A  former federal prosecutor blamed the woke policies of liberal district attorneys for the dramatic spike in violent crime rates soaring in Democrat-run cities around the nation.
Charles Stimson, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs in the George W. Bush administration from 2005 to 2007, said Democrats are masking the ugly truth by blaming the violence on guns. 
'Guns don't commit crimes, neither do knives and hammers, people do,' Stimson told Fox News. 'It's a red herring to focus on guns rather than the harder issue of how to enforce the law fairly and hold criminals accountable.' 
Violent crime is soaring in blue-state cities from coast to coast, with at least 10 reporting historic homicide rates last year, according to a study of the data.
Republican critics have attributed the skyrocketing numbers to bail reform policies, dismissal of 'low-level' crimes and the defund the police movement championed by Democrats.  
In Los Angeles, where Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon's is in charge, murders have increased 53 percent since 2019. In Chicago, where prosecutions are overseen by Cook County District Attorney Kim Foxx, slayings are up 70 percent since 2019. 
Philadelphia, home of Democrat District Attorney Larry Krasner, recorded its bloodiest year on record in 2021, when 562 people were slain.












Philadelphia recorded its deadliest year for homicides on record last year. Police are pictured investigating a mass shooting that injured at least eight people on February 17, 2021

Murders in New York City inched up by two percent in 2021 from the previous year, but the overall crime has shot up 42% percent in the first six weeks of 2022, compared to the same time last year. 
A lot of the blame has been laid at the feet of recently elected Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who vowed to stop prosecuting most quality-of-life crimes  within days of taking office in January.
Since then, 15 of the 16 police precincts in Manhattan have seen a spike in crime, with only the precinct covering unpopulated Central Park showing no change. 
The non-partisan  released a study last month that confirmed homicide rates to be climbing throughout major US cities.  
It found through a sampling of 22 cities that the number of slayings last year was five percent higher than 2020 and 44 percent greater than in 2019. 
Stimson, who's now a senior legal fellow at conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation, said the fault lies with soft-on-crime leaders. 
'It is not true that crime is rising in every big city — it's true that it's rising in cities that have elected rogue prosecutors,' Stimson said.
He noted that San Diego - where the top prosecutor is moderate Democrat Summer Stephan - reported just 48 homicides last year despite having a similarly-sized population as Philly.
However, in San Francisco homicides are also up, rising from 48 in 2020 to 56 last year. The city, where prosecutorial approaches are led by DA Chesa Boudin, recorded 41 slayings in 2019.
Boudin's notoriously progressive laws, which are seen as lax on crime, have been blamed for the rampant crime in San Francisco, where looters have ransacked stores and broken into parked cars. 











Longtime LA prosecutor blasts woke DA George Gascon for...
Nearly every single police precinct in New York City has seen spikes in crime so far this year - including five in which the rate has doubled, new data from the NYPD shows






Chicago broke a 27-year record for homicides last year. Detectives are pictured investigating the fatal shooting of two AFT agents and one police officer on July 7, 2021










Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon (left) and Philadelphia District Larry Krasner are among the criminal reform proponents who've received backing from George Soros










Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and Cook County DA Kim Foxx have seen huge spike in crime under their watch

He has also donated to PACs that support Gasc_n, who is being widely condemned for not cracking down on shoplifters and violent criminals, and Philly's Krasner.  
Soros donated $1.7million to Krasner's campaign, according to The New York Post. 
Stimson wasn't the first prosecutor to blame woke district attorney for the crime surge.
Last month, a longtime Los Angeles prosecutor slammed the county's liberal politicians and district attorney for the rising homicide rates in LA following the murders of a 24-year-old woman and a 70-year-old nurse this week. 
Jon Hatami, a child abuse prosecutor who led the infamous Gabriel Fernandez case in 2014, warned cities across America to reject liberal district attorneys.
He has blamed the soft-on-crime policies of Gascon for soaring violent crime and homicide rate in LA, including the recent murders of Brianna Kupfer, 24, and Sandra Shells, 70. 










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Brianna Kupfer, 24, (left) was stabbed to death in a random attack last Thursday while she was working alone in a luxury furniture store in Los Angeles. the attack occurred hours after Sandra Shells, 70, was fatally attacked at a bus stop 

Hatami and other critics said Gascon has failed to stop rising homicide rates in LA, and said his policies allowed career criminal Shawn Smith, 31, to be out on a $1,000 bond when he allegedly stabbed Kupfer, a UCLA grad student, to death inside the Croft House luxury store last Thursday. 
'Nobody should have to be around a district attorney who fails to fight for victims and fails to fight for the family members of victims,' Hatami told . 
'Nobody should have a district attorney who refuses to file charges against murderers and rapists and child abusers to the fullest extent of the law. That person does not deserve to be the D.A.' 
Others are reluctant to blame the crime wave on Democratic prosecutors.
Jeffrey Butts, director of John Jay College of Criminal Justice's Research and Evaluation Center, said a lack of gun control is largely to blame.
'The argument about woke prosecutors is entirely ideological and devoid of evidence,' he told Fox News. 'There's no correlation between the quality and tone of prosecution and the violent crime surge we've seen in the last two years all over the country.'
But Stimson contended that if cities continue heading toward reformative justice, they're likely to become states of bedlam.
'They're going to be hellholes until people, the people most impacted by these crimes, the Black and the Brown people, realize this,' he said. 'These policies are resulting in more deaths and more violence and they've had enough.'






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[url=]Homicides Continued to Increase in Major U.S. Cities in 2021, but at Slower Pace - Council on Criminal Justice