“Defund the Police” has become a rallying cry in cities across the country, one fueled more by emotion than evidence.
Crimes of passion are acts committed against someone because of sudden strong impulse such as sudden rage.
Defund the Police is like this, a sudden, anger-driven, “acceptable prevailing narrative” that brooks no disagreement among its proponents, yet when turned into policy will wreak havoc and harm upon communities.
With the senseless killing of George Floyd while in police custody May 25, 2020, two years of “Defund the Police” agitation exploded into a nationwide and to some extent global movement, first on street protest placards, then in outright riots, then city councils and mayors working overtime to embrace the idea.
“To address concerns about how police treat minorities, the Minneapolis City Council has announced a year-long program to disband the Minneapolis police department. San Leandro, California voted to defund their 93 member police force. Los Angeles is redirecting $250 million from the police to social programs. New York City is debating cutting the police budget by $1 billion. The Austin, Texas police department is eliminating 100 officers and delaying a police cadet class that was scheduled to start in July.”
- “Baltimore City Council approved a $22.4 millionbudget cut for the police department.
- Portland City Councilcut $15 million from its police budget earlier this month. $5 million of that would be put toward a new program that sends unarmed first responders to answer homelessness calls.
- Philadelphia cancelled a planned $19 million increase for the police department and shifted $14 million of the police budget elsewhere — including affordable housing.
- The city council in Hartford, Connecticut voted tocut or reallocate $2 million of its police budget.
- In Seattle, every department budget is being trimmed by around 10%.
- Other cities where officials are calling for changes, include San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Oakland, Milwaukee, Denver, Durham, Winston-Salem, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.”
Why? Why are cities defunding police? Ostensibly it is because proponents believe:
- police are killing Black Americans regularly and ruthlessly,
- police are “hunting” Blacks, and
- police are responsible for most of Black America’s problems.
Somehow police departments have become the point of the spear in the Black Lives Matter movement, vigorously promoted primarily by the Black Lives Matter organization.
The problem is, these points of view do not square with the facts of what is actually happening in Black communities and do not explain why Blacks are being killed every week in cities like Chicago.
Defund the Police and its rationale do not explain racism in America nor is it any kind of solution to the newly propagated “systemic racism” being preached by Leftist leaders, Big Media, or other cultural elites and corporations who’ve signed on for the ride, partly to virtue signal and partly in hopes of not being the next victim of woke cancel culture that undergirds Defund the Police and the Black Lives Matter organization.
“Every year, approximately 6,000 blacks are murdered. This is a number greater than white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the national population. Blacks are killed at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. In Los Angeles, blacks between the ages of 20 and 24 die at a rate 20 to 30 times the national mean. Who is killing them? Not the police, and not white civilians, but other blacks. The astronomical black death-by-homicide rate is a function of the black crime rate. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined. Blacks of all ages commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, and at eleven times the rate of whites alone.
The police could end all lethal uses of force tomorrow and it would have at most a trivial effect on the black death-by-homicide rate. The nation’s police killed 987 civilians in 2015, according to a database compiled by The Washington Post. Whites were 50 percent—or 493—of those victims, and blacks were 26 percent—or 258. Most of those victims of police shootings, white and black, were armed or otherwise threatening the officer with potentially lethal force.
Moreover, 40 percent of all cop killers have been black over the last decade. And a larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide deaths are a result of police killings than black homicide deaths…Twelve percent of all white and Hispanic homicide victims are killed by police officers, compared to four percent of all black homicide victims…
Blacks make up 23 percent of New York City’s population, but they commit 75 percent of all shootings, 70 percent of all robberies, and 66 percent of all violent crime, according to victims and witnesses. Add Hispanic shootings and you account for 98 percent of all illegal gunfire in the city. Whites are 33 percent of the city’s population, but they commit fewer than two percent of all shootings, four percent of all robberies, and five percent of all violent crime. These disparities mean that virtually every time the police in New York are called out on a gun run—meaning that someone has just been shot—they are being summoned to minority neighborhoods looking for minority suspects.”
Black Americans do not even want fewer police. “Monmouth University surveys over the last five years reveal that black Americans nationwide have become more satisfied with their local police departments. The percentage satisfied reached 72 percent in June — a rate that is now identical to that for whites.”
So if this is the evidence, why is Defund the Police being promoted so vigorously and why are city councils buying-into this narrative so quickly?
It’s about chaos and power. The more of the former that can be generated, the more of the latter shifts to Left-leaning or Leftist organizations and people bent upon disrupting the social order. This is a stated goal of Black Lives Matter the organization, and it is a goal for groups like Antifa. The fact that a lot of American citizens are being duped by this is all the more threatening.
There are other ways to improve criminal justice systems and policing. There is always room for improvement as the saying goes. I am not against reform. There are other ways to reform. Semper reformanda is not, after all, a bad idea. But reform and improvement are much different than wholesale rejection of law and order and an outright embrace of idealistic romanticism about the goodness of humankind.
Defund the Police and its rationale flow from a lack of understanding of human nature. To argue that crime will go away and social utopia will set in if cities simply do away with the police force is the height of fantasy.
"Once it’s determined that every man, woman, and child can do what is right in their own eyes (Judges 17:6), there is no end to what’s left of the old order to be destroyed. Once they sow the wind, they will reap the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7)."
Defund the Police is ill-conceived, emotion-driven, irrational, and ultimately ineffective. Defund the Police is a crime a passion, and insofar as it is adopted, communities will pay a serious price dealing with the social disorder that will follow.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2020
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