There is something wonderfully absurd about the slogan “Love is Love.” Grammatically, the slogan is a tautology. The first “love” is merely identified with the second. Its problem is not syntax but moral reasoning. It treats love as morally self-authenticating, assuming that the sincerity of the lover establishes the goodness of the love.
Yet, love is not good merely because it is felt deeply or expressed sincerely. Love receives its moral character from its object, form, and end. To love what is good, truthfully and rightly, is a virtue. To love what is evil, destructive, predatory, or degrading is not made virtuous by intensity. A person can sincerely love another person, a bottle, another man’s wife, power, cruelty, or the sound of his own voice. Authenticity does not perform moral alchemy.
Still, “Love is Love” has tremendous sloganistic power. It converts a disputed moral conclusion into a verbal identity and then repeats the identity as its own proof. Love is love. No object, definition, distinction, or reasoning is required.
Fighting that uphill battle with truth, grammar, and logic can become exhausting. So, as the saying goes, if you cannot beat them, join them. Thus, I am proposing a new civic slogan: Crime is Crime.
It has all the intellectual sophistication of “Love is Love,” but it arrives at an increasingly necessary conclusion.
The Urgent Case for “Crime Is Crime”
The City of Vancouver recently directed police officers to change how they handle several misdemeanor offenses, including third-degree theft, criminal trespass, disorderly conduct, possession of controlled substances, and public drug use. Instead of automatically issuing citations into municipal court, officers are generally to refer these cases to the City Attorney’s Office for a possible charging decision.
The city has emphasized that these acts remain illegal, officers will still take reports, and arrests may still be made when necessary. This is not the formal legalization of theft, trespass, or public drug use. It is something more bureaucratically refined. The law remains on the books while its immediate consequences become increasingly theoretical.
The reason is a genuine crisis. Washington’s Supreme Court adopted substantially lower public-defense caseload standards beginning January 1, 2026, while permitting them to be phased in through annual reductions. The purpose is defensible. An accused person has a constitutional right to competent legal representation, not merely the appearance of an attorney whose caseload makes meaningful representation impossible. Assembly-line defense is not justice. Washington Supreme Court Order No. 25700-A-1644
But Vancouver does not have enough public defenders to meet its obligations. By June 2, the city says 55 cases had already been dismissed because counsel was unavailable, including ten domestic-violence cases involving such allegations as assault, stalking, harassment, and violations of protection orders. The city therefore says it must preserve scarce defense resources for more serious cases. City Manager Lon Pluckhahn’s explanation
When Government Failure Becomes Everyone Else’s Burden
Yet, no matter how real the crisis, the proposed solution is still an abdication. When government lacks the capacity to prosecute crimes while protecting defendants’ constitutional rights, its responsibility is to build that capacity. It must find attorneys, provide funding, restructure contracts, seek assistance from the state, revise budgets, or plainly admit that a core public institution is failing. What it must not do is quietly transfer the consequences of its incapacity to store employees, business owners, families, neighborhoods, and everyone else expected to absorb the disorder.
The city calls these “low-level” crimes. That is a statutory classification, not a description of their human significance. Theft may appear low-level when reduced to a line on a municipal spreadsheet. It feels rather different to the shopkeeper who must replace the merchandise, raise prices, confront the thief, or close the bathroom because it has become unsafe. Trespass sounds minor until the trespasser is outside your apartment, inside your business, or refusing to leave the park where your children play. Public drug use is low-level only to the person who does not have to step over it, clean it up, explain it to his children, or watch someone slowly disintegrate on the sidewalk. “Low-level crime” often means crime whose costs are distributed among people without enough influence to make the government care.
The city insists that police will continue responding and taking reports. This is reassuring if the principal purpose of law enforcement is the production of paperwork. A citizen may still enjoy the comfort of knowing that the theft, trespass, or public drug use occurring in front of him has been carefully documented for a prosecution that may never happen.
Police Chief Troy Price acknowledged the problem more candidly. He wrote that many offenders may face “no immediate legal consequences” and, if their cases are never refiled, “no legal consequences at all from the courts.” Chief Price’s public statement. A law without a credible consequence is not entirely a law. Increasingly, it is a municipal suggestion.
The president of the Vancouver Police Officers Guild has also warned that the loss of an anticipated citation or arrest may impede officers’ ability to investigate offenses and recover stolen property. If an officer cannot lawfully search a suspected shoplifter or the person’s belongings, the stolen merchandise may be plainly identified and still practically unrecoverable. KATU’s report on the policy
A government that will neither restrain destructive conduct nor maintain the institutions necessary to adjudicate it is not protecting victims, and it is not helping offenders. It is allowing both to deteriorate together while congratulating itself for prioritizing resources.
Justice is owed to the accused, but it is also owed to the victim. A functioning government must be capable of protecting both. When it cannot, the answer is not to decide that one party’s rights will be financed by another party’s vulnerability.
Moreover, a man permitted to steal repeatedly is not being loved. A woman allowed to consume drugs publicly while her life collapses is not being treated compassionately. A person whose disorder is endlessly tolerated is being abandoned to that disorder.
Consequences restrain appetites that have already escaped a person’s control. They establish boundaries, interrupt escalating behavior, compel confrontation with reality, and protect a person from becoming further enslaved to his own impulses.
Emergencies Do Not Erase Responsibilities
Now, there may be no immediate solution to Washington’s public-defense crisis. Attorneys cannot be conjured out of the air. Budgets cannot be rewritten overnight. Difficult circumstances require triage, and triage necessarily involves painful judgments. But emergencies do not erase responsibilities. They reveal which responsibilities a government is willing to abandon first.
Vancouver’s citizens pay taxes, obey ordinances, submit to authorities, and fund the institutions of civil order. In return, they have a reasonable expectation that theft will be treated as theft, trespass as trespass, and public drug use as public drug use. They should not be required to absorb predictable harm because the government lacks the institutional capacity to enforce the laws it continues to impose upon everyone else.
So perhaps the moment has come for a slogan that meets our civic reasoning at its present level: Crime is Crime.