Anti-police ideology keeps making black people less and less safe

And then: “Aren’t you glad you live in Iowa?”

DEMOCRATS’ SENATE HOPES ONLY GET TOUGHER IN 2024

The editors of the Des Moines Register responded to these commonsense comments with spittle-flecked apoplexy, denouncing the ad as “dehumanizing,” “racist,” and “indefensible.” How do you explain such a ridiculous reaction to something so harmless? The simplest explanation is that the Democratic Party, the political arm of the corporate media, is extremely vulnerable on the issue of crime right now. They know it, and they are every bit as scared as that reaction suggests.

Police defunders and soft-on-crime Democratic prosecutors have played a huge role in creating a national crime wave. According to newly released FBI data, that crime wave got worse last year after an already lawless and violent 2020.

Murders, which had risen almost 30% in 2020, rose an additional 4% nationwide in 2021. Note that the slower increase is not progress — rather, it means the numbers are still headed in the wrong direction and, in many cities, setting new records. Nowhere are those numbers going in the wrong direction as quickly as they are in cities that actually did defund their police forces.

Philadelphia, which cut $33 million from its police budget, is also plagued by a prosecutor known for extreme leniency toward violent career criminals. The City of Brotherly Love set a new homicide record in 2021 with 562 killings. In New York City, where seemingly only hardworking people who act in self-defense ever get prosecuted, council members cut the police budget by $1 billion. The murder tally jumped from 318 in 2019 to 462 in 2020 to 485 last year.

In New Orleans, which cut its police force’s funding by 10%, the murder tally has steadily marched upward — from 124 in 2019 to 220 as of this past Sunday. Washington, D.C., which cut $15 million from its police budget in 2020, went from 166 murders in 2019 to 226 in 2021 — the highest in 18 years. Seattle cut police funding by 13% in 2020. Homicides jumped from 36 to 53. Although murders dropped back to 42 in 2021, there was a 20% increase in overall violent crime, and the number of arsons rose by 33%.

Austin, Texas, cut its police budget by (depending on how you score it) $21 million or $150 million in 2020, forcing the cancellation of three cadet classes and shifting vital department resources (forensics, for example) outside the department. The city’s homicides (44 in 2020) more than doubled the following year to 89 — a new city record. This year, the Austin City Council restored police funding, so at least they learned something.

Minneapolis, birthplace of the “defund the police” movement, cut department funding by 4.5% at a time when it really should have been increased given the ubiquitous rioting and violence of summer 2020. The city’s homicide count, just 46 in 2019, has since risen to 96 last year, just shy of an all-time record set in the 1990s. As in many of the cities mentioned above, Minneapolis also experienced an outbreak of carjackings last year — 600 of them.

Many of these cities are now having trouble hiring police officers because morale is so low. In New Orleans, 911 dispatchers have resorted to downgrading violent crimes (even rapes) to “nonemergencies” because they simply lack the officers needed to respond to 911 calls within the same day.

Why take on a thankless job like policing in a city where the politicians openly despise, disparage, and defame you as a group? Why work in a city where the prosecutors will simply release the criminals you arrest with a slap on the wrist? Why not just move to Iowa instead?

It isn’t rocket science. When police start neglecting the neighborhoods that need their presence most, the people who live in those places start getting killed in greater numbers. Is it any surprise that, according to the new FBI data, the share of murder victims who were black spiked from 51% in 2015, the year after Michael Brown was shot while attacking a police officer and trying to steal his gun, to 61% In 2021?

Although incomplete reporting clouds the picture somewhat, it also appears that the total count of black victims in 2021 must have been greater than the 21st-century record of 9,941 from 2020. That’s a lot of black lives — an awful lot more than the eight unarmed black people who were unfortunately shot by police in all of 2021, according to the Washington Post police shooting database.

The movement to weaken the enforcement and prosecution of laws is bearing its bitter fruit in the nation’s great cities. The party that planted this tree needs to pay an electoral price next month or things will get much worse.

Only a white liberal could possibly believe it good policy or good politics to go soft on the extremely tiny proportion of black people who actually commit violent crimes so they can in turn inflict even more death and destruction on the vast majority of black people who do not.

Multiple polls have shown that black voters want to see more police on the streets and to have the laws enforced more stringently. For example, in September 2021, more than a year after the murder of George Floyd, 75% of black Minneapolis respondents told a Star Tribune poll that they opposed “reducing the size” of the police force, even though 58% of the same black respondents had an unfavorable view of the department.

So it’s not as if they are blind to the problem — they just hate your solution even more.

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