Republicans Mustn’t Get Hoodwinked on ‘Defund the Police’ Pivot By Andrew C. McCarthy
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/republicans-mustnt-get-hoodwinked-on-defund-the-police-pivot/
“And by the way, if you go to the Black Lives Matter website, you will still find this: “#DefundThePolice: . . . We call for a national defunding of police. . . .” (Compare now-vice president Kamala Harris in 2020 praising Black Lives Matter as “the most significant agent for change within the criminal justice system”).”
Democrats might be making the case for funding once more, but it comes with a big catch.
O bviously, it makes sense for Republicans to denounce the Biden administration over Jen Psaki’s ridiculous claim that it was the GOP that wanted to cut police funding, the White House’s . . . um . . . rationale being that opposition to the president’s economic wrecking ball of a stimulus proposal equals opposition to every individual item in that boondoggle — as if deciding not to buy the manse you can’t afford in the tony school district means you oppose public-school education.
Everyone knows it was Democrats who made “defund the police” a mantra — occasionally, even a litmus test of what it means to be a viable Democratic candidate or official these days (even as Democrats who championed the scrapping of police departments spent taxpayer funds on security guards for themselves).
Nevertheless, as I have pointed out before, the smarter progressives have never been in favor of defunding the police, never mind zeroing out their budgets to achieve a wholesale elimination of the police. They not only want full funding, but significantly increased funding levels.
But here’s the catch: They want to change the definition of what policing is.
The savvy Democrats know that, as violent-crime rates surge, the party is getting killed over its “defund the police” madness. There is nothing to be done about that in the short term: The Bolshevik Left has insisted that Democrats are dead serious about gutting law enforcement (AOC: “Defunding the police means defunding the police” — not “budget tricks or funny math”); and the “defund the police” rhetoric is associated in the public mind with the months of lethal rioting that began last spring, and that was led by Black Lives Matter and Antifa, for whom Democrats continue to provide cover.
And by the way, if you go to the Black Lives Matter website, you will still find this: “#DefundThePolice: . . . We call for a national defunding of police. . . .” (Compare now-vice president Kamala Harris in 2020 praising Black Lives Matter as “the most significant agent for change within the criminal justice system”).
Over the long term, though, the Democrats’ plan is to remake policing. There would still be bulging budgets and robust police forces, but the investigative practices that dramatically reduced crime to historically low levels will be forbidden. Intelligence-based, proactive law-enforcement, in which police are deployed fluidly to places where crime is spiking, would be discouraged (because this results in the “disproportionate” arrest and prosecution of black males). “Broken windows” strategies that encourage enforcement against quality-of-life offenses — and project assurance that the rule of law is in effect while increasing police departments’ intelligence about criminal activity and gangs — would be eliminated. Policing specifically targeting gang crimes, including prosecutorial enforcement of gang charges and sentencing enhancements, would be erased.
If you are going to craft law-enforcement policy on a theory that racial disparities in arrests, prosecutions, and incarcerations must be erased; and if you are going to make a taboo of the remorseless fact that some demographic groups offend at much higher rates than others; then the only way to impose “equity” on policing is to refrain from enforcing the law. Period.
There would still be lavish police budgets, but the lack of enforcement activity would free up swaths of spending for tasks that are not policing as commonly understood: reallocation of law-enforcement dollars to education, mental-health services, and housing programs (with the police budget as the pass-through); social work (family counseling, crisis intervention, psychotherapy, etc.); “restorative justice” programs that purport to hold offenders accountable without prosecution; ramping up training in non-enforcement resolution of disputes; implicit bias and cultural responsiveness training; classroom sessions on the historic police involvement in discrimination and injustice; sensitivity training for dealing with LGBT and “gender-nonconforming” populations; training in community partnerships to address the root causes of crime; promotion of “positive police presence” at community events that have nothing to do with law enforcement; surveys and focus groups to assess community impressions of police; vigorous investigations of past and present claims of police misconduct; funding the establishment of professional standards and accountability boards by which progressive activists harass police under the guise of rooting out corruption and holding cops accountable; and so on.
Some of these initiatives will be out-and-out objectionable, some objectionable as a supplanting of law-enforcement activities, some objectionable other than in small doses, and some objectionable as a “fund the police” masquerade for progressive pork. In the aggregate, though, this is a comprehensive Democratic enterprise to transform policing — to replace the models that drove crime down for a generation (e.g., from 2,245 murders in New York City in 1990 to 289 in 2018) — on the false premises that police are the armed enforcers of an inherently racist society, and that racial disparities in prosecutions are explained by racism rather than by materially different rates of offense behavior.
Even energetic media revisionism will not be able to help Democrats in the short run. They are stuck with their “defund the police” rhetoric, and they will be hurt by it — which, of course, is why Psaki is going to laughable lengths to try shifting blame.
Over the long haul, though, the battle is not going to be about defunding the police but defining the police. Republicans should be against funding the progressive vision of law enforcement, which would give the country what it has given Democrat-run cities: non-enforcement and rising crime.
Comments are closed.
