The stark realization has finally hit Democrats after dangerous calls to “defund the police” during a summer of riots and unrest following the death of George Floyd in May of 2020.
Cities across the country, always exclusively run by elected Democrats, voted to “re-allocate” or “reorganize” their funding of police departments into other things like social workers or other means of dealing with requests for help from emergency services. In some cases, cities just shrank their departments altogether without doing much else.
The result has been nothing short of abject failure. Crime rates in cities that have done everything they can to demoralize and defund their police departments have been through the roof over the past two years. Murder is up, violent crime is up, robberies are up, transit crime is up, and petty crime is hitting new all-time levels.
It’s in this backdrop, a situation created by progressives in the Democratic Party, that President Biden this week was set to announce a plan to fund law enforcement and pretend that policing was important again:
President Joe Biden will unveil on Thursday an expanded budget request to Congress with $37 billion in funding for law enforcement and crime prevention for what the White House is calling his “Safer America Plan.”
But Biden’s request is aspirational — it’s for fiscal year 2023, which for the U.S. government begins this October, and it needs to be approved by Congress. Presidential administrations past and present often make large, ambitious budget requests as a messaging tool, only to see them not come to fruition or to be whittled down.
As part of his “Safer America Plan,” the White House said Biden will request “a fully paid-for new investment of approximately $35 billion to support law enforcement and crime prevention — in addition to the President’s $2 billion discretionary request for these same programs.”
According to the White House, the requested funding would be used in hiring and training 100,000 new police officers for “accountable community policing,” clearing court backlogs, solving murders and setting up community task forces to share intelligence. The funds would also target crimes not directly related to guns, such as fentanyl trafficking.
Suddenly the Democratic Party is the party of “law and order” with Biden at the helm “aspirationally” calling to allocate money for states and local municipalities to beef up their law enforcement agencies.
The real bottom line is that Democrats are getting politically killed in cities where residents are getting literally killed by stray bullets, robberies, and sometimes random acts of violence brought on for no reason.
One problem here, of course, is that the federal government does not employ, hire, or train local law enforcement or state law enforcement. They can make funds available for it, but cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis, for example, would have to actually decide they want to invest in their departments and invest in their officers rather than demean and demoralize them.
For the record, it has been Democrats and only Democrats calling for defunding, dismantling, and destroying of police departments around the country:
Joe Biden doesn't want a "safer America." If he did, he would condemn the many Democrats – including Kamala Harris – who have called for defunding the police.pic.twitter.com/Y7lwPAnEiw
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 21, 2022
As many have noted, the other prong of the crime problem has less to do with policing and more to do with soft-on-crime district attorneys and policies which release criminals back on the street within hours of an arrest. Sometimes they have a dozen or more prior arrests for various crimes and yet they still get released.
Another issue not mentioned was the Covid-19 vaccine mandate in cities like Chicago which forced hundreds of officers into early retirement, another Democrat policy that weakened an already beleaguered department.
Democrats broke law enforcement in the summer of 2020, broke it again in 2021, and they’ve been trying to save face ever since.
Most voters are looking at this as a “you broke it, you own it” problem where Biden’s plan to suddenly throw money at the problem is laughable and offensive. The attitude toward police officers doing their job under difficult circumstances has become one of ridicule and hatred from elected officials in Democrat-run states and cities.
Biden can come up with all the plans he wants to, but it won’t change the situations in cities like New York where criminals are set free and prosecutions are down.
If crimnal activity isn’t punished, then lawlessness persists. That is the legacy of the Democratic Party since 2020.
