Start Date: January 30, 2023

Defund the police. So how is it working?  

Remember back in 2020.  Minneapolis police were called to respond to a crime.  The accused was George Floyd. He had some criminal history and had used drugs. He had allegedly forged money to rob a store.  The grocer called the police for help.  He resisted. But he was only one man. It should have been manageable.  But for whatever reason the officers used excessive force and he died.  That was awful and tragic. They were removed from the force, tried, and convicted.

Then, it got weird. Somehow George Floyd was portrayed as a combination of Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and maybe Mother Theresa. They made statues and named things after him. That is sad. Being a victim doesn’t make you a saint. It is awful to see real heroes mired with some guy who was killed by rogue cops.

Then the rest. The riots, destruction, ruined businesses, burned buildings, gutted cities. It didn’t help poor people. When things get bad they cannot pick up and walk away as do the wealthy Antifa kids.

The not so brilliant idea was to respond to increased crime by eliminating or greatly reducing police.  I suppose the logic is that if we don’t have them, we can’t have bad ones. We may as well say the same about, doctors, pilots, athletes, teachers, priests, men, women, children, every ethnic group, LGBT etc. There are no perfect institutions or cultures. These ideas always come from people with security details and gated communities, not the people who are left behind.

One police chief, a female African American, pointed out that if they have layoffs the union contracts would require that the most recent hires be let go. They would be the youngest and most diverse part of the force.  She feared they might get sued. On the other hand if you target the senior staff for early retirement you lose the people with the maturity and experience to possibly de-escalate conflict. Either way the staff you leave behind are overworked, sometimes putting in 13 hour shifts day after day. I saw a photo of an officer sleeping in his car between shifts. Patrol officers can’t afford to live in Manhattan or the Hancock Park neighborhood of L.A. I knew one LAPD officer who commuted though CA traffic roughly 75 miles one-way from her home to her department in L.A. 

So they are TIRED. How do you respond to criticism, being spit on, sworn at, having water poured on you, and physical assault, especially when you are TIRED? Maybe you would get cranky, lose your temper more quickly than normal, especially if you reasonably believe most of the people you will encounter range from unfriendly to a legitimate threat.

With everyone heading for the door you eventually end up having to try and recruit back to a job you defamed and defiled.  Who wants that?  Even the military, which still has a fairly high level of admiration, has been lowering its standards because more than 75% of 17-24 year olds are obese, inadequately educated, dependent on drugs/meds, or have a criminal history, which is a disastrous commentary on our future as a nation, military or otherwise. The remaining 20-some percent of the young population are being taught it is a hateful institution.  So there aren’t many candidates. It is probably even worse in policing.  You cannot make a job completely undesirable and then expect the best and brightest to apply.  

So this leads us to the latest scandal in Memphis: Tyre Nichols. A black man killed by five  black cops in a department run by a female black chief in a majority black city. Police have been arrested. Fire and paramedics may be. The female black police chief could end up losing her job because it all happened on her watch. There are indications that the officers in question had inadequate experience and training, or should never have been hired. 

Is anyone learning anything? It doesn’t seem so.

L.A.’s newly elected mayor, Karen Bass is talking about eliminating more officers. She claims she is looking for extremists. Nothing about how she will define extremism. Is it simply not voting for her?  Moreover, how will she find these people? Is she going to violate their civil rights to spy on the department at large? Will she use big tech to read private emails?  Will the overworked detectives be assigned to investigate their own co-workers. There are always the time tested witch hunts where people are encouraged to accuse their fellows.  None of this lends itself to the kind of trust you need to have in a partner who may have your life in their hands.  

However it plays out, it likely will result in losing senior staff in a department that is already short 800 officers. Or is that the plan, to eliminate the highest paid staff and back fill with less expensive rookies? Many a budget has been reduced through age discrimination. The LAPD recruiting classes of late 2022 and early 2023 have had 37, 30, and then 22 graduates join as entry level officers while 50 to 60 or so experienced officers retire each month. Do the math. The department is getting both smaller and less experienced. Mayor Bass’ solution to increase the numbers is to lower the standards for admission. But that is how Memphis got into its dilemma.  

In San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen came out full force in 2020 to defund and reduce the SF Police Department.  And they did. In 2020, Mayor London Breed redirected $120 million from law enforcement. Crime skyrocketed. The city is now down 525 officers and could be down by 825, the same down turn as the police in Los Angeles, a city that is five times larger. Now Ms. Ronen, without a hint of repentance, is agonizing over being “betrayed” by the department for not receiving more police presence in her district. What is the city doing? In desperation it seems they are hiring officers who are unqualified, missing fingerprints, background checks, psychological exams, etc. Again this is how Memphis ended up with the Tyre Nichols death. So it should be no time before there is a bad outcome inspiring Ms. Ronen to return again to demanding another defunding. 

If at this point you need a laugh, or a good cry, California is in the process of banning K-9 police units. Apparently we have racist dogs. Never mind that they are used in lieu of lethal force and risk or give their lives to avoid gunfire between humans. It will lead to more shootings of and by police, so the leaders can call to reduce the police, and then complain about response time, and then backfill openings with even less qualified or properly motivated individuals. Round and round they go.

So in the name of justice we have degraded law enforcement to be lesser, both in number and in ability. Someone joked that these politicians must work for U-Haul as they couldn’t be more effective in making their communities unlivable. Criminals may not be evil geniuses but they do have street smarts. They know that acts that do not result in investigations AND arrests AND prosecutions AND incarcerations are, de facto, legal. You can do them over and over and there is no consequence.

Where does that leave us?  Crime is soaring. The most anti-police communities are bleeding businesses and residents. Nike is leaving Seattle. Amazon is moving staff out of downtown.  The Seattle PD can no longer investigate new adult sexual assault cases, as they don’t have enough detectives. Thus it is effectively legal. A retailer closing his San Francisco clothing store says that he never felt as unsafe when he was growing up in Latin America. Walmart is closing the last of its stores in Portland.  A Vietnam veteran says he felt safer walking in Saigon than in downtown Portland. Miracle mile in Chicago now has vacancies in almost one third of its retail units.  Wait times in some cities for emergencies can be an hour or more. In Austin an injured family struck by a drunk driver waited over two hours for an officer to be available to respond.  The drunk was then sober and only got a minor ticket. Non-violent crimes may get no response. Just file a report online.  A rural county in northern California no longer has a sheriff on daytime patrol. If it happens between sunrise and sunset, you are on your own.

So how is it working ?