Politicians are always looking for issues enabling them to seem concerned. The resulting laws and regulations don’t have to actually accomplish much, but in politics, appearances count for more than results. That’s the case with campus safety.
In today’s Martin Center article, Graham Hillard looks at the Clery Act and its very uneven enforcement, then the hypocrisy of the “progressives” when it comes to keeping campuses safe.
He writes:
Running alongside the Left’s campus-safety pragmatism, however, is an ideological vein that threatens to swamp the whole project of keeping college-goers out of harm’s way. Simply put, Democrats and their allies hold strange and incongruous views about criminals and crime, regularly robbing the Peter of campus safety to pay social-justice Paul. Looked at in toto, recent developments call into serious question progressives’ commitment to crime-free universities. If that commitment isn’t real, it is difficult to see this spring’s Liberty fine as anything other than selective (and political) prosecution.
Hillard points to the “Ban the Box” movement that makes it impossible to find out if prospective students have criminal records. Allowing such investigation would probably keep at least a few bad actors away, but “social justice” says that we must not inquire about past criminality.
He continues:
Of course, it is easy to poke fun at obvious double standards and hypocrisy. The more difficult task is parsing the utter inconsistency of campus progressives where public safety is concerned. In 2016, the Daily Tar Heel published an editorial under the heading “Silence Is Violence,” arguing that the university “system . . . doesn’t care” about sexual assault. Last month, having apparently soured on criminal justice, the same paper ran an article lambasting Chapel Hill’s latest batch of security cameras. Allow me to resolve the tension. Still crackling with #MeToo energy, the Left cares very much about sexual violence in all of its modes and iterations. But petty theft, disorder, vandalism, illegal drug-use? Progressives are usually on the side of the lawless.
Analysis: true.