The victims of violent crimes are overwhelmingly poor blacks who live in urban areas. If you want to make people safer, you have to make it riskier for criminals to harm their victims. More police, better training, longer prison sentences, letting victims defend themselves are all things that research consistently shows that work. For some reason, the politicians who run so many of America’s cities think that the solution is the opposite. It is a prescription for disaster, and the most vulnerable among us will be the victims.