Who needs the police?
It’s so much easier to vote to defund the police if you know you will have a private security detail to protect you, isn’t it? All the better if somebody else pays for it.
Several Minneapolis City Council members who have received death threats following their calls to defund the police after the death of George Floyd have been assigned private security details — reportedly costing the city $4,500 a day in taxpayer dollars.
According to information obtained by Fox News, the city has spent $63,000 on private security over the last three weeks.
Celebrities, who can afford their own private security, are also clamoring for reducing police spending and diverting the money to others services. It’s the latest thing. An open letter signed by celebrities suggests other uses for the money:
Where could that money go? It could go towards building healthy communities, to the health of our elders and children, to neighborhood infrastructure, to education, to childcare, to support a vibrant Black future. The possibilities are endless.
We join in solidarity with the freedom fighters in Minneapolis, Louisville, and across the United States. And we call for the end to police terror.
According to reports, the letter has been signed by John Legend, Taraji P. Henson, Megan Rapinoe, Jane Fonda, and Natalie Portman. Tres chic, yet none of these people will ever have to live in a dangerous neighborhood without armed protection if the police are abolished.
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute explains what regular people know about the police that celebrities and pandering officials don’t care to know:
“How lovely when we see the police! They are my friends.”
So said an elderly lady attending a police-community meeting in the Bronx several years ago. Her voice is representative of the thousands of senior citizens, middle-aged workers, and small-business owners who fervently support the New York Police Department. These vulnerable New Yorkers want more police presence, not less; they view officers as their only protection against predation.
What will the activists seeking to defund the NYPD tell these law-abiding residents—that they are now on their own?
The people who live in high-crime neighborhoods understand more about policing than the anti-cop agitators. Since the early 1990s, when the homicide toll in New York City topped 2,000 per year, tens of thousands of lives have been saved, thanks to the NYPD’s highly responsive, data-driven policing.
That policing model, known as Compstat, holds precinct commanders ruthlessly accountable for crime in their jurisdiction; it has driven homicide down 86 percent from 1990, to only 319 in 2019. Most of the lives saved by suppressing crime since then have been black and Hispanic.
We’ve has a taste of what it would be like if there were no police as police in Democrat-run cities have been ordered to stand back while private businesses and entire neighborhoods are demolished.
Most of us can’t depend on the taxpayer or our private means to protect us. The move to defund the police is essentially frivolous. Defunding the police is a rich person’s bauble.