Democratic lawmakers are promoting a radical anti-law enforcement agenda, including calling to abolish policing and prisons, in the wake of a police shooting of a man who resisted arrest and attempted to flee law enforcement.
The drastic calls for dismantling the law enforcement apparatus in the U.S. comes after police shot and killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright this week during a traffic stop in Minneapolis. Police attempted to arrest Wright over an open warrant that stemmed from an aggravated robbery charge in which he allegedly choked a woman and threatened to shoot her if she did not give him her money.
The police officer who shot Wright says that she thought she was holding her taser when she shot and killed Wright.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) responded to the news by claiming on Twitter, without evidence, that the shooting “wasn’t an accident.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” Tlaib said. “Daunte Wright was met with aggression & violence. I am done with those who condone government funded murder. No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can’t be reformed.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), one of the main proponents of the “defund the police” movement in 2020, seemingly backed Tlaib’s extreme proposal in a statement posted to her Twitter account on Tuesday.
“Daunte Wright’s killing was not a random, disconnected ‘accident’ – it was the repeated outcome of an indefensible system that grants impunity for state violence, rewards it w/ endlessly growing budgets at the cost of community investment, & targets those who question that order,” Ocasio-Cortez claimed without evidence. “Cameras, chokehold bans, ‘retraining’ funds, and similar reform measures do not ultimately solve what is a systemic problem. That system will find a way – killings happen on camera, people are killed in other ways, retraining grows $ while often substituting for deeper measures.”
Cameras, chokehold bans, “retraining” funds, and similar reform measures do not ultimately solve what is a systemic problem.
That system will find a way – killings happen on camera, people are killed in other ways, retraining grows $ while often substituting for deeper measures.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 13, 2021
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) retweeted a video on to her Twitter account of a far-left activist calling for the abolishment of “modern day policing” during an appearance on MSNBC.
You cannot reform or re-train what is happening right now. Modern Day policing needs to be abolished and re-built from the ground up. pic.twitter.com/IHGVokbDGZ
— Dr. Jason Johnson (@DrJasonJohnson) April 13, 2021
Even former President Barack Obama, who panned the “defund the police” movement last year, said this week that America “badly” needed to “reimagine policing and public safety.”
Left-wing Brooklyn Center Mayor Mike Elliott, mayor of the town where the shooting happened, responded to the shooting by saying, “I don’t believe that officers need to necessarily have weapons every time they’re making a traffic stop.”
The fact-finding website Heavy.com linked to a Facebook account that they claim belonged to Wright. The account was filled with posts that included degrading remarks about women, joking about running from police, and joking about attacking police officers. Widespread rioting and looting broke out in the area after the shooting happened.