So, the left has hit on a hot new solution to supposed systemic racist brutality from American police departments: disband the police.
This bizarre notion has picked up steam in recent weeks, as leftists continue to label cops systemically racist. Jessica Disu, a black activist, told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly last night, “We need to abolish the police. Period.” When asked by Kelly who would then protect the community, she answered: “We need to come up with community solutions.”
The problem in high crime communities has been lack of police – and the community solution that rises in the wake of such a dearth is gang murder. If people can’t rely on the police to keep the peace, they join a gang to ensure the threat of revenge if they are harmed. As Jill Loevy of The Los Angeles Times has written in her book, Ghettoside, “African Americans have suffered from just such a lack of effective criminal justice, and this, more than anything, is the reason for the nation’s long-standing plague of black homicides…[Lack of police] left ample room for vigilantism.” If the cops won’t protect you, you must find someone who will. One of the most horrific costs of Jim Crow was the unwillingness of white police departments to police black-on-black murder.
Nonetheless, the hot new solution according to the left is to disband the only people who can ensure that the state’s monopoly on violence means something. Thus, we find idiot actors like Mark Ruffalo tweeting:
Defund bad cops and police departments. Tell Obama: We need an executive order! https://t.co/rpRepf9fAT #DefundPolice
— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) July 12, 2016
What’s the real agenda here?
It’s twofold. First, if you believe that the cops are, as Professor Melina Abdullah has said, “an occupying force,” then the only solution is to “end the occupation.” Second, there’s a deeper goal of removing the rule of the law from the system because the system itself is supposedly corrupt. If the police are the enforcement arm for America, and if America is racist, then the only way to fight American racism is to disband its enforcement arm. What will spring up in its wake? “Community solutions” – a new society, flourishing in the absence of America’s historic ills.
The only problem: what will actually flourish in the absence of the Americanism and its law enforcement arm is chaos and murder. There’s a reason that Rudy Giuliani – the fellow Black Lives Matter now hates more than any other – is responsible for saving thousands of black lives during his tenure: America isn’t racist, and its law enforcement isn’t the enforcer for a racist system. Remove the cops, and you get an uptick in crime that harms the communities lacking the cops: minority communities.
But if the left wants to build a new world, a few thousand black lives are apparently worth the cost.