Cities in the United States and Canada are reembracing policing after being inundated with violent crime.
Last month, the Canadian city of Vancouver rebuked its soft-on-crime status quo and overwhelmingly elected the pro-police A Better City party. Vancouverites had grown exasperated with the frequent stabbings, assaults, thefts, and acts of vandalism that had turned parts of the downtown core into no-go zones. Chinese Canadians were particularly vocal, due to rampant violence against Asian seniors in Chinatown. At the same time, Ottawa, Canada’s capital, decisively elected a centrist pro-police mayor in lieu of Catherine McKenney, a liberal city councilor who often vilified the city’s police force and previously tried to slash its budget.
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America testifies to a similar tale.
In Seattle, former Mayor Lorena Gonzalez promised to cut the city’s police budget by 50%. Under her leadership, city officials supported the “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest,” or CHOP, a monthlong occupation protest by racial justice activists that turned part of a Seattle neighborhood into a police-free “autonomous zone.” Crime rates in CHOP surged 525%, however, leading to several murders that forced Gonzalez to evict the protesters and soften her rhetoric. Nonetheless, voters replaced her with pro-police Bruce Harrell in late 2021. The effects of the defunding movement remain, as major corporations, such as Amazon, abandon Seattle due to safety concerns.
Portland, a bastion of liberal politics, has also shifted course. In 2020, the city cut its police budget by $15 million, causing a policing shortage. Predictably, crime surged to the detriment of poor minority neighborhoods. Murders spiked 83%. The city quickly changed course in late 2021, reinjecting funds into the police. San Francisco’s story? In December 2021, Mayor London Breed, who previously supported defunding the police, announced a crime crackdown. This was joined by a successful referendum to get city prosecutor Chesa Boudin fired.
A moral lesson follows. In most of these cities, the activists who most militantly opposed the police appeared to live in well-off neighborhoods where crime wasn’t an issue, while those who suffered under the ensuing crime waves lived in low-income minority communities. It was yet another example of woke activists demanding utopian policies that had disastrous impacts. Polling data has consistently shown that low-income and minority communities overwhelmingly prefer to reform and improve the police.
Liberal cities are belatedly grasping that distinction.
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Adam Zivo is a Canadian columnist and policy analyst who relocated to Ukraine earlier this year to report on the Russia-Ukraine war. He is writing a book on how the war is experienced by average Ukrainians.
