Defunding the Police is backfiring in a spectacular way

San Francisco CA

Description

The standard Fake News commentary says that there is a slaughter of innocent, mostly black people at the hands of out-of-control police. Liberals and fake news say the solution to the problem is to cut back on law enforcement. It's true, there is a slaughter going on, but not at the hands of the police. Moreover, the purported solution, defunding the police, would greatly exacerbate the problem, resulting in orders of magnitudes more deaths than would be saved even with the elimination of an armed police force. These gruesome facts and the data that establish them seem to be missing from the public debate. Equally missing is that there are paths to reform that would reduce the number of killings of innocent people by the police without making worse the much larger problem of violence between civilians. The number of people killed by the police is very stable, at about 1,000 per year. Almost all are killed in the context of violent criminal episodes in which the police are doing exactly what they are supposed to do. Close to 100 police are killed on average every year, half or so “feloniously.” Rather than a recent epidemic of killings of unarmed civilians, the numbers have fallen from around 95 in 2015 to around 55 in 2020. The year 2020, when Liberals exploded over the George Floyd incident, police-involved killings were actually at an all-time LOW. In police-involved killings, approximately half of the unarmed deaths involved failure to comply with lawful orders from the police. And, in fact, there are always more white unarmed victims than black, but you never hear that from Fake News, because it doesn't fit the narrative If you want to know where the REAL SLAUGHTERS are happening, it's in the private sector: From 2015 to 2019, the number of homicides each year varied from about 15,000 to 17,000. And in 2020, when police-involved killings were at an all-time LOW, the number of private-sector murders skyrocketed to more than 20,000 In reality, the actual 'slaughter' is overwhelmingly by people killing their own race. The proposals to reduce armed law enforcement rather than deal with the real problem will only make the problem of innocent deaths worse. Why did murders spike in 2020? Because the "defund the police" movement got what it wanted — considerably reduced policing. The data is overwhelming that when police activity is cut back, crime surges. Beginning in December of 2015, in the wake of the Laquan McDonald murder, Chicago police reduced their aggressive patrols. Chicago immediately found that the reduction of police presence was immediately followed by a large increase in crime. For example, the number of murders increased from 480 in 2015 to 754 in 2016. Chicago determined that because of fewer stops in 2016, it appears that approximately 245 additional victims were killed and 1,108 additional shootings occurred in that year alone In Minneapolis, they 'de-funded' the police, crime immediately spiked, so they had to "Re-Fund" the police to get it back under control. There are on average 15 police-involved killings in Illinois each year. If we lowered that number to zero by taking all the police off the streets, the trade-off would be the saving of 15 lives and the loss of at least 245 in return. And consider the racial implications; The victims of violence are overwhelmingly minorities. Of the all the victims in 2016, 78% were African-American, 16% were Hispanic, and 5% were white. And Blacks killing other Blacks is the worst problem of all. Nationwide studies of the effect of the BLM/antifa demonstrations that occurred in 2020 with the resultant attacks on the police: The data shows the same correlation between the protests, attacks on the police, police pullbacks, and then a spike in violent crime in large cities The relationship between crime and policing is now accepted among criminologists. Criminologists agree: Few people dispute the idea that the quantity or quality of policing has an impact on crime. The 'Ferguson Effect' is real: Increased scrutiny of police and increased political pressure to prosecute police, leads to reduced effort by officers and causes crime to rise. It is a deadly fantasy that replacing the police with counselors and social workers will result in more effective law enforcement and fewer lives lost. To save lives, the poorest areas of large cities need more, rather than less, of a police presence. When asked, residents in poor neighborhoods overwhelmingly agree that more police presence would be better, rather than less. Rather than demonize the police, who have a dangerous and difficult job that for the most part keeps us safe, we should search for ways to alleviate the underlying social conditions that trap lives in a world of violence and criminality and focus on weeding out the bad apples. I agree with the last meme: If we have no police, most crimes will carry the death penalty and the 'bad apples' will be eliminated very quickly.