Hello, Defund the Police: Goodbye, Pro Sports Franchise Revenues
Washington, D.C. is facing some hard truths about crime.
“Soaring Crime Pushes Wizards, Capitals Out of D.C.; Potential Revenue Loss $25M,” crowed Wendell Husebo for Breitbart on December 16, 2023.
“Washington, DC’s, soaring crime rate pushed the Wizards and Capitals to relocate the professional basketball and hockey teams out of the nation’s capital, surrounding District residents say, potentially costing the District $25 million in yearly tax revenue,” began Husebo for the popular conservative media outlet.
“Sports: the latest victim of DC’s crimewave,” raged conservative media analyst Ben Domenech for the Spectator. “The departure of the city’s pro basketball and hockey teams to Alexandria was so avoidable.”
Unfortunately for D.C. city leadership, conservative media outlets weren’t the only newspapers to take notice.
“D.C. will lose more than the Capitals and Wizards if it doesn’t act fast,” begged the Washington Post editorial board on December 14, 2023.
“Could D.C. lose two of its sports teams?” wondered the All Things Considered crew for NPR last week.
Though D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has been trying — and, thus far, failing — to stop the deal, it is probably, as even the WP editorial board admits — much too late.
Monumental Sports has already announced the move.
And it’s no wonder.
According to 2023 statistics released by the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, robbery increased by 69%, violent crime by 40%, and carjacking by 89%.
The District’s loss will be nearby Virginia’s gain. As D.C. turned a deeper shade of blue, figuratively and politically, post-2020, Virginia has been trending redder.
“There’s no other way to say it: Virginia just dunked on Washington, D.C.,” noted the WP editorial board grumpily. “It’s basically a done deal that the National Hockey League’s Capitals and the National Basketball Association’s Wizards will move from downtown to a new arena in Alexandria in 2028. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) lured them with a hefty $2 billion offer, officially nonbinding but almost certain to go through.”
“Washington Wizards, Capitals plan to depart DC as crime crisis intensifies; Youngkin celebrates move,” reported Charles Creitz for Fox News. “Ingraham says it’s clear crime was part of the decision to move and that ‘nobody wants to go downtown’”
Once a reliably blue voting bloc, Virginia is now a fierce battleground state. And while Republican newcomer Governor Glenn Youngkin has managed fairly robust levels of support in his state, the Virginia Republican Party can hardly claim a level of victory on par with what Republicans have achieved in Florida, which turned from reliably blue to reliably red in a few short election cycles.
This latest victory for Youngkin may help solidify the Republican Party’s hold in Virginia.
“It’s not just about money,” Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears said during a Wednesday interview. “But you’ve got to talk about the environment. What is the surrounding area of the venue? If you go to the game and you’re having fun but if you leave the game you’re having to look over your shoulder, that’s an issue.”
This trend shouldn’t be unexpected for D.C. city lawmakers.
It isn’t as if large cities like D.C. haven’t experienced crime waves before. During the bad old days of the 1990s, crime soared upwards of today’s levels in many major cities and metro areas.
And beyond.
As corporations and ordinary citizens inevitably flee high-crime metro areas for the suburbs — as they always have historically — the tax base is eroded.
Brain drain sets in, and companies that do choose to stay and ride out periods of higher crime have a harder and harder time finding talented executives willing to relocate. That is already true in cities like Chicago, where CEOs are constantly complaining, between the lines in business publications and right out in the open on the talk show circuit — Republican and Democrat — that lax crime policies are making the costs of doing business in some cities untenable.
And crime victims aren’t statistics; they are real people who have been victimized by crime. The last thing they need, want, or expect is to be trivialized by a cadre of elite institutions that know all the right things to say about social injustice but miss key opportunities to do the right thing.
The cold shoulder these elite institutions are willing to give crime victims shows how truly out of touch they are with reality. Only an institution with no understanding whatsoever of who is most often victimized by crime — hint, it’s usually the most vulnerable in society — would demonstrate such callousness.
And allow such crime to proliferate at the expense of innocent victims everywhere.
“The Democratic Position on Crime Is a (Political) Crime,” complained Democratic Party analyst Ruy Teixeira for the Liberal Patriot in November.
Voters, he argued, can’t but miss the increase in crime taking place before their very eyes. Worse, according to Teixeira, voters are starting to take their frustrations about crime out on President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party ilk in the polls.
“It is not hard to think of reasons voters feel this way,” Teixeira wrote. “In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the nationwide movement sparked by it, the climate for police reform was highly favorable. But Democrats blew the opportunity by allowing the party to be associated with unpopular movement slogans like ‘defund the police’ that did not appear to take public safety concerns very seriously.”
“At the same time, Democrats became associated with a wave of progressive public prosecutors who seemed quite hesitant about keeping criminals off the street, even as a spike in violent crimes like murders and carjacking swept the nation,” he noted. “This was twinned to a climate of tolerance and non-prosecution for lesser crimes that degraded the quality of life in many cities under Democratic control.”
Until voters see that downward quality of life trend turn around, they aren’t likely to celebrate incumbents on Election Day.
(contributing writer, Brooke Bell)
