Since 2020, there’s been a pronounced effort to cater to criminals. From cashless bail to outright refusal to prosecute people for crimes, there probably hasn’t been a better time to be a petty bad guy in this country.

Ironically, a lot of those prosecutors will call for gun control while still refusing to actually prosecute people found with illegal guns.

Yet there is far too much of that going on, and an op-ed at Fox News argues that it’s putting cops’ lives at risk.

America has become less safe. The 12 major cities saw all-time crime records in recent years. Meanwhile, a report from Our America from October shows that carjackings, burglaries, homicides, assaults and other crimes are overwhelming America’s cities and leaving residents terrified for their own safety. This is, by definition, a job for law enforcement; however, too often the men and women who are supposed to keep our streets safe aren’t really safe to do their jobs.

Let’s call things what they are: America is facing a wave of pro-criminal violence because of the wave of anti-cop propaganda being pushed by the woke corporate media and the politicians riding that propaganda wave to push pro-criminal, anti-cop policies like “defunding” the police.

Now, the downstream reality is that too many law enforcement officers today are caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to upholding the rule of law. They’re caught in the crossfire between the politicized leadership they face and the criminals who are emboldened by the latest wave of soft-on-crime policies.

Coddling and excusing criminals has only ever helped the criminals and the politicians who like to harvest votes off of these terrible policies. Probably the most famous example of this from recent history is David Dinkins’ colossal failure as mayor of New York.  It wasn’t until Mayor Rudy Giuliani came in with tough on crime and gave the NYPD and other law enforcement the kind of support that they deserved that things started to turn around for the city.

Author Rob O’Donnell, a retired NYPD detective, has a valid reason to focus on how these rules are making officers less safe. I’m not faulting him for that.

But law enforcement isn’t the only group put at risk because of these pro-criminal efforts.

The average person is also at risk, in part because while criminals know cops are armed and likely to shoot back, the average target in a city like New York probably can’t. Even if Bruen made it so people could get carry permits for the first time in forever, the truth is that folks there are so browbeaten by anti-gun rhetoric that they’re not going to be armed.

Bad guys know this.

Criminals will always have certain advantages. First, they generally get to pick the time and place of an attack, so they have the initiative, but beyond that, they’re not worried about operating within the law. They don’t care about collateral damage. They don’t care if their rounds overpenetrate and kill some innocent bystander. They care about nothing except their own survival.

So making it harder on good guys, including law enforcement, doesn’t just put law enforcement at risk. It doesn’t just make their lives harder.

It hurts everyone who isn’t a criminal.