Minneapolis’ Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey was booed out of a protest after refusing to agree to defund the Minneapolis Police Department.
The visual of Frey, literally being shooed away from the crowd and jeered, is a lingering image and depicts the problem Democrats now have as they’ve ignored rioting and looting in many American cities. Democrats have sown the wind and are about to reap the whirlwind.
Clearly, all of us are outraged by what happened to George Floyd. It was reprehensible and wrong. Justice for George, though, has given way to something bigger. The Democrats and the Left are using Floyd’s tragic death to advance far-left ideology.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) supports defunding the police. She sympathizes with the Black Lives Matter movement and police reform activists. She believes that New York City should be spending less on policing and putting that money into resources that would help black communities thrive.
Brian Fallon, the Executive Director of Demand Justice, and a former spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, tweeted “Defund the police.”
The Minneapolis City Council is confident that they can defund the Minneapolis police department and council president Lisa Bender told CNN, “I think the idea of having a police-free future is very aspirational, and I am willing to stand with community members who are asking us to think of that as the goal.”
The Left’s reaction to the horrible death of George Floyd is to defund the police. That is an amazing statement, but not really a surprise. The Left has been anti-law enforcement for quite a while.
What is interesting this time is that there is some confusion on the Left. The far-left is adamant. The police must be defunded. The Black Lives Matter Facebook page clearly advocates this policy. However, some Democrats are twitchy about this idea. Joe Biden said in a CBS interview, “No, I don’t support defunding the police”
Potential Biden running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, (D-CA), in an interview on The View, said, “we need to reimagine how we are achieving public safety because we have confused the idea that to achieve safety, you put more cops on the street instead of allocating resources to other services such as education and housing.”
When asked directly if she supported “defunding the police,” Harris declined to answer. She is, however, supportive of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s move to slash $150 million from LA police department funding.
Elite Democrats are skittish about the outcome of “defund the police.” The reason is simple. There is a segment of the Left that believes in “defunding the police,” “a Green New Deal,” and free stuff for everyone. The elite Democrats have been lying to their own people. The elites are only interested in power. They just use the far left to try to win elections. Now, the Left’s chickens have come home to roost.
AOC makes it clear. She’s a true believer in all this lunacy. She tweeted, “And by the way, the fact that ppl are scrambling to repackage this whole conversation to make it palatable for largely affluent, white suburban ‘swing’ voters again points to how much more electoral & structural power these communities have relative to others.”
Where does that leave us?
The Democrats are divided. If Biden can’t figure out a way to placate the far left, then he’ll be booed, shooed, and forced on his own “walk of shame” like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.
On a deeper level, though, the idea that in 2020 America anyone could advocate for defunding law enforcement and be taken seriously is despicable. Police brutality is wrong, and racism is a sin. However, most police officers are men and women of integrity. It is a statistical fact that 120 whites have been shot to death by police as of June 2020; 88 African Americans; 57 Hispanics, and 98 whose race is unknown.
I am not a statistician, so I’ll leave interpreting what those stats mean to others. I hate that it happens at all. While police brutality against African Americans is wrong, these numbers show that attacks on law enforcement are unjustified.
There are incidents, horrible and vile, that should not happen. No one is denying that. By considering “Defund the Police” however, the Left is declaring war on law enforcement. If ever enacted, it would be dangerous and devastating. We have to be engaged and vote. More than ever, 2020’s election is about what kind of country we will be.
