Whaddya Know—Commie Cities Miss Their Police
It was just about a year ago at this time that many American cities descended into a madness that was frustrating, heartbreaking, and quite surreal.
The common thread among all these cities is that they have been in the thrall of Democrats for a very, very long time. When violence erupts like it did last summer, having a bunch of rabid ideologues in charge — no matter what side they’re on — is never the answer. The room is in need of some adults once chaos waltzes in.
The surreal part, of course, was how the Democrats in Congress reacted to the unrest. Rather than side with law and order, they fully embraced the Marxist lunacy of the Black Lives Matter movement. To be sure, they were almost all the way to a full embrace prior to last summer, but they hadn’t gone in for the deep hug yet. In doing so, they outed themselves as the cop-haters that they’ve been for some time now.
As the Democrats in Congress go, so goes the American mainstream media. The MSM immediately got to work on one of the most ambitious propaganda initiatives I’ve seen in over 20 years of writing about liberal media bias. We were repeatedly assured that the protests were mostly peaceful by “reporters” who were passing along these assurances while on camera and standing in front of burning buildings. There are times when I truly believe that the coastal bubble media elites think that no one in flyover country has cable or the internet.
The outcome of all of this violence was that the pinko idiots who run these cities decided that they should follow BLM’s lead in everything and kneecap law enforcement so all of the “peaceful protests” could continue unabated and ad infinitum.
It was — and still is in some cities — a most toxic environment. Criminals were lauded and allowed to do whatever they wanted while those who put their lives on the line every day and are tasked with protecting the public were constantly demonized by Democrats all up and down the food chain.
As the move to defund the police picked up steam in liberal hellholes that were already out of control it didn’t really take ESP to figure out how it would all play out. For those of us who live and work in reality, that is.
The Democrats’ fairy talk about defunding the police goes something like this: if tax dollars are removed from a city’s police budget and reallocated to social programs then the bad guys will suddenly decide to no longer be bad.
To the surprise of absolutely no one in conservative America, the bad guys didn’t go along with the program.
Now many of the blue cities that couldn’t wait to take money away from law enforcement are looking to reverse course.
One year after the movement to “defund” law enforcement began to upend municipal budgets, many American cities are restoring money to their police departments or proposing to spend more.
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he would reinstate $92 million for a new precinct after scrapping the project last summer. The mayor of Baltimore, who led efforts as a city councilman to cut the police budget by $22 million last year, recently proposed a $27 million increase.
After attacks on Asian-Americans and a rise in homicides in Oakland, Calif., city lawmakers in April restored $3.3 million of the $29 million in police cuts, and the mayor is now proposing to increase the department’s budget by $24 million. Los Angeles’s mayor has proposed an increase of about $50 million after the city cut $150 million from its police department last year.
In the nation’s 20 largest local law-enforcement agencies, city and county leaders want funding increases for nine of the 12 departments where next year’s budgets already have been proposed. The increases range from 1% to nearly 6%.
So, fewer cops equals more crime. Gosh, who’d a thunk it?!?!?
Even if funding is restored or increased, there still may not be enough law enforcement personnel around to help. It turns out that cops don’t like being lied about by thugs and Democrats (redundant, I know) and a lot of them in blue cities such as Minneapolis and Austin have left the job. In New York, the police department had to put a cap on the number of applications for retirement that could be made each month after a 411 percent increase one week last summer.
Why risk their lives every day if they’re going to be thrown under the bus by elected officials at all levels who are just jockeying for a little camera time?
Democrats ceased being serious about policy a long time ago. The progressive fringe is where reason and intellect go to die. Sadly, that fringe is now the mainstream of Democratic politics. Democrats govern solely by emotion, and we are seeing the disastrous effects of that writ large right now.
Again, there are very few adults in the room over on that side of the aisle. They can continue to lie with impunity because the mainstream media will let them. Last year they threw in with the bad guys and paid an almost immediate price for it. Well, their citizens did, anyway. The Ivory Towers are still fine.
Now they want a do-over that still doesn’t call the bad guys bad.
As the commercial says: “That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.”
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