Still Want to Defund the Police?

Left wing leadership in Chicago and Portland got more of what they’ve spent years asking for when violent mobs of hoodlums noticed this weekend that they have the green light for party time.  That is, they took advantage of the Conventional Progressive Wisdom that the police are the ones who need to be contained (by being stripped of funding, weapons, and legal protection, among all the other things we’ve heard so much about lately), while they  —  the thugs  —  are to be regarded as the newly entitled victims of Amerika’s callousness and cruelty.

As you might imagine, what happened then wasn’t pretty.

The National Review’s Editor’s Roundup provides a summary:

THE FAMILIAR PATTERN OF POLITICIZED VIOLENCE resumed this weekend after a brief respite in most major American cities. Chicago police shot a young man Sunday afternoon after he fired at them while attempting to evade arrest. Hours later, a mob — inflamed by the lie that the cops had shot and wounded a child — laid siege to Chicago’s downtown commercial district, Magnificent Mile.

Hundreds of people can be seen in countless videos circulating online looting luxury clothing stores, pulling ATM’s out of banks, smashing windows, and screaming in protest against a fiction. Around 4:30 in the morning, some of the rioters exchanged gunfire with the police. No one was shot in the exchange but at least one officer sustained a shoulder injury while clashing with rioters and another was maced.

The city responded by halting public transportation and raising the bridges that lead to downtown, but apparently failed to deploy enough police to quell the unrest.

“Absolute chaos in downtown Chicago,” CBS reporter Ryan Baker wrote on Twitter. “Appears to be coordinated effort with minimal police presence.”

But wait!  There’s more!!

Just as looters were preparing to destroy Chicago’s famed shopping district Sunday night, the same spirit of anarchy was manifesting in the streets of Portland, which have not seen a peaceful night since the summer began with a wave of protests and rioting over the death of George Floyd.

Roughly 200 people marched from a downtown park to the Portland Police Association Building, where they threw objects and launched fireworks at officers, blocked off the road and set dumpster fires.

The police responded by declaring a riot and using tear gas to disperse the crowd. Sixteen people were arrested and two officers were hospitalized with unspecified injuries, the police said. A small number compared to the twenty-four who were arrested in Portland on Friday night for throwing rocks and launching fireworks at officers. It should be said that we know all of this because local news outlets have done yeoman’s work documenting the unrelenting chaos in Portland. The Washington Post, meanwhile, believes its readers are best served by a glowing photo essay depicting the varying DIY riot uniforms worn by the play-acting revolutionaries.

As Chicago’s urban decay spread into its affluent downtown and Portland saw its seventy-third straight night of rioting and protests, New York grappled with its own crime wave, more diffuse than what’s been seen elsewhere but perhaps more insidious for that.

We wouldn’t want to leave out that progressive haven, New York City, either:

New York City is now on track to have more shootings and victims in 2020 than it had in 2019 and 2018 combined, the New York Post reported in its Monday cover story. There have been 821 shootings and 1,000 victims as of Saturday; there were 905 shootings and 1,099 victims in all of 2018 and 2019 combined.

One of this year’s many victims, Curtis Holley, was shot and killed in front of his wife Saturday night after inadvertently flicking a cigarette near a group of men on the sidewalk. One wonders what that has to do with “bread.” 

I read somewhere this morning that Chicago’s Mayor, Lori Lightfoot  —  who got elected by catering to the “the-police-are-the-menace” crowd  —  is now vowing “accountability” for the rioters.  The State’s Attorney, Kimberly Foxx, has yet to be heard from  —  not that it makes any difference what either of them might say at this point.  The anti-police, pro-criminal narrative that’s been dominating for years in Chicago, Portland, and New York (and numerous other enclaves, like the entirety of legal academia) is too entrenched by now to be dislodged by the facts-on-the-ground progressives routinely, if falsely, claim to cherish.  I’ll bet $500 here and now that, when the lights die down and the heat is off, the chest-beating promise of “accountability” for the rioters withers to next to nothing.