BLAINE GABBERT COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT AND LAUGHTER: Has Colin Kaepernick Lost His ‘Halo?’
Mr. Kaepernick balked at requests from Change Co. executives that he sit for an appearance with George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America” and declined to participate in interviews as part of the rollout, according to an internal document.
This makes sense. Who would want to do live television interviews after helping to launch such a destructive movement? Mr. Kaepernick began his protests in 2016 while a member of the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League. In August of that year, Mr. Kaepermick told the NFL: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color… There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
Mr. Kaepernick became perhaps the country’s most prominent advocate for abolishing police forces. Tragically, politicians who then sought to reduce policing have presided over historic levels of bodies in the street.
In San Francisco where Mr. Kaepernick’s movement became famous and where homicides have been on the rise, even radical politicians are now trying to combat the lawlessness they once enabled.
Speaking of which: How Defund the Police backfired.
So anti-police protests take a toll. In 2014, a white police officer in Ferguson killed an unarmed 18-year-old black teenager, causing demonstrations across the US. Afterwards, the police chief in nearby St Louis noted that, “the criminal element is feeling empowered by the environment.” In 2015, the US Department of Justice asked one of the country’s leading criminologists, Richard Rosenfeld, to investigate whether homicides had risen after the incident. At first, Rosenfeld was sceptical, noting that homicides in St. Louis had started to rise before then. But after looking at the evidence, he changed his mind. “The homicide increase in the nation’s large cities was real and nearly unprecedented,” he wrote in his 2016 report. Rosenfeld had found a 17% rise in homicide in the nation’s largest cities, between 2014 and 2015.
Rosenfeld told me, when I interviewed him, that last year’s Black Lives Matter protests had contributed to the homicide increase. “When people believe the procedures of formal social control are unjust,” noted Rosenfeld, “they are less likely to obey the law.” And BLM protestors fail to recognise that the people who suffer most, when the police can’t do their jobs, are black Americans, who are more likely to be victims of violent crime. They are seven to eight times more likely to be homicide victims than white Americans.
But progressives have gone one step further, by undermining the idea that police actually have any power to reduce crime. “Law enforcement is not going to prevent the violence,” claimed Philip Atiba Goff, CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, a few weeks ago. In 2020, then–vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris tweeted, “America has confused having safe communities with having more cops on the street. It’s time to change that.”
Researchers find that negative publicity about the police has a powerful impact on police officers. Little wonder, then, that in 2020, at least two dozen police chiefs or senior officers resigned, retired, or took disability leave in America’s 50 biggest cities. 3,700 beat officers left. Today there are fewer police officers per capita in America than at any time since 1992.
What liberals ignore is that there is good quantitative evidence that more policing can reduce crime. They argue that the police don’t actually prevent crime, they just punish people after the fact. But in 2009, President Obama’s stimulus package offered a billion dollars in grants to struggling American cities, to fund the police; cities qualifying for the grant increased policing by 3.2% and experienced a 3.5% decline in crime.
And there’s another inconvenient truth that liberals ignore: the evidence suggests that fewer cops may mean more police misconduct, because the remaining officers must work longer and more stressful hours. Working a 13-hour, rather than 10-hour, shift means cops are far more likely to experience public complaints against them, while back-to-back shifts quadruple the likelihood.
Still, progressives are busy gaslighting the public about their efforts to defund the police. A progressive columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote, “while there is continuing debate about what is driving the violent crime increases … we know for a fact that defund had nothing to do with it. Because defund never actually happened.” This is patently untrue. After the Black Lives Matter protests, more than 20 big cities reduced police budgets by at least $870 million. The LAPD’s budget was slashed by $150 million in July, for instance. It’s just that homicides rose so quickly that most cities reversed their defunding budgets. “From New York City to Los Angeles,” noted the Associated Press at the end of last month, “in cities that had some of the largest Black Lives Matter protests … police departments are seeing their finances partially restored in response to rising homicides, an officer exodus, and political pressures.”
Hence the Oceania-style pivot this year, as a form of triage with the midterms looming large:
● Frisco mayor: By golly, what this city needs is “aggressive” policing instead of “bull****.”
● Councilwoman wants to offer $50K for officers to work in Oakland.
● Spike of Homicides Causes Oakland Mayor to Reverse Course on Diverting Funds From Police.