A year into one of the worse social experiments ever conducted on American citizens, the politicians responsible for the highest increase in crime in a generation are suddenly trying to reverse course on their blatant attacks and blame on the law enforcement profession.
After de-funding and refunding the New York City Police Department, Mayor Bill de Blasio has suddenly decided that he wants to target violent criminals again. He recently dropped his “de-funding” verbiage and called for “precision policing” which sounds like the very measures that the Big Apple used to reduce crime in the first place…before it was called racist.
After Portland eliminated the “Gun Violence Team,” the agency recently announced that they wanted to bring it back after homicides jumped 1300% earlier this year and while facing a record shootings, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot recently asked the federal government for help.
Minneapolis, Seattle, Washington D.C. and countless other cities that jumped on the “defund” police train have not only reversed course but have placed millions into the budget to hire more officers.
But none of it will work…
It won’t work because as politicians threw away every success that law enforcement has had in the last two decades in reducing crime in the name of “community trust,” there will never be trust between law enforcement and those politicians again.
That is exactly why Portland can’t even get volunteers to re-join their “Gun Violence Team.” Sure, the politicians want to backtrack when it helps them politically but they are the same ones that called their cops racist for simply doing their job a year ago.
Those same politicians can invest whatever they want into recruiting but every potential recruit saw exactly how those cities treated the current cops over the last year.
As crime continues and the hypocritical politicians start blaming cops in the months to come, just remember that no profession could overcome what was done to law enforcement by the policy makers.
As rioters destroyed cities and called “all cops bastards,” those politicians stayed silent and let it happen. They told cops on the front line to back down and in the case of Minneapolis, to run away and their silence no doubt created the violence that America sees today.
Unfortunately, it will be the citizens that pay the price and if we could use a term so often abused by those politicians in the last year…those citizens that will pay the price will be disproportionately black.
So it’s over for many cities and the politicians got the “reimagining” that they desired and it’s time that they own it.