Democratic Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri has made it her mission to defund police departments and leave communities more vulnerable to crime. All the while, she has made sure to protect herself with the finest private security money can buy.
Bush spent more than $70,000 on private security in the first three months of this year, according to Fox News. She spent more than $230,000 on private security in 2021. This is all necessary because, in her own words, the alternative is that she would “possibly have a death attempt on [her] life.”
And Bush’s life is more important than the poor suckers who didn’t go from anti-police activists to privileged members of Congress. In 2020, the country saw the largest one-year increase in homicides in recorded history and the most homicides since 1998. Homicides went up again in 2021, by 5% over 2020 and by 44% over 2019.
But the lives of the commoners don’t matter to Bush. “I’m going to make sure I have security because I know I have had attempts on my life,” Bush asserted in August 2021. “So suck it up. And defunding the police has to happen.”
Bush will be the first one to find a camera to profess her support for Black Lives Matter, but the movement to defund police departments harms black communities the most. In 2019, 53% of homicide victims were black. Bush’s congressional district includes St. Louis, a city with a population that is 45% black and that also had the highest homicide rate in the country in 2019.
More importantly, blacks over the past two years have consistently opposed the movement to defund or abolish police departments. They want police officers in their communities, and they name crime as the top problem they are facing. Bush wants to strip them of the police protection they want and support all because BLM activists like her think they know better. In her view, these communities don’t deserve the protection they want, but she intends to buy her own protection.
Bush, like the BLM activists who denounce capitalism while using donor money for expensive mansions, is a hypocrite. She treats activists as her constituents while unapologetically fighting to prevent her St. Louis constituents from police protection in the most violent city in the country. And she will continue to spend hundreds of thousands on her own private security while advocating that her constituents be left to the whims of violent criminals.
