You’ve probably seen images of Los Angeles’ viaduct system in movies like Terminator 2 and TV shows like 24. Scenes of cars racing, high-speed chases and dystopian landscapes have been filmed there for decades, and it is a popular street racing hotspot.

The 6^th Street viaduct bridge has been closed since 2015 for a monumental $588 million renovation. The bridge connects the neighborhood of Boyle Heights to downtown L.A. and has deteriorated over the years. It opened to traffic and much fanfare this past July.

Unfortunately, like everything else in Los Angeles, it was too good to be true. The bridge has returned to being a popular drag racing location and a site of what’s known as a “street takeover.” This is a situation where mobs of spectators and street racing crews block off streets they deem ideal for racing and take them over for their own use. For obvious reasons this is not only illegal, but extremely dangerous.

Street takeover on newly opened half billion dollar 6th street bridge ends in crash involving several vehicles.

This lawlessness is literally destroying our community. pic.twitter.com/6Ydg902Kza

— Kevin Dalton (@KevinForBOS) July 19, 2022

The 6^th Street bridge is a major thoroughfare for pedestrians and traffic, and it is, and has been plagued with street takeovers since its reopening.

In response to racing gangs and the public hazards, the City of Los Angeles has decided to crack down on law-abiding citizens who use the viaduct as it was intended. The city has announced they will be closing the bridge periodically to all traffic, in hopes of discouraging street takeovers during peak racing times, especially on the weekends.

This is how the authoritarian progressives deal with everything. Their solution to every criminal violation is to restrict law-abiding citizens. The criminals get to continue violating the law, because that’s what criminals do.

When a crazy person violates the law to murder innocent children at a school, the response from Democrat officials locally and federally is to attempt to restrict the second amendment rights of law-abiding citizens. Murder is already illegal, but rather than responding by enforcing the laws on the books and putting more effort into preventing insane people from committing mass murder, the only solution on offer is to punish the innocent.

While rampant smash and grab crime is raging in Los Angeles, the city’s solution is to erase felonies for theft offenses up to the value of $950. Meanwhile, stores like CVS and Walgreen’s have had to practically turn their locations into escape rooms, putting even basic items like deodorant and tampons behind locked shields, and reorganizing layouts to make it more difficult to walk straight out of the building.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s response to smash and grab mobs in a popular shopping district was to restrict traffic in and out of the area. She also launched a public information campaign telling citizens to avoid wearing expensive clothing and jewelry while holiday shopping.

During the height of the pandemic, California’s homeless were living on beaches, unmasked, unvaxxed, and lying in a toxic sludge of human waste and drug paraphernalia. Police passed right by the rampant crime in the tent cities to arrest lone surfers in the ocean for breaking “quarantine.”

The authoritarians on the left only care about power. Criminals don’t respect authority. So what do you do when you crave authority but can’t use it to control agents of chaos? You use it to control the peaceful and the law-abiding. You use it to control the people who already follow the rules of society.

Not only are we the victims of unchecked criminals, we become the victims of a weak and feckless government. The logical, adult solution to the issue would be to punish criminals. We have examples far and wide. Look at how Rudy Giuliani changed New York City by getting tough on crime and making criminals the target of law enforcement, not law-abiding citizens. The Big Apple went from being one of the most unsafe major cities in America to one of our safest. Of course, that’s all being undone by this recent spate of progressive, Black Live Matters, Defund the Police political set. But it worked once…it could work again.

When Donald Trump announced his “remain in Mexico” policy at the border, it worked to decrease illegal border crossings. Criminals prefer ease. It doesn’t take that much to deter 90% of the criminal class out there in America. Outside of people involved in organized crime or those who find satisfaction in deliberate murder, most criminals are of the petty kind, drug addicts thieving or conspiring to support their habit. They don’t want trouble, they just want it to be quick and easy.

That’s why locking your front door is a very good security measure, even though most of us have front doors that could be easily broken down were a person determined enough. It’s not about making a door that cannot be broken down, it’s about creating enough of an inconvenience for a criminal to make them think twice.

These days the Democrats in charge of our largest cities have no intentions of making any criminal think twice. It is open season on innocent citizens, and Democrat-led governments have decided as long as it looks like they’re “doing something” they can “do something” to the good taxpayers of their cities and call it a plan.

The right thing to do, the logical thing, would be to add police presence, punish criminals to the full extent of the law, crack down on arrests and encourage convictions of even petty crimes. Send law enforcement and city departments to monitor hotbeds like the 6^th Street bridge and make it impossible to be overtaken by the wanna-be Fast and Furious crowd. Ticket parking violators, cite traffic violators. Seize illegal vehicle enhancements. Ensure the streets aren’t used for open-air drug markets and homeless encampments. Make it hard to be a criminal.

Instead, our leaders seem to find great joy in making it hard to be a normal, taxpaying citizen.

Punishing the lawful is a Democrat policy, and they seem proud of it.