Suppose you're on a battlefield with bad guys coming at you full force and you have the means of stopping them. But then, while calling your own troops nasty names, you pull them off the field, letting the bad guys have their murderous way.
That's not that far from what we've done in the United States with cops, and we thus have had an egregious homicide rise. Guess who pays the most: our Black American citizens.
It is terrible, terrible, terrible that some of our police have themselves done horrible things, but while the George Floyd tragedy signaled a deep need for reform, Democrats preferred denying Republicans any say in getting anything done. Police are still being universally demeaned as immoral racists and, in some major cities, police forces have been at least temporarily stripped of significant funds. Police have retired early and quit in record numbers.
The numbers? It's 3,700 beat cops who are gone, it is reported. Think of a policewoman in Asheville, N.C., who was written about in the New York Times. Because of her presumably mistaken career, friends quit talking to her. Relatives quit talking to her. A demonstrator set her clothes on fire. As quoted in the Times, she said, "I am drowning in this politically charged atmosphere of hate and destruction." She quit.
One problem with that is that police are hard to replace at the moment.
We've had thousands of protests saying abolish cops and hundreds of riots saying the same thing, using violence as an exclamation point. Defunding has proceeded. Portland, for instance, cut a police budget in 2020 by $16 million after 12 homicides, and then experienced 44 more homicides with 200 police officers taking off and the homicides in 2021 getting worse.
Experts are telling us that in 2020 homicides went up by a whopping 30% in 34 of the nation's largest cities, a historic rise. The bloody increase in homicides was an unbelievable 92% in Louisville and 95% in Milwaukee.
Hey, the pandemic did it, some say, but a precise study shows the big bump did not come until virulent anti-police protests went national. Nothing exacerbates crime like the lessened prevention that followed, and those who think police a foremost threat to Black Americans should consider the exceptional death toll experienced by Black Americans.
