In 2020, when San Fransisco’s Democratic mayor London Breed proposed a 35 million dollar cut in police spending, City Supervisor Hillary Ronen declared that was not nearly enough. Ultimately the police budget was decreased by approximately 120 million.
Today that same Ms. Ronen is begging for a greater police presence in her city. CNN recently reported the crime figures for San Fransisco and they are appalling. Quite aside from the horrific increase in acts of violence, statistics show every citizen of the city has a one in twenty chance of being the victim of a property crime. Yes, if you live in San Fransisco, there is a one in twenty chance you will be robbed, have your car stolen, etc., etc., this coming year! In descrying this reality, the hypocritical Ronen is placing the blame squarely on the backs of her city’s police officers. Apparently her naive and ultimately idiotic efforts to defund them had nothing to do with it!
In 2020, Brandon Johnson, presently seeking to be Chicago’s next mayor, was fully supportive of the initiative to defund his city’s police force. Invoking the deterministic notion that crime is always the result of either mental illness or socioeconomic deprivation, he recommended redirecting funds to various social services which would no doubt solve many of his city’s problems. But crime is out of control in Chicago and two thirds of its voters have made it clear an effective, well-funded police force is a major priority. Sensing his chance of winning April’s upcoming runoff election to be jeopardized by his “liberal” views, he is now insisting that he does not and never has supported reducing the size and power of his city’s law enforcement units. The facts, however, reveal that he is lying and he is lying because the “defund” mania that sprang from George Floyd’s 2020 death has done nothing but increase crime not only in Chicago but in various other cities throughout the States.
The underlying delusion evident in Johnson’s comments and shared by most on the Left, is that criminality is generally caused by socioeconomic factors utterly beyond the individual’s control. In plain English, they don’t believe in Human Evil! But all of history proves them wrong, as indeed does the absurd double standard of their Ethos. You see, if social inequities are the cause of most criminal behavior, why are the Rich and Powerful, subject to none of the hardships of the “disenfranchised,” the greedy, deceitful monsters they are deemed to be in the Left’s simplistic, Marxist world-view? Evil clearly transcends socioeconomic categories, and the notion that increasing social services to the poor will eliminate crime in Chicago is naive in the extreme.
No one is exonerating police officer Derek Chauvin of his actions on May 25, 2020, but George Floyd was high on fentanyl and was equally responsible for his own death. A long time drug addict with a penchant for violence, he had been arrested several times. Released repeatedly by “compassionate” D.A.s, he had done nothing to get his life in order. He was a self-indulgent, amoral individual with no respect for either the rule of law or other people. Sadly, there are millions like him on the planet. Myles Sanderson who killed 11, including his own brother, in Saskatchewan on Labor Day Weekend, 2022, had been arrested and yet released over 50 times because he was deemed an Indigenous victim of Western oppression. In a wonderful indictment of the stupidity of Canada’s “liberal” attitude towards law enforcement, Cree leaders suggested they should have their own police force which would no doubt protect their people far more effectively than the system presently in place.
The naive, Utopian, “we can fix the world” impulse underlying the Left, demands it eliminate the Inner Life of Man from its narrative because it is ultimately beyond human scrutiny. While governments can manipulate the socioeconomic landscape, they are powerless before the enigmatic variables of Character and Intelligence. But the “progressive” approach to Human Behavior is not only brazenly superficial, it actually incites criminality by declaring vast portions of the species victims of oppression who have every right to be enraged. 2020’s widely disseminated but purely speculative notion that George Floyd’s death proved most White American cops are racists, clearly inspired many inner city Blacks with nothing but disdain for the Rule of Law. It is the sort of narrative that has been excusing if not inciting Black urban crime for decades now. Yet when the police are forced to arrest inordinately high numbers of Blacks in attempting to maintain public safety, the Left hypocritically insists those arrests, which they may in fact have made necessary, actually validate its belief in Systemic White Racism! Truly ridiculous!
Brandon Tatum is a retired Black cop whose podcasts frequently expose the absurdity of the contemporary “progressive” narrative. In response to B.L.M.’s contention that Whites continue to be Black Americans’ main tormentors, he points out not only that Black on Black crime is out of control in inner city America, but that it is the hated police who are in fact his people’s main defense against criminals of all colors. His podcasts are worth watching.
The facts of Human Nature clearly don’t matter to the brain-dead Left. In Jan. of 2023, The Chicago Tribune reported that in the previous year approximately twenty one thousand 911 calls lodged by citizens who felt threatened by impending criminal assaults, went unanswered for over an hour. How many innocent people, one wonders, suffered needlessly because of the sheer stupidity of their government. Former Mayor Lightfoot, who now says she never favored defunding the police, reduced their budget by 80 million dollars in 2021 and, when an inordinate number of cops retired that year, made no attempt to replace them. She paid the price when soundly defeated in the first phase of Chicago’s recent election. And of course she played the Victim Card, claiming her loss was due to the fact that she is Black, Female and Gay.
Simple, inarguable fact: While none of us is perfect, some are so consumed by self-interest, so incapable of honest self-awareness, so disdainful of the rights of others, that they are capable of unconscionable acts of Evil. But one’s moral status is in no way defined by one’s Color, Gender or Sexual Orientation. Identity has nothing to do with Morality. There are bad White cops just as there are bad Black people. And there are heroic White cops just as there are amazing Black people. The “defund mania” was rooted in the stupidity of the Left’s infatuation with Identity Politics. The dramatic increase in crime evident in several “progressively” ruled American cities is clear evidence that effective police forces are essential to the maintenance of Law and Order within any civilized society. The attempts by Ronen, Johnson and Lightfoot to pretend that they never supported defunding the police, is perhaps the most dramatic evidence of the stupidity of that “liberal” initiative.