Washington, D.C. – Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes is a dangerous Democrat whose soft-on-crime record is not only “haunting” him in this race for U.S. Senate, but also making Wisconsin communities less safe. Read more below.
National Journal: Mandela Barnes’s Soft-On-Crime History May Haunt Him in Wisconsin Senate Race
By: Brittany Bernstein
U.S. Senate candidate Mandela Barnes’s history of being soft on crime as Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor could prove a defining factor in a close race against incumbent senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.).
Barnes has come under fire in recent weeks over reports that his campaign did not actually receive endorsements from two law-enforcement officers, as he previously claimed. One day after a La Crosse County sheriff’s captain denied endorsing the Democrat, a second sheriff’s office official from Racine County came forward saying the campaign made a “mistake” in including him on the endorsement list as well.
The lieutenant governor’s attempts to tout support from law enforcement come as his opponent has repeatedly sought to bring Barnes’s cloudy past on the “defund the police” movement to light.
Barnes officially came out against defunding the police in January. Yet Heather Smith from Wisconsin’s John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy says Barnes is trying to rewrite history and “gaslight” the public on the issue.
Barnes, whose campaign has received funding from five groups that support defunding the police, tweeted in July 2020: “Defunding the police only dreams of being as radical as a Donald Trump pardon.
”One month earlier, PBS Wisconsin asked Barnes about previous comments about criminal-justice reform in which he said, “With so far to go, it’s not about taking baby steps, it’s about taking as many steps as possible.”
Asked if that means “abolishing or defunding police departments,” he replied: “That means taking a look around at society and asking, ‘How did we get here?’ It’s about looking at priorities of city budgets. I can say, you know, in my hometown of Milwaukee, the police budget has exceeded the entire property tax levy for five consecutive years.”
He added: “Three out of the top five City of Milwaukee paid employees in 2018 were police officers. We’re talking about $100,000 in overtime in some instances.”
PBS’s Marisa Wojcik pressed again, asking Barnes if he agrees that police budgets should be completely done away with or defunded.
“Not completely done away with,” he said. “We need to invest more in neighborhood services and programming for our residents, for our communities on the front end. Where will that money come from? Well, it can come from over bloated budgets in police departments, you know?”
Yet the size of the Milwaukee police force has decreased nearly 18 percent since 1995 to the lowest number of sworn officers in at least 25 years, including a decrease of 4.5 percent from 2019 to 2020.
Smith notes that not replacing officers who leave the force is a quiet way of defunding the police and can end up costing the city more in overtime than it would to just fill the vacancies.
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Barnes has called defund-the-police advocate Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) “brilliant” and once spoke at a major meeting for the Center for Popular Democracy, a far-left group that has called for defunding police and “police states.”
In one of his most egregious attempts to have his political cake and eat it too, Barnes appeared in a 2018 photo holding an “Abolish ICE” T-shirt, but later claimed he was holding it in solidarity with immigrants who were being separated from children at the border and not because he supports the cause. He claims that he supports comprehensive immigration reform but is not a part of the movement to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Yet Barnes not only held the shirt for a photo but requested it in a Twitter exchange in July 2018. A Madison-based activist offered him the shirt from the Democratic Socialists of America in a tweet.
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A June 2020 Marquette Law School poll — after the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis, Minn., but before the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis. — just 23 percent of Wisconsin voters supported defunding the police.
Two months later, after a Wisconsin police officer shot Blake while responding to a domestic-violence call, support for defund-the-police actually declined to just 17 percent. The poll separately asked voters if they support the job that police do; 76 percent supported police.
In October 2020 a Marquette poll did not ask the question about support for defunding the police, but did ask about approval of police overall. Eighty percent of Wisconsin voters said they support the job police do.
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The destruction, coupled with a string of high-profile local crime stories, have created a difficult environment for Barnes, who has advocated cutting Wisconsin’s prison population in half on several occasions.
In 2021, a man with a lengthy rap sheet killed six people and wounded dozens when he drove his car through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wis. At the time of the massacre, the suspect, Darrell Brooks, was facing multiple pending cases in Milwaukee County involving second-degree reckless endangerment and being a felon in possession of a firearm.
According to Milwaukee County’s Democratic district attorney, John Chisholm, an “inappropriately low” $1,000 cash bond in the pending cases allowed Brooks to leave jail in a matter of days, after which he drove into the crowd.
Marshawn Giles, 24, also had numerous run-ins with the law. Just months after being released from jail, Giles killed his girlfriend’s 20-month-old daughter in April 2022. The toddler was beaten, thrown, and sexually assaulted.
Giles was out on parole when the incident occurred after serving just one year in jail in connection with a drive-by shooting.
“It has continued to be difficult for Mandela Barnes, from the standpoint that he has been pretty radical in his views and his positions,” Smith said.
As a state representative from 2013 to 2017, Barnes sponsored a bill to end cash bail. His office said in February that he remains firmly in support of his proposed legislation.
He also advocated banning the only ammunition in the state that is legal to use for deer hunting.
Meanwhile, violent crime in the state has continued to climb under the leadership of Barnes and Governor Tony Evers. Violent crime was about 40 percent higher in July than it had been at the same time in 2021, which saw a record-high number of violent crimes.
Evers has claimed the vast majority of people in prison are only there for minor drug crimes. However, over 70 percent of people in Wisconsin prisons are there for violent crimes, while the rest may be imprisoned for something that was violent but pleaded down to a nonviolent charge.
“People are concerned about violent crime, and the only answer that the Democrats typically bring to the table is, let’s be nicer to the criminals, and gun legislation,” Smith said.
A recent Marquette University Law School poll found that 88 percent of Wisconsin voters are concerned about crime, and 87 percent are concerned about gun violence. The issues came in behind only inflation, which concerned 94 percent of voters.
Smith predicted that crime will be “one of the defining issues of this race” because of the growing concern about crime among Wisconsinites and Barnes’s “strong personal record of being anti-police, soft on crime and putting felons before families.”‘’
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