Major U.S. City Drops “Sanctuary City” Law, Instantly Gets Surprising Result
Democrats constantly claim that sanctuary cities paradoxically reduce crime. Luckily, we now can test that assumption.
Phoenix, Arizona did away with their sanctuary city policy eight years ago to receive startling results. “We saw a 20-year low crime rate. When we were allowed and had the discretion to contact our federal immigration partners, crime fell dramatically,” Explains the executive director of the Arizona Police Association. (via Fox News)
The changes were felt immediately. In less than a year from ditching sanctuary status Phoenix’s murder rate dropped 27 percent, robberies fell 23 percent and theft fell by 19 percent.
Crime rates continue to decline year after year. But, the largest drop occurred as soon as sanctuary status was reversed, indicating that protecting illegal immigrants increases crime.
The benefits of the Phoenix experiment were made apparent after a six-year study from University of California, Riverside, which found there is no benefit to being a sanctuary city, despite liberal claims that it drops crime.
The study compared 55 American cities and found that there was “no statistically discernible difference in violent crime rates, rape, or property crime,” between sanctuary cities and regular cities.
This study faced the difficult task of drawing conclusions by comparing vastly different cities. However, its conclusions aren’t the whole story. Now that we can compare the same city before and after sanctuary laws, it is clear that protecting illegal immigrants increases crime rates.
However, even if Arizona didn’t see any changes and conformed to the University of California study that found no “discernible difference” in crime rates between sanctuary cities and law abiding cities, the case study still would not be reason enough to adopt sanctuary policies.
Essentially, Democrats in sanctuary cities argue that sanctuary status lowers crime rates. They claim that illegal immigrants are more likely to cooperate with police when they do not face the fear of deportation. However, the California study thoroughly showed that that is not true: there is no reduction in crime.
If cities want to violate federal law they should have good reason. If crime rates remain the same across sanctuary and non-sanctuary cities than there is absolutely no reason to propose sanctuary status unless sanctuary cities have nothing to do with crime rates.
The true reason that Democrats prefer sanctuary cities is because illegal immigrants overwhelmingly vote Democrat. Democrats cannot compete in fair elections, so they offer legal protection for their secret constituents.
All of the available evidence suggests either that sanctuary status has no impact or only increases rates of criminal behavior. This forces us to question the motives of Democrats.