What Disbanding The Police Looks Like

As Chicago was besieged with another weekend of protests against police with the accompanying fires and looting, 110 people were shot, 25 fatally.  Tom Schuba, Sam Charles and Matthew Hendrickson of the Chicago Sun Times report that most of the shooting victims last weekend were black as are most of the suspects.  Reverend Michael Pfleger, a longtime crusader against gun violence in Chicago told reporters, “I heard people saying all over, `Hey, there’s no police anywhere, police ain’t doing nothing.'”  The city reported 65,000 calls to 911 over the weekend, as law-abiding store owners and residents sought police responses to an “unprecedented level of activity,” according to a PD spokesman.  The protests in Chicago over the death of George Floyd included attacks on officers and demands that police departments be shut down or defunded,  and provided a “teachable moment” on how cities will look if those demands are met.

In other major cities like New York, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Houston protests organized by Black Lives Matter (BLM) were accompanied by fires, looting, assaults and similar calls for disbanding or defunding police departments.  In many of these places, police departments were already backing off policing minority districts after the rioting resulting from the fatal 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, something Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald called the “Ferguson Effect.”   While it is clear that BLM represents the views of some segment of the African American population, many if not all white liberals and most of the national media, it is not clear that any of them really value black lives.  With thousands of black men, women and children being killed by black criminals every year, only the lives of the nine or ten unarmed blacks killed annually by police actually matter to activists and their supporters, because those deaths can be exploited politically.   The murder of David Dorn, the retired black police captain shot to death last week by a black looter while he was trying to protect his brother’s St. Louis pawn shop did not fit the BLM narrative, so his life did not matter.