Thursday, December 14, 2023

The debacle of defunding the police is coming home to roost

 The Hill

 Mayors and national elected leaders who supported defunding law enforcement must be held accountable and voters must be smarter in who they elect next time around. 

"Liberal mayors across the country who took an ax to the budgets of their police departments following the death of George Floyd almost two years ago are scrambling. They now find themselves under extraordinary pressure from residents, including those who elected them, to address the unprecedented levels of crime and violence in their cities. 

"Combined with unrelenting national media attention regarding their early support of defunding police and inability to put forth effective alternative anti-crime solutions, liberal mayors are now reversing course and publicly calling for increased funding, aggressive policing measures, harsher penalties, and federal assistance for their cities. The motive for change is obvious, and not surprising — they swung for the fences and missed big time by adopting the most extreme and dangerous position of the left known as “Defund the Police.” 

"These mayors couldn’t resist the temptation no matter how impractical and unnecessary the idea was. They joined groups including Antifa, Black Lives Matter and democrat members of Congress (most notably “The Squad”) and immediately began slashing the budgets of their police departments and limiting their operations instead of implementing more reasonable, common-sense approaches like increased training and retraining, updated use of force criteria, and the deployment of additional less-than-lethal options for officers. 

"Instead, they responded to these calls by politicizing and villainizing the entire law enforcement profession and in the process their own departments. The mayors acted like they were invincible, yet the unforeseen problem lurking in the distance two years later for them and the Democratic party is that from the very beginning, they were dead wrong on this issue — wrong on the popularity and practicality of defunding police and not enforcing the law in a civilized society and wrong on the eventual political repercussions that they would face as citizens and visitors became fearful and disgusted at what these cities had come to resemble — third world countries." . . .

No comments: