Crime
Soros-Backed DA Poised To Lose To Challenger In Ultra-Liberal County
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Portland District Attorney Mike Schmidt is likely to be replaced by prosecutor Nathan Vasquez after only serving one term.
Schmidt, the Soros-linked incumbent, won in 2020 in a landslide in which he received over 75% of the vote in heavily-Democratic Portland. Election results show Vasquez leading Schmidt with 56% of the in the nonpartisan primary as of this writing.
As of April 2024, Multnomah County is nearly 50% blue, with 282,152 of 568,681 voters registered Democrat according to the Oregon Secretary of State. Only 56,653, roughly 10% were registered Republicans.
The incumbent received a generous cash influx of $213,000 from Soros linked donors in April 2024. Despite this, Schmidt and many other progressive and Soros backed DAs are on a losing streak.
Former Portland District Attorney Mike Schmidt linked to Soros lost
How unpopular was Mike Schmidt?
Portland just voted for a long-time Republican (now registered Independent), gun-owner to represent them as District Attorney.
Wild times in PDX. https://t.co/cptlbZTu1E
— Michael Pruser (@MichaelPruser) May 22, 2024
Portland faced increasing insecurity and surges of violent crime in recent years, prompting many to flee the county. Portland homicide rates peaked in 2021 with 92 murders and again the following year with a record of 101 murders, according to OregonLiveData. Violent crime rose 17% in Portland following Schmidt’s election, according to a report from the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission.
In 2020, Oregon decriminalized hard drugs via referendum Measure 110, but was promptly re-criminalized by Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek after Oregon declared a state of emergency citing a dramatic increase in overdose cases. Vasquez plans to prioritize enforcement of drug trafficking and open air drug use, according to his campaign website.
Portland @DAMikeSchmidt is asking voters to reelect him on May 21. Soros is pouring big bucks into the campaign to gaslight voters about the record killings, riots & drug ODs under Schmidt's leadership. Read my piece about the man who destroyed Portland: https://t.co/usCZJXfNXx pic.twitter.com/bTsz0YLFY1
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) May 17, 2024
Following Schmidt’s 2020 election, Portland became a hotspot for riots following the police killing of George Floyd. Schmidt later announced that they would not be prosecuting low- level riot related crimes. BLM rioters and violent Antifa protestors led destructive demonstrations for over 120 days, billing the Portland Police Department over $12 million by the end of the year.
Schmidt also accepted a $30,000 campaign donation in February from the Drug Policy Alliance, a group that supported hard drug decriminalization through referendum Measure 110.
“Experience matters,” Vasquez said on his campaign website. “Until you’ve held the hand of a child who is about to face her abuser, or a mother who must listen to the details of her son’s murder, or helped someone access rehab for the first time, only then can you know what it takes to rebuild our public safety system.”
Both Vasquez and Schmidt’s campaign did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Crime
Trudeau’s pro-transgender regime is a get-out-of-jail-free card for Canada’s most violent criminals
From LifeSiteNews
Canada’s most dangerous criminals are being sent to women’s prisons simply by identifying as such. This can only happen because the country is run by people like Justin Trudeau, who believes gender ideology with every fibre of his being.
You’ve probably heard plenty from Justin Trudeau and his progressive clones about conservative premiers “attacking” and “targeting” the so-called “LGBT community” for legislation protecting children from sex change surgeries. But you won’t hear a word about the victims of LGBT ideology – and you won’t hear a thing about the growing list of insanities inflicted on Canada by the policies they have passed and supported.
Consider the case of Adam Laboucan, who as a teenager brutally raped a 3-month-old infant and allegedly drowned a toddler – he was convicted only of the violent pedophilic assault, because he was less than 12 years old when he drowned the 3-year-old boy, and under Canadian law you must be at least 12 to be prosecuted.
Laboucan’s case – which LifeSiteNews reported on last year – was so disturbing that he became Canada’s “youngest designated dangerous offender.”
Now, according to The Canadian Press, Laboucan is “seeking escorted leave from prison to attend Indigenous cultural ceremonies in Vancouver.” You see, Adam Laboucan has changed his name. He is now known as Tara Desousa, and the CP obediently refers to him by his preferred pronouns, leading to ludicrous sentences such as this one:
Desousa, then named Adam Laboucan, was 15 years old in 1997 when she sexually assaulted an infant she was babysitting in Quesnel, B.C. The baby required surgery to repair the injuries.
Laboucan, of course, was not a woman when he attacked the infant and drowned the child. He is not a woman now, despite having obtained sex change surgeries since then (he is 43). He is considered so dangerous that B.C. Supreme Court Judge Victor Curtis imposed an indefinite sentence on him in 1999 because there was, in the view of the court, no foreseeable “time span in which Adam Laboucan may be cured.” The B.C. Court of Appeal affirmed the dangerous offender designation in 2002.
They did so for good reason. Expert psychiatrists stated that Laboucan exhibited everything from “transsexual to pedophilic tendencies.” He was given to self-mutilation and even self-cannibalism. He was promiscuous and volatile, threatening to kill a female guard and behaving so erratically that a 2010 parole review again affirmed his dangerous offender designation due to his problems with “gender identity, impulsive behavior, violence and sexual deviance.” But in 2018, he began to identify as a woman. As LifeSiteNews reported shortly thereafter:
In a 2021 brief to members of the House of Commons, incarcerated women’s rights advocate Heather Mason told a House Committee that numerous women prisoners had been subject to sexual harassment by males who call themselves females who are living in female prisons. Mason made special mention of Laboucan (Desousa) stating: “One of these women reported that while in the mother-child program, two transgender individuals with convictions for pedophilia, Madilyn Harks and Tara Desousa, would loiter near her and her child, making sexist and inappropriate antagonizing comments.” The person who calls himself Madilyn but was named Matthew has been labelled a serial pedophile with an “all-encompassing preoccupation in sexually abusing young girls.”
Note well: the reason one of Canada’s most dangerous criminals, a man with violent pedophilic impulses and a history of profound mental disturbance, can get sent to a women’s prison is because our country is run by people like Trudeau, who believes gender ideology with every fibre of his being.
Now, Laboucan – wearing his new female identity like a skin suit – has applied in Federal Court in Vancouver to attend a “healing centre for women” run by the Circles of Eagles Lodge Society, an Indigenous organization.
Laboucan’s most recent attempt at parole – in June 2024– was denied, with the Parole Board of Canada stating that that the victim of Laboucan’s assault and the family “have suffered pain, anxiety and anguish and long-term emotional impacts resulting from your offending. Each time you come up for parole, they are haunted by your offending and the damage you inflicted on their defenceless son/grandson.”
Of course, the government now expects you to believe that these crimes were committed by a woman – and the board did say that “escorted temporary absences” were “the next logical step in reintegration and gradual release,” despite the fact that he is “an undue risk to society.”
Laboucan’s Vancouver-based lawyer, Caroline North, declined to comment on the Federal Court application when asked by the Canadian Press.
Crime
Despite recent bail reform flip-flops, Canada is still more dangerous than we’d prefer
Our Criminal Justice System Is Changing
58 percent of individuals sentenced to community supervision had at least one prior conviction for a violent offence. 68 percent of those given custodial sentences were similarly repeat offenders. In fact, 59 percent of offenders serving custodial sentences had previously been convicted at least 10 times.
Back in 2019, the federal Liberals passed Bill C-75, “An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and other Acts”. Among other things, the law established a Principle of Restraint that required courts to minimize unnecessary pre-trial detention. This has been characterized as a form of “catch and release” that sacrifices public safety in general, and victims’ rights in particular on the altar of social justice.
I’m no lawyer, but I can’t see how the legislation’s actual language supports that interpretation. In fact, as we can see from the government’s official overview of the law, courts must still give serious consideration to public safety:
The amendments…legislate a “principle of restraint” for police and courts to ensure that release at the earliest opportunity is favoured over detention, that bail conditions are reasonable, relevant to the offence and necessary to ensure public safety, and that sureties are imposed only when less onerous forms of release are inadequate.
So unlike in some U.S. jurisdictions, Canadian courts are still able use their discretion to restrict an accused’s freedom. That’s not to say everyone’s always happy with how Canadian judges choose to use such discretion, but judicial outcomes appear to lie in their hands, rather than with legislation.
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Arguably, C-75 did come with a “soft-on-crime” tone (in particular as the law relates to certain minority communities). But even that was mostly reversed by 2023’s Bill C-48, which introduced reverse onus for repeat offenders and required judges to explicitly consider the safety of the community (whatever that means).
Nevertheless, the system is clearly far from perfect. Besides the occasional high-profile news reports about offenders committing new crimes while awaiting trials for previous offences, the population-level data suggests that our streets are not nearly as safe as they should be.
As far as I can tell, Statistics Canada doesn’t publish numbers on repeat offences committed by offenders free while waiting for trial. But I believe we can get at least part of the way there using two related data points:
- Conviction rates
- Repeat offender rates
Between 2019 and 2023, conviction rates across Canada on homicide charges for adults averaged 42 percent, while similar charges against youth offenders resulted in convictions in 65 percent of cases. That means we can safely assume that a significant proportion of accused offenders were, in fact, criminally violent even before reaching trial.
We can use different Statistics Canada data to understand how likely it is that those accused offenders will re-offend while on pre-trial release:
58 percent of individuals sentenced to community supervision (through either conditional sentences or probation) had at least one prior conviction for a violent offence. 68 percent of those given custodial sentences were similarly repeat offenders. In fact, 59 percent of offenders serving custodial sentences had previously been convicted at least 10 times.
Also, in the three years following a term of community supervision, 15.6 percent of offenders were convicted for new violent crimes. For offenders coming out of custodial sentences, that rate was 30.2 percent.
In other words:
- Many – if not most – people charged with serious crimes turn out to be guilty
- It’s relatively rare for violent criminals to offend just once.
Together, those two conclusions suggest that public safety would be best served by immediately incarcerating all people charged with violent offences and keeping them “inside” either until they’re declared innocent or their sentences end. That, however, would be impossible. For one thing, we just don’t have space in our prisons to handle the load (or the money to fund it). And it would also often trample on the legitimate civil rights of accused individuals.
This is a serious problem without any obvious pull-the-trigger-and-you’re-
- Implement improved risk assessment and predictive analytics tools to evaluate the likelihood of re-offending.
- Improve the reliability of non-custodial measures such as electronic monitoring and house arrest that incorporate real-time tracking and immediate intervention capabilities
- Improve parole and probation systems to ensure effective monitoring and support for offenders released into the community. (Warning: expensive!)
- Optimize data analytics to identify trends, allocate resources efficiently, and measure the effectiveness of various interventions.
The Audit is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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