Why Voters Are Killing the Defund Movement

As Kent reported Tuesday, voters in Minneapolis rejected a ballot measure proposing to eliminate the police department and replace it with social workers.  In a New York Post article Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald reports that Charter Amendment 4, which would address crime with a “comprehensive public health approach” received major support from progressives including $500,000 from George Soros’ Open Society Policy Center.  “Minneapolis voters didn’t need to imagine the results of Amendment 4’s utopian scheme:  they have been living though a preview of police abolition…..Traffic and pedestrian stops dropped at least 75 percent following the George Floyd riots, in response to the charge that police were racists for investigating suspicious activity in high-crime neighborhoods.”

“The results of this de facto experiment in depolicing spoke for themselves.  Through September 2021, the number of shots fired in Minneapolis was up 380 percent compared with the same time period in 2019.   The past 20 months account for almost a quarter of the city’s 70,000 reported gunshot incidents since 2008.  Homicides are near record levels.”

Rep. Illhan Omar, who represents Minneapolis, and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison defended the Defund amendment to the bitter end, with the Democratic congresswoman denying that it was at all “radical.”

While supporters of the defund the movement, including Black Lives Matter, claim their objective is to protect the African American community from racist police:  “A black Minneapolis resident is 480 times as likely to be shot by a criminal as by a cop,”  and “More than four fifths of Minneapolis homicide victims are black, though blacks aren’t even one-fifth of the city’s population,”….and “they are being killed by other black civilians.”

The people most victimized by cities that have defunded their police departments are urban blacks, whose lives apparently don’t matter to progressives.  Just like “hands up don’t shoot,”  “black lives matter” is a slogan used by people to promote an agenda which has nothing at all to do with protecting any segment of the law-abiding public.  It is heartening to see that people are getting wise to this fiction.