I am a prosecutor. I used to be a criminal defense attorney. Crime comes from a complicated collection of sources and circumstances. Efforts to reduce crime, therefore, require an evaluation of the complications and circumstances in a given area. The causes of crime are geographically, economically, and culturally bound, and solutions probably should vary dramatically from area to area.

I know some people may not agree, but an oft-overlooked component of crime and law enforcement is culture. American crime, at least in part, is what it is today from our country's own defiant and ignorant understanding of what freedom is. "You can't tell me what to do with a gun." "You can't tell me to get out of my own car." Combine it with an unhealthy dose of American exceptionalism and social circumstances that contribute to crime and we get stupid like sovereign citizens, election denialism, and hilarious black-or-white efforts to villify law enforcement. Our country breeds criminals and idiocy in the classroom almost as much as bad parenting because we're told over and over that this is the best and most free place in the world and children in africa are starving. It's in our collective psychology. So every social pain is both a source of cognitive dissonance and King George III back from the dead to tax our freedoms. This is evident to me in the way the law in other countries is both written and enforced. Japan's violence is a far cry from ours. Canada isn't some paragon of legislation, yet their crime rates are very low. Interestingly enough, Canada's indigenous people make up a disproportionately HUGE amount of their incarcerated, but no one cares. But American cops were just born bad and are taught only to shoot the black people. As if law enforcement doesn't come out of the exact same pool of people who become office workers who screw around when they probably should be working, teachers who diddle their students, and negligent engineers who cheated their way through school. School shootings in America exist because they're a cultural touchstone for malignant attention and perverse notoriety, yet the issue is reduced to being either mental illness or guns. The fact that nobody can touch our guns is a symptom of the death caused, not the source of the issue.

Prosecutor's are little more than a reflection of the cultural expectations and demands of a given area. Articles like this are therefore both laughably myopic in their conclusions and a little dangerous in the way they perpetuate this tug of war we seem to be in. That said, I'm glad there are efforts from new prosecutors to reduce both disparity in treatment of people and legitimate efforts to eliminate waste and unneeded suffering in reducing crime. But the solution isn't a decision not to prosecute ABORTION, for which there are probably like 10 cases a year for. We'll never come up with consistent cause and effect relationships with this kind of whack a mole policy making. America needs to start thinking differently, starting with an admission that where there are people there will be criminals and understanding those criminals is more important than any other effort to reduce injustice for anyone.