Now that the madness and rioting seems to be receding just a bit, so too has the mad enthusiasm for the hard left’s cause of “defunding the police.”
Maybe they finally started reading the polls. Only 16% of Americans support defunding the police, while 65% oppose.
You know who doesn’t want to defund the police? Trayvon Martin’s mom.
In 2012, a young Florida man named Trayvon Martin became a cause célèbre after he attacked a man named George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Martin in self-defense. Zimmerman was found not guilty of second-degree murder, but the Black Lives Matter movement that emerged from the killing lives on. You might’ve heard about it on the news recently.
Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, is running for county commissioner in Florida and says she disagrees with demands to defund the police that some have called for in the wake of George Floyd’s death, according to the Guardian…
Fulton has kept a close eye on the protests over the death of George Floyd — her son’s death helping spark the Black Lives Matter movement — and told the Guardian she doesn’t agree with calls to “defund the police…”
“I think we need more police,” she said. “We need police with better standards, and police with better ethics and better work habits…”
If large cities actually go ahead and defund the police, it would cost thousands of black peoiple their lives:
Amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, riots, looting, and calls to defund the police, a Harvard economist has found that proactive policing saves black lives.
“Defunding the police is not a solution and could cost thousands of black lives,” Roland Fryer told The College Fix in an interview about his latest research.
“I think the streets are talking and we should listen. People are frustrated,” he continued in the email. He sympathizes with frustration at “big racial differences” in educational achievement, life expectancy and “almost every part of life.”
The youngest African-American professor to receive tenure in Harvard history, Fryer uses a data-driven approach on fraught social issues.
He made waves four years ago with his research on use-of-force incidents by race. It found that black suspects were less likely to be shot by police than white suspects.
His new research is similarly controversial in the media. In a Manhattan Institute video late last month, Fryer exclaimed that he encountered an “absolute refusal to grapple with the data” from the media and “insistence” that he should not publicize it.
Referring to a reporter whom he showed the research, Fryer told The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley: “I thought the person might sit with the numbers for a bit and go, ‘Damn, a thousand lives. That’s a lot.’”
It’s a repeat of the controversy over his 2016 paper on police use of force. Though that research “didn’t find racial bias in shootings,” he told Riley, it “did find very large racial differences in lower level uses of force.”
John Nolte noted that the war on police is a war on black people:
Unless you’ve lived in an inner-city, or ghetto (as we called it back in the day), you honestly can’t imagine what life is like.
During the mid-80s, I spent two years working and living in the inner-city of Milwaukee. My world revolved around 6th and Wisconsin and 35th and Highland (look it up) years before the violent crime decrease of the 90s. On top of that, during the insane 70s, I went to an inner-city school, Jackie Robinson Middle School, on 37th and Fond Du Lac (look it up).
You can write off my experience because I’m a white boy, but my neighbors weren’t white, and during the 80s, my girlfriend, who’s now my wife, wasn’t white, and yet we were all suffering under the same government oppression — the inescapable, suffocating oppression of living in a high crime area.
Believe me, racism was the least of anyone’s problems…
All I can tell you is this… Living in a high crime area is like living in a world where vampires rule. You better be home and behind a locked door before the sun goes down. You might not hang garlic and crucifixes, but you do hang bars on your windows (and hope you don’t have to escape a fire) and install multiple locks on your doors, and you choose the suffocating heat over the cool but dangerous breeze of an open window.
Walking to your car after work when it’s dark (especially for a woman) is a daily dread.
Walking those two or three blocks home after work in the dark from the bus stop (especially for a woman) is a literal act of bravery.
I know what it’s like to come home to find my apartment robbed, to have my car stolen, to get assaulted after turning over my wallet. I know what it’s like to have a drug gang squat in the vacancy down the hall. I know what it’s like to get a panicked call from the woman you love because she’s trapped at work, at a retail store, where a street gang just walked in and announced it was taking over.
And I know how all of this ensures you forever tread water. You can’t get a better job in a nicer area because now you have no car to get to work. You can’t save money to get out, because now all your stuff’s been stolen and you have to replace it. You can’t get a better paying job because the crime long ago scared away the kind of employer who might offer such an opportunity. You live hand-to-mouth, a gerbil on a wheel, so there’s no way to save for the first month, last month, and security deposit on a nicer, safer place.
Yes, we finally got out. It took a measly $900 loan (that took me 15 months to pay back), but lemme tell you, that’s no way to live. There’s nothing romantic about poverty, and when criminals reign, it’s a literal dystopia.
Looking back, even though my skin color made me the racial minority, I don’t ever remember race being an issue with any of my coworkers or neighbors. We were all in it together.
But back to the corruption…
This system is put in place by design, to keep people down, to keep them from becoming a complacent member of the middle class. And if you care enough to take a good look around, to study past and present history, it is a system put in place by Democrats to keep the people who live in these predominantly black neighborhoods poor, angry, desperate, and huddled.
And what wold does the hard left envision after police are abolished? One where they hold the monopoly on force:
While traditional policing implies deputized professionals enforcing laws passed by the legitimate representatives and—it is to be hoped—duty-bound to respect individual rights, Community Armed Defense rejects the individual rights upon which the U.S. system is built in favor of the collective communal “rights” of identity politics. It exists not to uphold law, but to enforce the “political demands” of favored groups.
The image of a volunteer fire department but with guns may suit the anarchist ethos, but in fact Community Self-Defense is about establishing revolutionary shadow governance.
Far from simply providing armed enforcement, the term covers a full panoply of activities, providing all manner of services traditionally provided by the government—from food banks and co-op gardens to housing and medical clinics.
This may seem overly ambitious. But for the revolutionary insurgent it is just good policy. And as a tactic, it works. From the Taliban to FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) to the Mexican drug cartels, the language may be different but the model is the same. Create instability, force out the government, and finally replace it. Reports from Seattle suggest that, already, groups are “requesting” $500 per business owner to help support “community protection and security.”
In areas where the logic of revolutionary politics is operative, those who can provide services and a sense of stability, even for a fee, reign. Whether they were the ones who caused the instability to begin with is immaterial. In revolutionary periods, groups that demonstrate even a modest ability to perform this function should not be underestimated.
Attempts to abolish police, including the most recent Seattle Autonomous Zone, may seem risible. They are likely to be short-lived and collapse upon themselves as revolutionary ardor wanes. But they provide a short-term proof of concept, a propaganda victory, and justification for future efforts. Abolition of the police—whether by groups like Antifa, or through elected radical city councils—is now officially on the menu. The establishment of Community Self-Defense and its standards of collective group rights will represent a kind of de facto regime change.
Have Democrats finally realized they’ve plopped the boiling frog into revolution too quickly, or will victimhood identity politics drag them into the same electoral defeats that breakdowns in law and order have delivered in the past?
