, helped put hundreds of violent criminals behind bars for a decade or more. But Holder gave federal prosecutors more discretion to pass on cases, which meant fewer and fewer violent criminals were going to federal prison. Holder’s DOJ also accepted outrageous plea bargains for illegally selling firearms, including a year’s probation for 24-year-old Dontray Mills of Milwaukee. He pleaded guilty to buying 55 firearms with a fake ID and selling them illegally on the streets of Milwaukee in 2013 and 2014. Coincidentally or not, homicides have been on the rise in Milwaukee, and police have yet to recover all of the firearms Mills sold on the black market. Meanwhile, Mills is finished with probation and is free to pursue his rap music and acting career.

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