Well, that didn’t take long.
Minneapolis, a trendsetter in the defund the police movement, is now trying to re-fund the police.
In response to frightened citizens pleading for more protection against a crime wave, the City Council of Minneapolis last week voted to spend $6.4 million to hire new police officers.
This comes less than a year after the same City Council voted to reduce the police budget by $8 million after the defund the police movement gained momentum in the wake of the George Floyd riots. The budget cut, which would reduce the police force by 750, was supposed to be phased in, but many members of the force retired or moved away to find jobs elsewhere.
ABC News quoted an AP report at the time of the defund vote:
“Some in favor of the plan called police officers cowards, gang members, white supremacists or terrorists. They spoke about violence that African Americans and other minorities have experienced at the hands of police. Those against the plan said the City Council was acting irresponsibly and has bungled its attempts to bring change. They cited increasing violence, saying they don’t feel safe.”
New York voted to cut $1 billion from the police budget in July, and, as in Minneapolis, vilified New York police took early retirement in droves or left the city. Strangely, rather than becoming an Eden presided over by kindly social workers, New York experienced a surge in crime.
In the wake of a series of subway stabbings, MTA is asking to beef up subway policing by a thousand officers. In other words, too many people are learning the hard way that a world without adequate policing is dangerous and scary. When police are away, criminals, and people who perhaps have mental disabilities, play havoc with the social order—and peoples’ lives.
Heather Mac Donald and others tried to warn of the dangers of defunding the police. Defunding advocates portrayed their movement as a boon for black citizens. Mac Donald emphatically showed that the opposite is true.
I am sure that a lot of the people who embraced defunding the police did so because it is trendy. But don’t be too quick to absolve them: their advocacy has added to the sum of human suffering. And don’t believe that the defund movement is going to go away just because the evidence shows it an overwhelming disaster.
The defund the police movement isn’t going away anytime soon because it is an integral part of the left agenda. Remember in the sixties and seventies when some of us called the brave men and women who were protecting us “pigs”? Black Lives Matter routinely uses that term.
See a CBS story about how the BLM chant of “pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon, referring to police, “riled cops.” How could anybody take offense to such a charming chant?
Defunding the police isn’t just something many elites regard as cool, it is a long-desired object for many on the extreme left.