Police: A growing opposition to ‘defunding’
Calls to defund the police department in New York City have hit a roadblock, said Jeffery Mays in The New York Times: opposition from the black community. An effort spearheaded by white progressives on the City Council to cut the police budget by $1 billion and reduce the number of officers on the street has met resistance from colleagues representing communities of color, at a time when New York and other U.S. cities face a soaring number of shootings and homicides. Vanessa Gibson, a black Democrat from the Bronx, said her constituents object to the use of excessive force but “want to see cops in the community. They want to be safe.” Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark, N.J., called defunding the police a “bourgeois liberal” solution for addressing systemic racism. A recent Gallup poll found that only 19 percent of black Americans want to see fewer police officers in their communities, while 81 percent want the same number or more.
Of course we do, said Charles Love in City Journal. “My black friends, relatives, and neighbors are neither conservatives nor strong supporters of law enforcement, but none supports defunding the police.” The kind of violent crime now on the rise hits black communities the hardest, and white liberal mayors were too quick to accede to Black Lives Matter protesters’ demands. The truth is that defunding or abolishing the police “was always an absurd idea, politically and practically,” said Jonah Goldberg in The Baltimore Sun. But it’s been pushed by an “elite media” very distant from black people’s real lives.
It’s a bit more complicated than that, said John Eligon in The New York Times. Ask residents of Minneapolis’ majority-black North Side and you’ll find decidedly conflicted views on the
City Council’s push to remake the police force. “Residents complain of rampant police mistreatment, but also of out-of-control crime and violence.” Advocates of defunding say that having fewer cops would allow the city to invest more resources in the community, to alleviate poverty and treat drug addiction and mental illness. But Taona Mays, 24, who was recently wounded in a random shooting, is among those who are unconvinced. With fewer cops on the streets, she said, “people definitely will do just anything.” Her conclusion: “It’s good to have good police. It’s bad to have bad police.”