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.
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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