As Democrats continue to try rewriting their history of support for the “Defund the Police” movement, some of them are also once again demonstrating that they have a “security for me but not for thee” approach on the matter.
According to information from recent campaign filings, freshman Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) has paid out close to $70,000 in the second quarter for private security:
Bush’s campaign sent $54,120.92 in payments between April 15 and June 28 for “security services” to RS&T Security Consulting, a New York-based firm with a mysterious online presence, Federal Election Commission records released Thursday show. The Democrat’s campaign also paid $15,000 to Nathaniel Davis for “security services” over the same time period.The $69,120 in security payments accounted for more than a third of Bush’s $197,000 in campaign expenditures during the second quarter, the FEC records show. It’s also nearly double what her campaign spent on private security during the first quarter of 2021.
Bush has been one of the staunchest proponents of pulling funding from police department budgets in her state, saying back in January that “Defunding the police isn’t radical, it’s real.”
In May, after St. Louis moved forward with plans to gut the St. Louis Met PD’s budget despite the fact that the city is one of the most dangerous in the country, Bush called the vote “historic” and said it “marks a new future” for the city:
“Today’s decision to defund the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department is historic. It marks a new future for our city.””For decades, our city funneled more and more money into our police department under the guise of public safety, while massively underinvesting in the resources that will truly keep our communities safe,” she continued.Bush added: “But even as more and more money has gone into policing, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department continues to be the deadliest police force in the nation, year after year—all while violence in our communities continues to skyrocket.”
In addition to using campaign funds to pay for private security, Bush also spent taxpayer dollars on security for a least one event during the first quarter.
Other members of “The Squad” have spent thousands on private security this year, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley:
Meanwhile, however, Ocasio-Cortez has paid $3,000 per month on a New York-based “security consultant” service since December, 2020, though she was spending $5,000 per month on the same security consultant beginning May 5, 2020, as The Daily Caller first reported.Since the start of 2021, she has spent more than $25,000 on “security” costs dated Jan. 25; more than $1,500 on security detail for a February trip to Houston after a shocking winter storm devastated the area; nearly $4,000 on “security services” dated Jan. 19; and nearly $850 on “security services” dated Feb. 2.
Not surprisingly, Democrats who get caught doing stuff like this rarely respond to requests for comment when they get called out.
Last summer, after the city of Minneapolis unanimously voted to begin the process of defunding the police, several city council members were found to have been getting tens of thousands of dollars in taxypayer-funded private security after allegedly facing threats of violence over their vote to defund the police.
If the polling over the last year or so on defunding the police is a reliable indicator, most people are fully awake on this issue at this point and oppose decimating police departments, and support either maintaining the current police presence in their communities or increasing it.
It’s radical left-wing politicians like Bush who still don’t seem to get it, nor do they seem to care about the concerns expressed by their constituents that their calls go too far. Instead, they continue to enjoy the type of security details that most Average Joes and Janes cannot afford.
I believe this is what they call “Democratic privilege” – not that any of them would ever admit to it.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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