It’s a public park rn which makes the loss all that more devastating than militarizing an abandoned mall.

these right-leaning people want to reduce crime, right?

No, not really. The term is used as a dog whistle, it’s an indicator that you want to both criminalize and punish in very particular ways. “Crime” is down over the last several decades and the folks following this line have only gotten louder. “Crime” is a huge category that ranges from theft from faceless megacorporations to serial murder, there’s no such thing as just “reducing crime” as an inherently good thing. Some things are unjustly criminal and it would be good to see those crimes increase. Example: it is criminal in many places to set up an organizing and feed the homeless. Repeat offenders will get arrested, jailed, and in some places imprisoned.

“Tough on crime” is and has been a dogwhistle for the racialized criminalization and punishment of poverty, which is closer to what is happening in Atlanta. Elevating misdemeanors to felonies (criminalization), prosecuting more misdemeabor thefts from businesses, harsher sentences (more punishment). This has a history closely tied to policing in the US, itself drawing from slave patrols, Jim Crow, and an enclosure of common spaces in favor of private business interests - such as the invention of the offense of “loitering”. Cops in the US, i.e. “law enforcement” gangs, are organized chiefly around the defense of private property both reactively and proactively. They arrest people for stealing diapers but do jack about wage theft. The articles about “crime” increases nowadays are often little more than press releases by companies like Walgreens, uncritically passed on by “journalists” and used to manufacture consent for politicians to serve those business interests by more thoroughly opnishing petty thefts rather than directing focus and resources to the underlying precarity that drives it.

Poverty has been highly racialized in the US due to the legacy of creating social structures that justified chattel slavery, and the criminal punishment system is a central component of American poverty.

So when people claim to want crime reduction, what they really mean is they want more cops to protect business interests and they want the people acting against business interests to be punished and hurt even more. And, at best, they don’t care that this will disproportionately impact the marginalized, and particularly along anti-black lines.

Answering seriously, they’re not trying to reduce crime. And they have no intention of reducing poverty.

This is a response to the 2020 BLM protests, which despite how liberals co-opted it, still terrified the American state. These urban warfare citadels are being constructed by the ruling class because they know an economic downturn is coming. A whole lot of people In the US are about to be jobless, houseless, and without healthcare.

these right-leaning people want to reduce crime, right?

There’s at least two groups here:

1. The oligarchs. They’re not so worried about petty crime as they are about maintaining their huge wealth disparity. They use the police to maintain that.

2. The poor. They’re worried about petty crime because they watch TV. And it tells them that we need more police to stop crime.