Premium

Buffalo's Potential Next Mayor Is a Socialist Who Compares Police to Slave Owners

Buffalo mayoral candidate India Walton speaks to supporters during a rally, Saturday, Oct. 23, 2021, in Buffalo, N.Y. (AP Photo/Joshua Bessex)

 

Buffalo may elect the first openly socialist mayor of a major U.S. city in a generation.

India Walton, a millennial community organizer in the mold of lunatic U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, won the Democrat primary this summer, where only 10 percent of voters turned out, upsetting the multi-term incumbent Mayor Byron Brown.

But Brown refused to step aside and is instead running as a write-in candidate in the general election. Brown leads in some polls, but a write-in campaign is hard to measure, as he relies on support from local Republican officials and moderate-to-conservative organizations in Western New York. The local GOP hasn’t fielded a mayoral candidate in nearly 60 years.

Brown says Walton’s aberrant views — like “defund the police” — on crime would imperil Buffalo residents. He points to Walton’s plan to cut funding for the police department.

Shortly after winning the primary, Walton confirmed she’d like to eliminate policing. And like other radicals, her campaign now proposes inane alternatives that will “free up resources” for social services to replace police duties while she searches for those pesky “root causes” of crime.

Meanwhile, public safety is voters’ top issue with high crime in Buffalo, so Walton has slightly toned down her rhetoric. Yet her priorities remain traditional leftist claptrap, with no interest in combating crime.

In a horrific interview Walton granted to the hard-left feminist “Reply Guys” podcast this summer, she described policing as the evolution of slave patrols and insisted Italians were recruited as cops to oppress blacks.

“Policing in this country you, know, while we’re talking about apples and bunches and bushels, policing in this country is in the soil, right?” she said “Like, police are an evolution of slave patrols that were invented, um, you know, after the abolition of slavery, and during slavery, to reclaim back when black people were considered property, right? And then when we look past Reconstruction, the reason why there are so many people of Italian American descent in police forces is because you know there used to be this class solidarity. But at a certain point it was like, hey at least you’re not them, right? Like you can be, you can have this position of power and if you keep those people in line then you’ll be okay.”

Related: Minneapolis Voters Decide Next Mayor and Whether to Defund the Police

In this nearly-unintelligible rant, Watson claims that policing was created mainly to be a successor to slave patrols. She also believes that Italian Americans became police officers as the result of “racial superiority” in the post-Civil War period; her ilk says Italian immigrants were willing to subjugate blacks if it led to a “position of power” as police officers.

Claims that policing emerged from slave patrols is a myth that’s become popular among libertarians and leftists in recent years trying to delegitimize the institution.

In reality, today’s policing has no relationship to Jim Crow or slavery. Instead, some form of policing has always existed in modern civilization.

Buffalo is a liberal city in a blue county. However, former President Donald Trump still received 41 percent of the vote last fall, and President Joe Biden crushed Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democrat primary. So will a divisive, woke radical and admirer of socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez become its chief executive, or will sensible voters take a hint from New York City and reject an anti-police candidate?

 

Recommended

Trending on PJ Media Videos

Advertisement
Advertisement