“Defund the Police” Democrats Get A Wake-up Call . . . from Leftist Site The Atlantic
When you’ve lost the Atlantic . . .
The absolute disaster of the “Abolish the police” cum “Defund the police” movement is finally sinking in among the left . . . and in unexpected places.
In New York City, Democrat mayoral candidate Eric Adams sailed to his primary victory on the votes of outraged—to use the leftist racist term intended to diminish human beings to their skin color alone—”black and brown” voters who are appalled by the violence and bloodshed in their neighborhoods.
If there’s a lesson to be learned from the Democratic mayoral primary — and there definitely is one! — it’s that it’s easy to ignore street violence when there’s very little street violence to be seen. Such is the oblivious attitude of mostly white Manhattanites who voted against Eric Adams, the only real law-and-order candidate in the race.
The de Blasio-era rise in violence did not impact all areas of Gotham equally. Not even close.
Inhabitants of lower-income, high-crime, mostly minority neighborhoods turned out for Adams in huge numbers, up to 70 percent of votes. The only major candidate who pledged crime-fighting strategies with real teeth, he earned the New York Post’s endorsement for making public safety his campaign’s centerpiece.
Meanwhile, the neighborhoods that voted for Kathryn Garcia (and her wishy-washy crime-fighting strategy of replacing the NYPD’s “warrior culture” with a “guardian mindset,” whatever that means) are among the city’s least dangerous, as shown by NYPD CompStat data for each of the city’s 77 precincts.
This division amongst NYC primary voters, where pampered (white) wealthy elitist progressives voted for the anti-Adams Democrat socialists who want to abolish the police and “abolish prisons,” isn’t limited to NYC.
Even the far-left outlet The Atlantic is making the progressive case for abandoning the “defund the police” madness in an article entitled, “Progressive Denial Won’t Stop Violent Crime” (archive link).
Rising anxiety about crime will fuel support for policies that Ocasio-Cortez is opposed to. Many on the left feel understandably outraged about police abuses, and worry that using policing as a tool to combat crime will only harm people in the most vulnerable communities. But if progressives pay close attention to people in those high-crime communities, they’ll discover that residents generally want both police reform to prevent abuses and more effective policing to tackle crime.
Progressives are making a moral error by downplaying violent crime and dismissing the role of police in dealing with it. Featuring @PeterMoskos @SteveBellow @fortforatlanta and @SalAlbaneseNYC. https://t.co/mzN2dDAk9M
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) July 27, 2021
Note that when you hover over the article, the original title is “Why the Crime Wave is a Disaster for Democrats.” The author, Zaid Jilani, takes Democrats/progressives/socialists to task for being more concerned with what acknowledgment of and a shift from their disastrous de-policing agenda will mean politically than with the very real and actual harm this lunatic idea is inflicting on the very communities they cynically claim they want to protect.
In the minds of many progressives, acknowledging cases like Ansari’s and the demand by those who are most at risk for policing to combat crime would only offer ammunition to conservatives and other supporters of the carceral state. John Pfaff, a prominent progressive criminologist, recently argued that “those who favor the status quo are trying to use the rise in homicides as grist for rolling back policies they dislike.”
Progressive politicians who do want to address this rise in violence sometimes worry about their ideological credentials being called into question if they embrace additional policing. “I think it’s a litmus test. You can’t talk about policing, otherwise you’re considered, I guess, nonprogressive,” says Sal Albanese, who formerly represented parts of southern Brooklyn in the New York City Council and is now the Democratic nominee for a district on Staten Island.
. . . . Some nonpolice interventions, such as youth summer-jobs programs that can help keep kids out of gangs, are worth supporting. But police are still a vital component of any anti-crime response.
That reality began to dawn on me when I went on a reporting trip to Baltimore in 2018. The city had been experiencing a massive surge in homicides, going from 211 murders in 2014 to 342 murders in 2015. This elevated rate has persisted in the years since, settling in as a sort of new normal.
Explanations from the left for this surge in violence are unsatisfying. Baltimore did not grow significantly poorer or more segregated in 2015, and hasn’t in the years since.
I urge you to read the whole thing. (As an aside: The Atlantic is one of the few leftist outlets that I always read; good writing, good thinking . . . even when I don’t agree).
Ultimately, Jilani is all but begging fellow progressives to wake up and stop worrying if this Republican or that will “pounce” or make hay of their acknowledging the truth: this “defund the police” push is causing harm, loss of life, among the very people the progressive left purports to seek to protect.
It shouldn’t be surprising to us that people who live in the most violent environments in America value the role that policing can play in making their community safer to live in.
Steve Bellow spent 40 years working in and among law enforcement. He is also the son of Black parents who grew up in the South under Jim Crow. They raised him in South Central Los Angeles during the 1960s, a period in which California saw a significant increase in violence.
Bellow is outraged by what he sees as widespread anti-police sentiment that doesn’t take into account why high-risk communities demand the presence of police in the first place.
“I get so infuriated when I read something saying Black people wake up every day worrying about the police, or it’s going to cause more harm than good if the police are involved,” he told me, recounting the way that street violence impacted his childhood. “I come from a relatively large family—two brothers, three sisters. Your young sisters couldn’t walk outside out of fear. It wasn’t fear of the police. In fact, you were hoping for a police car to come by every once in a while.”
The bottom line is that the longer the radical socialist left clings to its doomed-to-fail dreams of a police-free America, the worse the problem will get and the more it will harm the Democratic Party with voters.
Let’s hope that sanity prevails because insisting on this path of lawlessness and violence harms not only the Democratic Party but all of America.
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Comments
Democrats believe in direct action to solve problems. Republicans believe in perverse side effects to direction action.
All the problems that can be solved with direct action have long ago been solved. What’s left is problems that respond to direct action with perverse consequences.
So the left is most often wrong, and the right is most often right.
For The Atlantic to notice the perverse consequences after they’ve already happened though is late to the game. The right predicted it long ago.
I’ll shorten that. Communists are retarded and conservatives aren’t.
The worst combination in a leader is Ignorance and Arrogance. They make obvious mistakes over and over because they do not believe they are capable of making mistakes.
Even if their tune is changing, police should still bail out, take their families to places which respect police, who appreciate police.
Lawless large cities are going to find that after the threat from COVID19 recedes, people will still not want to go downtown because of the increasing threat from Criminal Violence.
You cannot return to normal until crime is under control. And, it may take decades to repair some of these Police Departments.
For the last 20 years, the city government spent millions revitalizing downtown here and it was working fairly well.
The Rat mayor and city council killed it in less than 5 months last year with the awful “re-imagining” policing idea which is just defunding. As you probably know, crime went through the roof and downtown is a ghost town. The council laughably airs commercials on the radio saying downtown is “open and safe”.
AOC may be in for a big surprise next year, as her influences wanes and she is seen for who she is, a dumb extremist who dictates to others, but ignores her own commands.
Yeah, but she pours a stiff G&T
I heard she floats her drinks. It figures.
“In fact, you were hoping for a police car to come by every once in a while.”
This entire article documents the insanity of letting white liberals govern according to their flagrantly racist sterotypical imagination of the black experience..
> AOC may be in for a big surprise next year, as her influences wanes and she is seen for
> who she is ….
Oldschool, old boy (a contradictory appellation if I ever heard one ;), I *SO* wish you were right. My hopes for such an awakening on the part of her constituents were dashed when AOC, as well as other members of the Mob Squad were re-elected in 2020.
AOC should have been trounced if only for her part in kiboshing the Amazon deal and 30,000 jobs in her district. What kind of candidates did the the Republicans put up to oppose these lunatics, candidates incapable of driving home the faults of these communists? Who will they put up in 2022?
I don’t have a lot of hope in this regard, though I will put in my vote for what it’s worth.
“Ultimately, Jilani is all but begging fellow progressives to wake up and stop worrying if this Republican or that will “pounce” or make hay of their acknowledging the truth: this “defund the police” push is causing harm, loss of life, among the very people the progressive left purports to seek to protect”
I’m guessing it’s highly likely it’s more worry about how their fellow progressives would react.
The Progressives are like a cult with brainwashed followers who are all afraid to set out of the bubble lest they be excommunicated.
I wish everyone could experience working in a police department with officers. They are by and large the nicest people you’ll ever meet. I consider myself to have almost no temper whatsoever; I am in complete control of my emotions. But when they bring in arrestees who are screaming profanities at them non-stop, and angry/crazy people come in the lobby who make no sense and/or demand the answer they want to hear regardless of what the law says … I don’t know how they stay in control, day after day after day.
Very often I’ll be sitting there doing my work on the computer, saying over and over again in my head, “Get this person the hell out of here! He’s giving me a headache!”
There are many “good” individuals who join LE for the right reasons. There appear to be many who join for the wrong reasons, including job security, income & benefits, a chance at the “disability lottery”, and retire comfortably after 20 years. … There are many aspect of LE union contracts that seem to be benefits but in action undermine the safety and effectiveness of the role of police in communities. … There are too many laws (many unlawful and unconstitutional; too many to be adjudicated such by the courts) which LE are charged with enforcing. … LEOs are individuals and given enforcing laws that present little versus great personal risk they will generally choose those laws that present less risk and more OT. … I expect you get the gist. … So I’ll conclude by agreeing there are many “good (nice) individuals” in LE; but, individuals behave differently when in a group, when their incomes (and lives) depend on compliance with “group think” and “we / them”. …
Sure. Orthodoxy is more important than actually doing or solving anything. The uber woke are used to externalizing the costs of their policies. The defund police movement doesn’t really impact the elite or near elite or usually the upper middle class.
These are the same folks who’s argument is the absence of police or lower numbers of police in ‘affluent white’ neighborhoods and suburbs as compared to other neighborhoods demonstrates that the lower crime in the affluent areas would be realized in other communities when less police are present in those neighborhoods.
They seriously argue this crap. It couldn’t possibly be that larger numbers of police are deployed to areas with higher crime rates. No they say it’s the presence of police that cause crime rates to increase.
How about a compromise? Keep the same number of LEO but deploy them across the jurisdiction in equal numbers in each ward or district of the City? Then when the insanity stops the City will still have LEO on staff to redeploy back to where they are needed?
How about a better compromise? Keep the same number of LEO, but deploy them exclusively in minority neighborhoods. Leave the limousiner defunders to fend for themselves.
Works for me but I ain’t the guy you need to convince.
“These are the same folks who’s argument is the absence of police or lower numbers of police in ‘affluent white’ neighborhoods and suburbs as compared to other neighborhoods demonstrates that the lower crime in the affluent areas would be realized in other communities when less police are present in those neighborhoods.”
This the same idea that says that if we put up a deer crossing sign, the deer will cross there. Progressives seem unable to process the basic logical distinction between causation and correlation.
The argument that Police cause crime is equivalent to the argument that wet streets cause rain.
All that matters is who decides how much funding the police get.
The Commicrats are just as braindead as their dear leader.
Leftists do not believe in such a thing as “human nature”, and so do not understand the importance of “incentives”. Their projects are therefore doomed to fail and create mayhem and destruction.
Here’s a tangentially related “good read” about another facet of why violence in NYC and how it disproportionately affects in all the boroughs but especially lower middle and indigent neighborhoods.
In NYSRPA, a group of public defenders last week filed this amicus:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-843/184718/20210723101034102_20-843%20Amici%20Brief%20revised%20cover.pdf .
P.S. Keep in mind that Tammany Hall was the Demorat Party political machine.
The vile Dhimmi-crats are so utterly predictable in their infantile, self-serving and capricious policy positions. Always behind the curve, as they adjust their political stances and their morality depending upon what the latest polls, consultant reports and focus groups state.