Crime — including homicides — is spiking, yet liberals continue push to defund police

Though violent crime, including homicides, is sharply rising in the United States, liberal activists continue to push to defund police departments, particularly in urban areas hardest hit by the spike in violence. 

Leaders in Minneapolis, Seattle and New York City have all recently cut funding away from policing, even as a recent study by the Council on Criminal Justice reported homicides have spiked in 21 US cities so far in 2020.

“Homicides, aggravated assaults, and gun assaults rose significantly beginning in late May and June of 2020,” reported the researchers led by University of Missouri-St. Louis Professor Emeritus Richard Rosenfeld, a former president of the American Society of Criminology. “Homicide rates increased by 42% during the summer and 34% in the fall over the summer and fall of 2019. In the 21 cities providing homicide data, there were 610 more homicides in the summer and fall of 2020 than during the same period in 2019. Aggravated assaults went up by 15% in the summer and 13% in the fall of 2020; gun assaults increased by 15% and 16%.”

Jeff Asher, a former CIA officer and co-founder of the AH Datalytics firm, reported that in 51 major U.S. cities, murders are up 35%  through late fall this year compared to the same period in 2019. And nationwide, murders were up 15% for the first six months of 2020, according to the FBI’s preliminary Uniform Crime Report released in September.

“You cannot diminish the police, defund the police and expect that crime is not going to rise,” Bernie Kerik, a former New York Police Department Commissioner, told Just the News. “You're going to have increases in violent crime, shootings, guns, and homicides.

”Anytime you have increases in shootings, you have an increase in homicides, those numbers are going to rise. I've been calling this for a year, since they started down this road.” 

Yet in spite of this rise in death and violence, a Black Lives Matter co-founder ripped former President Obama for dismissing “defund the police” as a “snappy slogan.” Obama had said Democrats' “defund the police” agenda contributed to an unexpectedly weak showing at the polls in November. However, even after Democrats lost U.S. House seats and so far have failed to control the U.S. Senate and Joe Biden’s White House victory is still in dispute, the Democrat-led Minneapolis City Council this week voted to cut its police budget.

“To be honest, there is a criminal, thug element to Black Lives Matter now, on a street level,” Pastor Darrell Scott, a board member of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, told Just the News. “It attracts, that organization, and that movement, attracts criminals. I'm not saying that it’s exclusively criminals and thugs, but it attracts a lot of criminals and thugs. But it attracts a lot of criminals and thugs and it attracts a lot of people who would like nothing less than a decrease in police presence in society.” 

Meanwhile, the number of police officers in the United States reached a 25-year low, with roughly 214 police officers per 100,000 Americans in 2019, according to Census data. An August Just the News poll by Scott Rasmussen found that 60% of voters with children would feel less safe sending them to school in a “police-free zone.”  

“Thomas Hobbes wrote about what happens when you have a state of nature, where there is no law, and our Constitution is the basis for the rule of law in America,” Carol Swain, a prominent African-American activist, told Just the News AM television program on Wednesday. “If you remove the police, of course you're going to have an increase in crime and people are going to try to protect themselves."  

Swain said she was dismayed that policy changes sparked by the coronavirus — with public health officials concerned about COVID-19 spreading easily in communal living areas — have allowed prisoners early releases, allowing them to exit and commit more crimes.  

“And this social justice, Marxist, socialist movement, what they have done is turn everything upside down,” Swain said. “The criminals have the upper hand, meanwhile citizens like us, if we go out without our mask, if we don't follow the edicts of Big Brother, we may find ourselves arrested — the police arresting citizens — when they ought to be out there, hunting down the criminals, putting them in jail and keeping them there, regardless of who they are.”

Swain noted that proportionately, those most likely to be a victim of a violent crime are racial minorities, yet Black Lives Matter activists label people who want to protect police funding as racist. 

“Well it’s happening because we have racial double standards, and the suffering of people of color, that suffering is being used to advance a radical progressive agenda,” said Swain, a former political science professor at Vanderbilt University. “And now that the country is moving towards being majority minority, white people are not necessarily the majority all over the country. It's more important than ever before that we have a system of fairness, and we cannot allow violence to take place and police to be defunded, and for people to hold back when it comes to fighting for our voting rights, when it comes to enforcing our laws.” 

Prominent civil rights activist Bob Woodson, a recipient of the Presidential Citizens Medal from former President George W. Bush, told Just the News AM television program on Tuesday that he was worried that “critical race theory” principles have contributed to calls for dismantling police and in the process are endangering black communities.  

“I think we're really at a very dangerous place,” Woodson said. “Because, unfortunately black Americans are being used, the rich legacy of the Civil Rights Movement has been hijacked by the radical left, and using it to bludgeon the country, and really destroy civic institutions in the name of seeking justice for blacks.” 

Like Swain, Woodson said he thought the movement for equality of opportunity for black Americans has been wrongly expanded beyond its initial, laudable mission for dismantling Jim Crow and segregation. 

“As you know, they migrated from justice for [George] Floyd to burning Bibles in Portland, to denigrating the Christian cross as being white supremacist,” Woodson said. “They've also said that the nuclear family is Eurocentric and therefore racist. So they have migrated away from social justice for blacks and are just using black Americans as a bludgeon to denigrate the country. And that's why critical race theory is just the foundation upon which they are making these assaults.