Defunding the Police Has Been a Massive Failure
“rising crime is rapidly undermining the progressive consensus”
It is absolutely stunning that some people thought this would be a good idea and actively pushed it. Look at where we are now.
Michael Shellenberger writes at UnHerd:
How Defund the Police backfired
Over the last two decades, progressives have established a new consensus on crime. Nonviolent felonies like shoplifting and drug possession should be reclassified as misdemeanours. Cities should defund the police and spend the money on nurses, psychologists and social workers instead. Offenders should have minimal involvement with the justice system — and be kept out of jail wherever possible.
But now, rising crime is rapidly undermining the progressive consensus. Homicides rose 30% in 2020, and over two-thirds of America’s largest cities will have had even more homicides in 2021 than in 2020. At least 13 big cities will set all-time records for homicides, including Philadelphia, Austin, and Portland. Meanwhile property crimes in California’s four largest cities rose 7% between 2020 and 2021. Car break-ins in San Francisco declined temporarily in 2020, because Covid emptied the city of tourists, but they have since skyrocketed, reaching 3,000 in November. Many residents have stopped bothering to report crime.
Of course, many crime rates are still below what they were in the Eighties. And progressives are right to say that we shouldn’t panic about rising crime, since past panics contributed to cruel and crude responses, including overly long prison sentences with little in the way of real rehabilitation programmes. That’s why, in the late Nineties, I worked for George Soros’s foundation, among others, advocating for drug decriminalisation, reduced sentences for nonviolent crimes, and alternatives to incarceration.
But today it’s clear that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. In 2000, when I stopped working on criminal justice policy, progressives were advocating mandatory rehabilitation as an alternative to incarceration. Now, progressive prosecutors are simply releasing criminal suspects from custody without requiring rehab or extended probation.
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If progressives truly believed that Black Lives Matter, they would address the two factors that kill the most young Black people:
1. Abortion
2. Black-on-black (often gang) violence.
But it always seems that progressives are trying to make it easier to get abortions, and trying to stop police from taking guns away from gang members. Based on their actions rather than their words, it appears that progressives don’t care about Black lives at all.
Every time I see this photo of the squad my mind flashes back to the “sidetrack couch” in Animal House, to which the brothers kept herding pledges who had zero hope of being invited to join the frat.