Ex-Mayor Who Oversaw Police Hiring Freeze Is Mugged by Hatchet-Wielding Maniac
Call it “karma” or reaping what you sow: A person’s actions tend to catch up with them.
That’s what one Democratic candidate just discovered in Arizona. Greg Stanton, a liberal who is the former mayor of Phoenix, found out the hard way that there might be consequences to pushing “progressive” programs in place of law enforcement.
Stanton is now running for Congress, based largely on his political experience as a city council member and then mayor between 2000 and 2018. During that time, the Democrat took positions that could be described as anti-police… but he sure needed a cop last Saturday.
That’s when a deranged man armed with a hatchet mugged the former mayor and current candidate for Congress.
“He said he was heading back to his car after dinner when he was approached by a man,” reported The Arizona Republic.
As the person came up on Stanton, the candidate took a quintessentially liberal approach to dealing with the situation.
“I assumed he was probably going through a difficult time — experiencing homelessness — and was going to ask for money,” the Democrat told the Arizona newspaper. “I will often provide them with resources.”
Stanton said the man asked for some money, but it turns out the vagrant had more sinister intentions.
“Then, Stanton said, the man moved toward him aggressively. He asked the former mayor to move across the street to a darker area. Stanton said he then saw the man was carrying a hatchet-like weapon,” explained The Republic.
“I realized this was much more serious than him just asking for money,” the ex-mayor admitted to the paper.
The candidate said he let the hatched-armed man take his wallet before running inside and calling the police.
Yes, the same police that Stanton kept under-funded and under-staffed when he ran the city.
“In 2008, the city’s finances became so dire that Stanton, then a member of the city council, and his colleagues were forced to cut services and institute a hiring freeze on all new government personnel, including police officers,” explained The Washington Free Beacon.
“By the time the freeze ended … the city was already dangerously understaffed,” the news outlet continued. “The police department’s roster had fallen from a high of 3,388 in 2008 to 2,772 in 2015—a deficit of over 600 officers.”
All that time, the city grew quickly, which means that the shortage of cops was even more dramatic. The Phoenix violent crime rate in 2016 and 2017 climbed twice as fast as the national average.
Then-mayor Stanton consistently chose to push feel-good liberal projects like light rail expansion and energy efficiency instead of focusing on meat-and-potatoes issues like keeping the police department properly staffed and outfitted.
“How ironic that the man who helped run Phoenix into the ground by not advocating for sufficient police staffing is now a victim of that choice?” pointed out the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association after Stanton was mugged.
“As mayor, Greg Stanton focused on light rail expansion, bike lanes, and LED streetlights,” PLEA president Ken Crane elaborated to The Free Beacon. “He focused on all of the minor issues that look glitzy while he ignored those, such as public safety, that are central to a vibrant city.”
“In his first four years in office, he didn’t do a heck of a whole lot to ensure the city got the police officers it needed.”
We’re glad that Stanton is okay after his incident, and political views certainly do not justify crime. They do, however, sometimes contribute to it … and realizing that liberal decisions which ignore reality have serious real-world consequences is exactly how people end up as conservatives.
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