Opinion

WALSH: ‘Defund The Police’ Is A Stupid, Crazy Idea That Will Make Everything Worse 

   DailyWire.com
People walk down 16th street after “Defund The Police” was painted on the street near the White House on June 08, 2020 in Washington, DC. After days of protests in DC over the death of George Floyd, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has renamed that section of 16th street "Black Lives Matter Plaza". (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

As Senate Democrats are busy kneeling in honor of George Floyd while cloaked in African garb (not a joke), leftist activists have settled on a specific policy: they want to defund the police.

The Minneapolis City Council has already announced its intentions to defund and dismantle its city’s police department, though Mayor Frey is not yet on board with the proposal. Frey was asked about the idea at a recent Black Lives Matter demonstration, and his negative response led to him getting cussed out and booed off the stage by an angry mob. Imagine Frey’s shock. He’d just allowed leftist radicals to rampage through the streets for two weeks, even offering up a police precinct to be burned as an atoning sacrifice, and that was not enough to win him favor with the mob. There’s a lesson in there, for anyone paying attention.

But what exactly does “defunding the police” mean? What does it entail? As always with leftist proposals, the details are sketchy. The activists who attacked Frey said they “don’t want no more police,” and this — abolishing the police entirely — seems to be what “defund” means to many activists. An article on CNN explains it this way:

It’s as straightforward as it sounds: Instead of funding a police department, a sizable chunk of a city’s budget is invested in communities, especially marginalized ones where much of the policing occurs. […] Some supporters of divestment want to reallocate some, but not all, funds away from police departments to social services. Some want to strip all police funding and dissolve departments.

Irony abounds. For years, the Left has insisted that the cure to nearly all societal ills is to increase government funding. How do we fix education? More funding. Healthcare? More funding. Homelessness, drug addiction, suicide, domestic violence? More funding. Now they have found one area of government that must be fixed by cutting, not funding. I could almost applaud this sudden interest in radical frugality if there was any chance that it would be consistently applied.

The first question raised by any plan to defund or disband law enforcement is how, exactly, a community is supposed to handle murderers, rapists, robbers, and thieves if there are no police to arrest them and lock them up. Not surprisingly, most of the champions of this idea have not bothered to address this concern.

Lisa Bender, the president of the Minneapolis city council, was asked what a person is supposed to do about a home invader in the middle of the night if they cannot contact the police. Bender responded that anyone who would wish to call the police in that situation is “coming from a place of privilege” (not a joke).

The CNN article mentioned above has a slightly more expansive response:

MPD150, a community advocacy organization in Minneapolis, focuses on abolishing local police. Its work has been spotlighted since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis Police custody.

“The people who respond to crises in our community should be the people who are best-equipped to deal with those crises,” the organization says.

Rather than “strangers armed with guns,” the organization says, first responders should be mental health providers, social workers, victim advocates and other community members in less visible roles.

So, if you are carjacked while waiting at a stoplight, a mental health provider will be on the scene shortly to give you a shoulder to cry on, and probably a bottle of pills. As for finding the guy who committed the crime, bringing him to justice, and retrieving your stolen property? Well I guess you’ll just have to hope he has a change of heart and decides to return it on his own.

A popular Tik Tok video provides more details. We are told that victims of rape and assault can call highly trained psychotherapists, and victims of theft can call “social workers” in “defensive armor.” Like I said, not much thought has been put into developing this concept.

Of course, I don’t need a CNN article or Tik Tok video to tell me what will happen if there are no police. I can look to any third world country for the answer.

First, many of the fired and disbanded police officers will go into private security. They will promptly be hired by the rich, who will have their own private police departments to protect them and chase down any bad guys, or anyone else they’d like to dispose of. The rest of us will have to fend for ourselves. Expect a proliferation of  armed militias and vigilante mobs.

Leftists want us to believe that this would be, somehow, an improvement over the current system. And these are the same people who spent the previous several weeks denouncing vigilante justice after the Ahmaud Arbery killing. One minute they tell us that you don’t need to grab a gun and enforce the law yourself because we have the cops for that. The next minute they tell us, never mind, we’re getting rid of the cops, too. Well, then back to the do-it-yourself approach. The Left cannot complain about the brutality and inequality that follows. This what they are quite literally asking for.

More from Matt Walsh: Biden’s Floyd Funeral Campaign Stunt Exposes The Elitist Left’s Lies

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