Defund The Police…Still A Thing

You would have thought liberals would have learned their lesson by now. I can understand (kinda, sorta) the liberal mindset in trying to show their support for the Black Lives Matter and Antifa crowd over the death of George Floyd and other criminals that were ultimately killed by police. While I thought at the time the defunding police departments was a rather rash and stupid knee-jerk reaction to a terrible situation, it was understandable how the addle-minded liberals out there could actually come to that conclusion. The fact is, they don’t think with their brains, they think with their hearts. That play on emotions is usually what gets the uninformed, uneducated, ignorant poor slobs of America on their sides.

But I would have also thought a year later, they would have learned their lesson.

Minneapolis, which was the first place to scream “defund the police”, and then later city council did just that in deference to the mobs, also decided to hire their own private security to protect those on the city council. And what happened? Police starting quitting and retiring in droves. All of a sudden, Minneapolis, and several other cities around the country no longer had to worry about “defunding the police”, because the cops were doing it for them. They were voting with their feet and were leaving on their own rather than face harassment for just doing their jobs. In a lot of those cities, they realized that defunding the police wasn’t the most prudent or smart avenue to drive down. It usually led to higher crime rates, more murders, and certainly didn’t make their communities more attractive to get people or businesses to move to.

Except in St. Louis, Missouri.

In St. Louis, their mayor, Tishaura Jones, is still screaming about “defunding the police”. This despite St. Louis becoming the murder capital of the country. Jones wants to close a city jail, divert $4 million from the police budget and spend it on “community programs”, and she wants to cut 100 cops from the department’s roles, by not filling the vacancies that already exist.

In St. Louis, their murder rate is already at a 50 year high. And the city’s head of their Department of Corrections has resigned. In 2019, St. Louis had 19 homicides per 100,000 residents. Last year that number soared to 87. The reason? Well, if you want to listen to Jones and her liberal buddies on city council, it wasn’t because of defunding the police. It was because of COVID.

Huh?

Yeah. That’s what I said. It had nothing to do with Black Lives Matter, or Ferguson, Mo, next door to St. Louis, or Antifa, or the previous city administration, which Jones said did a terrible job. It had to do with COVID.

What Jones, who’s actions are backed by newly elected congresswoman, Cori Bush wants to do is “move people through the judicial system” rather than send people to jail. She wants to “partner” with community groups to better solve the crime problem she’s facing.

Now, in a way, she could be right. I personally think the problem with black crime in our country is systemic. Their distrust of the police actually stems from the fact that black on black crime is higher than any other form of racial accountability you can name. And to fix the judicial system by allowing the underlying factor of blacks being violent toward other blacks is not the answer. What needs to happen in that community is to reestablish the family and the principles that guide our society. And yes, they are markedly different today.

Back in 1960, 22% of black households were single-parent households. Today, some 60 years later that number is 72%. Way back in 1938, 11% of all pregnancies were to single mothers. Today that number is 75%. Is poverty a problem? Yup. But here’s an interesting statistic. Where there is a mother and a father in the home, the poverty rate is 8% (compared to the national average of 5%). In homes where there is a single parent, that number is 37%.

It is the collapse of the two parent household that has caused a lot of the problems blacks in this country face. It’s not racism. It’s not slavery some 160 years ago. It’s breaking down because the families aren’t staying together. Blame it on crime, blame it on drugs, whatever the root problem is, it’s not the police. Blacks are getting into more trouble per capita than the rest of society, but most sociologists don’t blame the police for the breakdown. They blame the breakdown of the family as the problem.

So, Tishaura Jones, Cori Bush and others that want to say this is some white cop’s fault need to fix the problems at home to solve the problem. Yes, partnering with community organizations to help stem that tide would certainly help. Defunding the police though, is the absolute wrong answer.

Carry on world…you’re dismissed!