Well an anti-cop politician has gotten a taste of life on the not-so-nice side of town. Shivanthi Sathanandan, the second vice chairwoman of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, was the victim of an attempted carjacking outside her home in front of her terrified children aged four and seven.

Sathanandan had once vowed to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department but is now calling for tougher policies towards criminals.

“I have a broken leg, deep lacerations on my head, bruising, and cuts all over my body. And I have rage,” Sathanandan posted on Facebook. “These men knew what they were doing. I have NO DOUBT they have done this before. (Gee, ya think?) Yet they are still on OUR STREETS. Killing mothers. Giving babies psychological trauma that a lifetime of therapy cannot ease. With no hesitation and no remorse.”

While there has been some contemptible sneering at her misfortune, those who have actual experience with the reality of crime are largely reacting with a world-weary, “Told you” attitude.

Sathanandan was part of a movement to radically restructure our approach to law enforcement. It’s been around for a while if you remember Joan Baez’s song about how “We’re going to raze the prisons to the ground!” but has in this generation gained traction in mainstream politics.

Chesea Boudin, the son of radical activist Kathy Boudin convicted for her part in the Brinks armored car robbery (1981) and raised by Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn, was elected DA of San Francisco promising to find alternatives to prison and not to prosecute “lifestyle crimes.”

He became the first DA in San Francisco to lose a recall election after his policies had the predictable effects.

Friends in New York City have similar stories about living with Rudy Giuliani’s “one broken window” policy versus Alvin Bragg’s “compassionate” no-bail policy.

We know policing is an often ugly business. We know prisons are often horrible places where prisoners may well come out worse than they went in. But the solution proposed by these people is not reform but abolition.

For those of us not raised in an upper-class gated community bubble it is difficult to imagine how any sane person could seriously propose we do without police or a means of isolating the anti-social from society.

It is proposed that we concentrate on rehabilitating offenders rather than punishing or isolating them.

The flaw in this notion is in the very word, RE-habilitate. This assumes they were habilitated to begin with. Most often this is not the case. They did not experience a fall from grace, they were never raised to function within a civilized society to begin with. They are doing what experience has taught them is necessary to survive in their environment.

“So it’s poverty! We can fix that.”

Sorry, no. Most people who fall under the official poverty line do not commit violent crimes, and those who do are not stealing food they’re stealing money for drugs and jacking cars.

And note that two generations and trillions of dollars spent since Lyndon Johnson first declared war on poverty has seen little or no correlation with the rise and fall of crime rates.

Economist Thomas Sowell once said the history of the 20th century could be described as replacing what worked with what sounded good.

It comes hard for those who want perfect solutions to an age-old problem, but fact is the best we can do is to keep doing what we’ve always done and keep looking for better ways to do it.

— Steve Browne is a longtime reporter in southwest Minnesota