How brave the woke are, until the consequences of their bold actions rebound upon them.
We are not referring to those courageous souls now facing charges for their roles in the violence, assaults, arsons, and riots going on in various cities, supposedly in the name of racial justice. Rather, we refer to city leaders in Minneapolis, who just invented some clever excuses to keep off the November ballot a ludicrous measure that would have abolished their police force.
Barry Clegg, chairman of the Minneapolis Charter Commission, told the Wall Street Journal that the measure needed a 90-day delay (which will conveniently keep it away from voters) because it still requires further input from the minority communities it is intended to protect.
But the fact is, the abolition or defunding of the police is not a popular cause in any community.
We know this because instead of embracing the dogma of wokeness, the Gallup Organization actually tested its assumptions. Gallup’s survey, released last week, found that 61% of black people want police presence to remain the same as it is now, and a further 20% would like to see more police on their streets. So that’s 81% in favor of the police.
It is painful to have to explain this to people who consider themselves anti-racists and allies, but most black people are neither criminals nor even slightly sympathetic toward criminals. They are far more likely than white people to be crime victims, and they want the police to be there, even if they are rightly wary of the potential for discrimination and brutality.
For all the attention given to black Americans’ disproportionate incarceration or involvement in crime, it is lost on most people that the actual criminal population in any given community is relatively small. For context, roughly 94% of all black people are not arrested in any given year (compared to 97% of all white people), and more than 98.5% of black Americans are not imprisoned at any given time. So it is a crude, even offensive stereotype to assume that most black people think of themselves as being on the wrong side of the law — just waiting to become victims of police who are overzealous, lacking in restraint, and spoiling for an opportunity to inflict racist violence. Black people are far less likely to suffer at the hands of police than they are to suffer either direct violence or deterioration of their quality of life due to local criminals.
Despite the appalling encounter with police during which George Floyd died in May, almost no one from any community believes that the real problem is the existence of the police. The police need to be reformed, not abolished.
Unfortunately, perhaps in part due to the strange circumstances in the nation today — the coronavirus, the political radicalism, and these wild, wearying times — the conversation about reform that needed to happen after Floyd’s death was hijacked by radicals whose real aim is violent revolution and the abolition of the United States.
Their silliness can now be abandoned. It is now time to go back and discuss real police reform. The pay, education, and training of officers must be scrutinized as factors potentially correlating to the incidence of police brutality. The trend toward militarization of police must be reversed. The question of qualified immunity must be revisited. Abusive practices, such as civil asset forfeiture, must be curtailed.
And perhaps most importantly, police unions, which routinely shield truly bad and violent cops from accountability, must be weakened. Their demands for various measures that make cover-ups more likely must be rejected.
New York and other cities are now experiencing crime waves — a direct result of the pullback of necessary police protection and the decision by demoralized officers to retire en masse. Civic leaders must recognize the vital service that police provide and embrace the idea of mending, not ending, the role of officers in our society.
