De-Fund the Police……Oh……..Wait………..

Minneapolis, the site of George Floyd’s death in the hands of the police in May of last year, initially reacted as you might expect a city with far Left leadership to react  —  namely, to strike out against the police as a product of reflex rather than reflection.  The snarling demand was to de-fund and disband the police department.  In early June, the Minneapolis City Council declared an intent to restructure the department as a “new community-based system of public safety.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to de-funding.  Reality.

Here’s a clip from the recent Daily Mail story:

The city was plagued by soaring violent crime last year – with homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft and arson all up on last year’s figures.

By the end of the year, police had recorded 532 gunshot victims, more than double the same period a year ago.

Carjackings spiked to 375 by December, up 331 per cent from the same period last year. And violent crimes topped 5,100, compared with just over 4,000 for the same period in 2019.

As officers from the department started resigning, many claimed it was due in part to post-traumatic stress disorder from a summer of unrest.

Then president-elect Joe Biden told civil rights leaders that the ‘defund police’ slogan was the reason Democrats experienced widespread losses in congressional races across the country on November 3.

‘That’s how they beat the living hell out of us across the country, saying that we’re talking about defunding the police,’ Biden said told civil rights leaders at the time.

Yes, well, when Joe Biden gets it, maybe even the radicals will get it.  Soooooo………

Minneapolis is [now] planning to spend $6.4million to hire dozens of police officers, at a time when some City Council members and activist groups [had] been advocating to replace the police department following the death of George Floyd.

The City Council voted unanimously Friday to approve the additional funding that police requested.

According to the Minneapolis Police Department, there are only 638 officers available to work, which is roughly 200 fewer than usual.

An unprecedented number of officers quit or went on extended medical leave after Floyd’s death and the unrest that followed, which included the burning of a police precinct.

Yes, it’s all true!  When you smear and weaken the police, you get more crime.  When you respect and strengthen them, you get less.

You might have thought this was too obvious to need saying  — or, failing that, you might have thought it would have been learned from fifty years or so of data (that is, the early Sixties through the Seventies and into much of the Eighties, when softer law enforcement policies were in vogue and crime exploded; versus the early Nineties through roughly 2014, when the country hired many more police and generally got tougher, helping to produce an historic decrease in crime).

But mere common sense and a half century of experience were not, at least initially, enough for Minneapolis (or New York or Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, etc., etc.).  It took a year of rampant murder.  Let’s hope the lesson has been learned in at least some of these cities  —  it was bought at a steep price, paid mostly in the blood of black victims.