By all indications the rising tide of crime in Connecticut reveals no signal of receding any time quickly.
The numbers we’re getting from regulation enforcement on the bottom in our personal city are astounding: extra automobiles had been stolen in Shelton throughout a three-month interval this yr than in all of 2019.
The statewide image of this pattern is equally disturbing.
Crime victims throughout Connecticut have already made extra requests from the victims’ compensation fund than in any earlier yr on report. The fund pays out bills for victims to obtain grief counseling, assist pay medical payments and, in some circumstances, funeral bills — a reminder that the fixed wrestle for a lot of victims does not finish, even after they’ve obtained justice.
On a weekly foundation now, residents are confronted with tales within the information of organized retail theft gangs concentrating on native companies and field shops, criminals stealing catalytic converters from work vehicles and faculty buses and much more severe crimes, like homicides, being carried out by teenagers as younger as 14.
As your elected state representatives, we have been very outspoken about these crimes. A few of us have additionally been made victims.
We have repeatedly joined our fellow Republicans within the Home and Senate in advancing smart public security proposals to get to the center of the problem — eliminating delays within the prosecution of great felonies like sexual assault, permitting ‘theft of a motorized vehicle’ to lastly be prosecuted as a separate offense and bringing the voices of the victims into juvenile delinquency proceedings for the primary time.
These proposals, and extra, have been broadly accessible — each initially at www.StopCarThefts.com and later re-published in dozens of articles, editorials and TV information experiences — for greater than 4 months. Have your Democratic representatives learn them?
We additionally started circulating copies of a petition on the identical time these proposals had been issued — to set off a particular session and provoke fast legislative motion on them. Have your Democratic representatives signed it?
Gov. Lamont, who reportedly expressed help for some Republican proposals, would not lend his help for a particular session to implement them.
Because the most-powerful elected Democrat on this state, he certainly should nonetheless have sufficient affect over his occasion to deliver influential Democratic lawmakers to the desk.
Now with those self same Democrat legislative leaders presently blocking these reforms at practically each accessible alternative, many Connecticut residents should be asking themselves: Does anybody care?
The truth of the state of affairs couldn’t be clearer: Connecticut has an issue with crime.
The variety of homicides in Connecticut elevated 31 % in 2020 in accordance with the FBI, simply over the historic 30 % enhance nationwide.
The identical FBI report reveals automotive thefts in Connecticut rose 42.5 % from 2019-20. Nationwide, that enhance was solely 11.8 %.
Up to now, legislative Democrats have given no proposal to reverse this pattern and restore our security. Home and Senate Republicans have provided a number of.
To be in a management place and never admonish and even acknowledge prison conduct is, in actual fact, no totally different from endorsing it. Inaction, as a substitute, results in extra severe penalties down the highway: loss of life, severe harm and but extra arrests and re-arrests. The cycle continues.
As they are saying, if you’re not a part of the answer, you might be a part of the issue. Now we have an issue and we owe it to our constituents and to our regulation enforcement officers who’re on the entrance strains to come back collectively and discover options.
State Reps Jason Perillo (R-113th) and Ben McGorty (R-122nd) serve residents of the Metropolis of Shelton within the Connecticut Common Meeting.
