In a New York Times (NYT) op-ed Wednesday titled “‘Defund the Police’ Is Dead. Now What?” far-Left columnist Charles M. Blow mourned the death of the “defund the police” movement, warning Americans will yet “regret” rejecting it.
“Its opponents beat it to death, not that it was ever wildly popular,” wrote Blow. Citing an October Pew poll that found “support for reducing spending on the police had fallen significantly,” Blow lamented that “the numbers have always been low.”
Noting that the 2020 underperformance of Democrats was blamed by party leaders in part on the defund the police movement, Blow argued that “Republicans believe it harms Democrats” who are now “running scared from the slogan.”
He then admits that “less public appetite for doing anything that might reduce a community’s police presence” came as “violent crime began to rise.”
According to Blow, such attitudes culminated in President Joe Biden’s “Safer America Plan” speech this week whereby the president said, “When it comes to public safety in this nation, the answer is not ‘defund the police,’ it’s ‘fund the police.’”
“It was the capstone in the crusade against the defund movement, and possibly the gravestone of the movement itself,” Blow lamented.
“The issue that launched the push to defund the police — police shootings — has not changed,” he wrote, citing statistics that supposedly point to a disproportionate rate of black Americans and Hispanic Americans shot and killed by police. “What do we do about this?” he asks. “Have we simply become inured to these horrific numbers? Do these lives no longer matter?”
Blow concludes that “the signal we are sending to all the people who truly believed that there would finally be real change in policing and the possibility of more equity in our criminal justice system is that racial equity is a tertiary issue, that it is lower than people want to admit on the social hierarchy of policy priorities. We will regret that.”
Leftist radicals like Blow may regret it, but the average American citizen won’t. Crime has surged nationwide after the Left campaigned endlessly against police, leading to eroded confidence in law enforcement, sunken police morale, and an officer exodus. Following the defunding of police in many Democrat cities, murder rates rose 16 percent in 2021 across major U.S. cities.
Big cities are also continuing to see an upward trend of violent crime in places such as Los Angeles and New York City which defunded their departments and employed soft-on-crime “bail reform,” which allows career criminals back on the streets.