This post is closely connected with the one I did the other day on the “Systemic Racism” that seems to be virulent in US cities run by the Democrat Party.

As you can see from the above clips, “Defund The Police” (DTP) became very popular in 2020 as one of the Left-Wing responses to the death of George Floyd – the other response being to Burn, Loot and Murder – as well as blaming White Supremacy, the Republican party and – of course – President Donald Trump.

Any idea that helps Democrats win an election will be embraced by them. One of the softer versions was implemented in Chicago and it said all the nice stuff about helping criminals to reform, Reclaiming neighbourhoods and so forth. Reducing police numbers was not mentioned – but it was implicit in the calls for funding to be “re-directed”. The harder version, the one shouted by Antifa and BLM, was as follows:

  1. Defund the police so that they have to reduce staff and policing activities.
  2. Make it clear that it’s the Police who are the problem, thereby causing officers to quit in large numbers before they become the next scapegoat to political ambition, and severely restrict the policing they do, both of which reinforce step 1.
  3. Have District Attorneys (DA’s) with policies to reduce prison populations by releasing long-term convicted prisoners, including those convicted of violent crime.
  4. Have DA’s release people just arrested by police (no cash bail and so forth), as well as dropping charges against them, especially if they’re BLM or Antifa protestors.
  5. Reduce the thresholds for “minor” crime, like refusing to prosecute unless it’s more than $900-$1000 of theft.

But it’s important to understand that this was not just as a result of Floyd’s death. This concept of defunding the Police has been in the works for some time on the Left:

From the streets of Chicago to the city council of Seattle, and in the pages of academic journals ranging from the Cardozo Law Review to the Harvard Law Review and of mainstream publications from the Boston Review to Rolling Stone, advocates and activists are building a case not just to reform policing—viewed as an oppressive, violent, and racist institution—but to do away with it altogether. When I first heard this slogan, I assumed that it was a figure of speech, used to legitimize more expansive criminal-justice reform. But after reading the academic and activist literature, I realized that “abolish the police” is a concrete policy goal. The abolitionists want to dismantle municipal police departments and see “police officers disappearing from the streets.”

That article from 2019 described how “political momentum” was building behind the idea: Floyd’s death simply switched it to full after-burner. The result for the cops was described in detail by one of them in What Policing Is Like in the Age of BLM/Antifa in late 2020: he had to use a pseudonym…

… because otherwise, I’m subject to being fired for violating department policy or, at the very least, suspended for a time and then transferred to the crappiest assignment they can think up for me. Not to mention I have a family to support. I purged my Facebook friends.
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But after a couple of high-profile incidents where suspects wound up dead, we were essentially told to stop pursuing the bad guys: Too much liability for the city. So, if a violent felon who shot someone last week is spotted and you know it’s him? Depending on the ranking officer working, you’re most likely not going to be allowed to go get him.

Read that and you won’t be surprised that there has been an explosion not just in violent crime – not just murders but muggings, carjackings, shoplifting, and smash-and-grab raids in those Democrat cities. And as this guy points out:

Okay, I get it; you’ve been brainwashed into believing Democrat = good and Republican = evil. But for fuck’s sake, can you pause just for one moment and turn off your reflexes and engage in critical thinking, employ logic and look at the actual policies that the people you vote for implement? I guess that’s asking too much, all things considered. Ironically enough, and even more infuriating, the “marginalized communities” and “communities of color” that supposedly are oppressed and persecuted because of white supremacist policing and the criminal justice system wind up with the highest body counts and casualty rates as a result of embracing the BLM line to defund the police.

When I first went to Chicago in the mid-1980’s they had 800-900 murders per year but they were isolated to certain parts of the city, it was gangs fighting for control of territory, and the new approaches to policing in the 1990’s promised improvements, which duly arrived.

This time around I see no hope for improvement because the diagnosis and the solutions are wrong.

So let’s roll with the Democrat cities: Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York City, Portland and, of course, Minneapolis.

Chicago

A little bit of schadenfreude time:

Illinois Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford (D) and her husband were victims of a carjacking Tuesday evening in suburban Broadview. Law enforcement said that the carjackers sped off the scene in Lightford’s vehicle along with the Durango.

Lightford has yet to issue a statement on the matter.

Well at least she didn’t blame White Supremacy!

Seattle, Washington

An Unherd article, The Fall of Seattle, describes in detail where the city administration’s attitude towards its Police changed overnight because of the Floyd incident, even as many Seattle cops pointed out the things MPD Officer Chauvin had done wrong in Floyd’s case:

“In May of 2020, our political leadership considered us a necessary evil,” says Chris Young. “In June of 2020, they started to think that we were an unnecessary evil. Every cultural institution in the city turned on the police.” … “We were hated,” says J.D. Smith. “We were literally hated overnight.”

And then they worked 16 hour days for months in that atmosphere, carrying riot gear in their cars just in case. Of course Antifa and Burn Loot Murder were right in the middle of it with the East Precinct being abandoned to the CHAZ. Cops began to leave, via early retirement and quitting to join other Police Departments in the state. The city was okay with this because it enabled the defunding they wanted anyway. And it wasn’t just the hate but the increasing futility of the job, with the example of Nordstrom’s flagship store getting done over:

On 1 June, Mike Magan [robbery detective] and a colleague from the Seattle bomb unit entered the site to look for possible video footage. The first floor, he says, was destroyed. “All the jewellery cases had been smashed,” he says. “All the cosmetics were gone. All the makeup was gone. Shoes were gone — bags. Everything.” As for tracking down the looters, that wasn’t on the agenda. “We were told: you will not investigate any of those things,” Magan says. “The city attorney wouldn’t file charges on them.”

That too is a similarity Seattle has with the other Democrat cities on this list. The SPD is down from 1,400 officers in 2019 to less than 900 now, even with $25,000 bonuses for new hires. Which has led to the inevitable result:

  1. Gun violence reached an 11-year high in 2022;
  2. Motor vehicle theft reached a 15-year high in 2022;
  3. A total of 7,753 individuals were arrested in 2022, an 18-percent (1,174) increase over 2021;
  4. More than 20 percent of those individuals were arrested at least twice in 2022; and
  5. The average response time for police in 2022 was more than 10 minutes.

Seattle is in the midst of “a criminal and humanitarian emergency” a bakery owner who indefinitely closed her business over safety concerns.

This February 2022, Bruce Harrell, newly installed as mayor of Seattle, made it official that his city has gone into decline. “The truth is the status quo is unacceptable,” he said in his first state of the city address. “It seems like every day I hear stories of longtime small businesses closing their doors for good or leaving our city.” But it’s not just small businesses. In mid-March, Amazon announced that it was abandoning a 312,000-square-foot office space in downtown, citing concerns over crime.

San Francisco

Given how liberal and woke the city already was on all issues the DTP movement hardly had to speak up at all; the SFPD was already getting hammered by the insanities of the city refusing to enforce the law and losing officers that way: SFPD Short 825 Officers By the End of 2022:

A 15% cut in 2020 and a 11% cut in the budget for the SFPD in 2020 and 2021 respectively slashed numbers across the city…Due in large part to the shortage, as well as factors such as then-DA Chesa Boudin’s new policies that led to fewer criminal prosecutions, crime skyrocketed throughout the city across every category. The city was named as one of the most dangerous in America, with residents given a 1-in-16 chance of becoming a victim of a crime every year. 

Ah yes, the good son of Weather Underground terrorists, murderers and hardline communists, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, young Mr Boudin carried all their insanity into his job, refusing to prosecute a myriad of crimes, even violent ones. Amazingly, he was booted by the SF public in a crushing recall election defeat just two years after they elected him, mainly due to working class Asians, given that Boudin-style nonsense was and is supported by white college-educated liberals. The voters also booted three similar Far Left, “Anti-Racist” fanatics from the SF School Board.

As a result even the Lefty Mayor, London Breed, two years after supporting DTP, looked at the reality and has changed her tune: San Francisco Mayor Gives Pro-Police, Anti-Crime, Anti-Drug Address, including a $25 million increase in the SFPD budget. Naturally the Far Lefters are not happy, but it may make little difference because of the same reasons as the other cities; what cop wants to have multiple targets on their back?

Los Angeles

Incredibly the Los Angeles DA, George Gascon, was Boudin’s predecessor in San Francisco, but departed for the larger city to the South, where he began implementing all the same crap. However, the increased crime rates apparently were not bad enough for LA voters because, incredibly, he survived his recall election, and then doubled down on his policies – of course.

But perhaps it would not have made any difference considering how politicised the LAPD have become, as retired-LAPD officer Jack Dunphy (not his real name) explains in Why Would Anyone Want to Be a Cop in Los Angeles Today?:

LAPD chiefs are now selected by the five-member civilian police commission, whose members are selected by the mayor. In recent years, the selection criteria for commissioner would not appear to include any expertise in law enforcement, but rather merely how each member can be said to represent some segment on the all-important “diversity” spectrum. A chief is appointed to a five-year term, with the police commission having the option of reappointing him to a second term if a majority so chooses.

The result is that what LAPD officers have leading their department is a politician in uniform, one who was selected by politicians initially and who is beholden to them for his recent reappointment to the position, for which his total compensation comes to $494,615.05.
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And keep in mind that the upper ranks of the LAPD are largely populated by people who achieved their positions by demonstrating their willingness to please the chief and thereby please his political masters.

When even your own leaders don’t have your back, for political reasons, why would you stay – and why would you join such an outfit in the first place? Same story as the other Democrat cities:

The department is about 500 officers short of its authorized strength, and in its desperation to boost staffing it is trying to lure back recently retired officers.

Philadelphia

In 2020 the city reduced Police Funding by $14M, but as per the other cities the cops were defunding themselves anyway, leading to an undermanned department in 2022 with 500 vacancies and the usual desperate measures of recruiting bonuses and bring back retired cops:

We need a different approach because what we’re doing right now is not working,” said Rep. Jared Solomon, D-Solomon “We’re now in crisis in Philadelphia.”

Also yet another example (they’re endless in these cities) of Lefty voters not learning: it’s bonus schadenfreude time:

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA) was carjacked at gunpoint in Philadelphia and was left unharmed on Wednesday, her office said in a statement.

The city had a record 562 homicides in 2021, with 2022 producing 514, and as even the Lefty site Axios noted:

  • Overall shootings have increased by 3%, according to city stats.
  • Overall violent crime is up 7% from the same time last year.
  • Robberies in which perpetrators used guns are up 60%, while rapes decreased by more than 25%.
  • Property crimes are up more than 30%, with businesses getting hit hard as commercial burglaries have risen a staggering 50%.

New York City

Every city has slight variations on how crime presents. With New York City it was officers being ambushed:

The ambush comes in the wake of several other attacks on New York Police officers in recent days, as violent protests have rocked New York and other cities across the country: an officer was bashed in the head by a fire extinguisher in Harold Square; another was mowed down by a car in the Bronx; three people jumped a police officer, also in the Bronx.

All the officers survived but assassination attempts on cops seem to be an NYC thing. Also the DTP movement never got far in the city – shown by them electing as mayor a former NYPD cop, Eric Adams. However in every other respect it’s the Democrat City formula repeating:

Despite all this, and his pushback against DTP, Eric Adams has not tackled the other factors hitting the NYPD, which is that the New York political class have sided with the Antifa/BLM activists and regard the Police as enemies.

Portland, Oregon

The detective assigned to investigate the death of Spaulding — a chiropractic assistant who didn’t do drugs, wasn’t in a gang and lived close to the house where he was born — left in 2020 in a wave of retirements and the detective assigned to it now is swamped with fresh cases after Portland’s homicide rate surged 207% since 2019.

That’s from the Associated Press and the post referring to notes that:

The AP briefly alludes to “disillusionment” following George Floyd’s murder. For some reason — I’ll leave it to you to figure out why — they refuse to mention the “Defund the Police” movement, and instead use the bizarre word-replacement, “calls to divest from policing.” They just can’t bear to say “Defund the Police” caused this, so they come up with other words to euphemize it. And then they turn to blaming the lack of cops on covid and Biden’s Super Economy instead of themselves.
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Hey that’s another possible factor — now that leftwing mayors and Soros prosecutors have decriminalized crime and set all the criminals free, crime is soaring, and cops can’t make a difference, even if they were staffed at their previous levels.

Maybe that accounts for the death-spiral causing them to quit: Their jobs consist of nothing but arresting the same people only to see them put back out on the street by a leftwing mayor and Soros DA within hours.

Nah. Probably just “worn out from the pandemic”

So even by August 2022 even the Lefty fans were beginning to back away from this insanity. Which brings us back to the trigger point…

Minneapolis

After two years of mayhem the city reached a new low in mid-2022 when about 100 rounds were fired into the MPD’s 4th Precinct. Amazingly nobody was hurt, but this was simply a continuation of 2020:

Minneapolis remains without a permanent police chief 7 months after Chief Arrandondo retired.  The department has only 564 officers, down from nearly 850 just a few years ago. 
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The downtown entertainment district and sporting venues have been hit hard.  Rarely does a week go by without a story of citizens being assaulted, robbed, shot in the crossfire, or just harassed while downtown or attending a ballgame in the evening.  A recent Twins homestand with the Yankees averaged over 10,000 empty seats – that just hasn’t happened in the past.

Metro Transit is under the same strain.  Stories of riders being assaulted, robbed, or harassed while trying to ride the light rail are commonplace.  Ridership has decreased by half since pre-pandemic days, and safety is often cited as a primary reason.  Those that are riding are often criminals and homeless who openly use drugs, urinate and defecate, and sleep in the isles of the train cars.
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We have never seen such a public safety crisis in Minneapolis.  And this is the city the New York Times labeled “Murderapolis,” in the mid 90’s. 

Needless to say that it’s the city’s Black population that has been hit the hardest by all this, as was predicted by this article in 2020:

If the present wave of protests succeeds in hamstringing American police departments, many more black Americans will die. That is just what transpired in Baltimore after the 2015 riots following the death of Freddie Gray, who died in the back of a police van after his arrest for possession of a knife. Several days of looting and burning ended with the arrival of the National Guard.

I didn’t even bother with Baltimore because it was a crime-disaster even before 2020. Suffice to say that the Mayor, a a quiet, serious-minded, Black woman named Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, did not even run for re-election. That was no surprise, considering that the Baltimore city government charged six police officers with murder and manslaughter, and mainly black juries acquitted them

But it also went into considerable detail about the failure even before Floyd’s encounter with Officer Chauvin:

Why black Americans should want to undermine the police forces that protect them is a sensitive question that has a simple answer: The price of such police protection is humiliation. The sort of policing that keeps criminals off the streets requires stopping and frisking large numbers of people, stopping cars with a broken tail light, and so forth. But this also subjects large numbers of innocent people to humiliating examination and occasional mistreatment.

Most people would rather be dead than humiliated, and black Americans are no exception.
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The long humiliation of black men has incubated a terrible rage. The phony promise of upward mobility leaves them feeling cheated, with good reason. In 1960, 90% of white women and 87% of black women aged 18-59 years had been married at some point in their lives; by 2016 the proportion had fallen to 60% for white women and just 33% for black women

Sadly, black women account for 40% of all abortions, although they comprise only 12% of the female population. Black babies, that is, are more than three times as likely to be killed before birth than white babies.

A death-knell is tolling over black America. The high murder rate of black victims killed by black perpetrators is the most extreme expression of a self-destructive impulse that undermine black families. Self-destruction through violence—a form of what Emile Durkheim called anomic suicide—horrifies white liberals. They do not have to ask for whom the bell tolls, for it tolls for them, too.