Pittsburgh is Pennsylvania’s second-largest city. Naturally, being a large, northwestern city, it’s under Democrat control. And also naturally, it responded to George Floyd’s drug death by doing everything it could to hamstring policing. Inevitably, that meant that the police force began to suffer from a staffing crisis. Now, that staffing crisis means that at night unless people are experiencing a real-time, life-threatening emergency, no police will show up. In Pittsburgh, the “broken windows” theory of law enforcement is irrelevant; instead, the windows are breaking.

For those young ’uns who don’t remember the 1970s, that was the first decade that felt the full effects of the leftist contention that policing was inherently racist and classist. With police prevented from doing their jobs, cities fell into decay. This was the heyday of subway train tagging in New York and the irritating windshield guys who’d dirty your window and then extort you through implied violence if you didn’t pay them to clean it.

What helped bring about change was an article entitled “Broken Windows” that James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling introduced in March 1982’s The Atlantic Monthly (when it was still a magazine of ideas and not a Democrat party outlet). The theory was simple: If you don’t police small crimes, such as broken windows, criminals will move on to larger crimes. Or, as Wilson and Kelling explained:

Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one un-repaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)

If you show you care, criminals don’t escalate. It’s intuitively obvious, but it took the partnership of Mayor Rudy Giuliani and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton to put the theory into effect and (at least for a while) return New York to its former glory. I remember being there in 1994 and meeting a gay man who told me, “I’ve always been a Democrat, but Giuliani has been such a wonderful mayor for the city that I’m voting to reelect him.”

In Pittsburgh, though, the city is being forced by leftist policies to tolerate broken windows once again:

BREAKING: Pittsburgh police will no longer respond to certain calls & will instead be redirecting people to a telephone unit.

Those crimes include thefts, harassment, criminal mischief, burglary alarms, etc.

Additionally, there were be only 20 police officers patrolling the… pic.twitter.com/H5dqLud72W

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 10, 2024

The state-of-the-art call center cannot compare to a police officer arriving on the scene and instantly pursuing the 16-year-old wannabe gang member who just tagged a building or broke a window. Very soon, there will be more broken windows…lots more. And inevitably, that will signal to the criminal classes that nothing can stop them.

Of course, the criminal classes already know that 2024 America is a paradise for them. We’re Batman’s Gotham in its darkest days or Superman’s Bizarro World, where crime lords have their boot on the city’s throat.

In New York City, Daniel Perry, a former Marine, is arrested for defending people from a subway maniac, but there’s a revolving door at the DA’s office when it comes to criminals who have been arrested dozens of times. For example, Edward Johnson, a 57-year-old illegal alien in New York City, has been arrested 23 times that we know of (including gun possession charges) and has another 42 arrests under seal. Nevertheless, he was recently still out and about, violently attacking female doctors and nurses.

The same stories repeat again and again in America’s Democrat-run cities. The institutions are hostile to ordinary citizens and bow before the criminals and their leftist enablers. So it’s no surprise, really, that Pittsburgh’s Democrat policies are now creating a situation in which windows will be broken, cars stolen, houses robbed, and citizens assaulted, all without any meaningful police responses.

I end every one of my posts lately the same way: Conservatives need to vote in numbers so overwhelming that every Democrat, from the President of the United States down to the local dog catcher, loses. Otherwise, we’re going to look like South Africa in a few years, for we will have slipped into a violent, dystopian reality.

Image: Broken windows at the Stehli Silk Mill in Manheim Township, PA, by Smallbones. Public domain.