‘Defund The Police’ Has Increased Gun Sales And Support For Trump

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wants to take federal funds away from any police department that has violated the civil rights of the citizens they serve. The Minneapolis City Council agreed with calls from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) to disband the city’s police department and unanimously passed a resolution to replace the police with a “community-led public safety system.” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti seeks to cut $150 million from the police budget. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced he would slash the city’s police department budget too.

Despite all these actions, some leftists are engaging in word gymnastics by stating that “defund” really means reform. Yet, in a New York Times op-ed titled “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” Mariame Kaba — an activist and an anti-crime organizer — clarified for Americans what “Defund the Police” means.

Kaba writes, “We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.” She criticized a police reform bill put forth by Democrats as something that was tried and failed in the past. She concluded the police couldn’t be reformed because they are always racist, violent, and “don’t catch the bad guys.”

She states, “The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers in half” as an immediate step. But don’t confuse that with her ultimate goal: “We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.”

Without the police, what should the community do to protect themselves against criminals? Kaba suggested using “community care workers” to address mental health issues and “restorative-justice models” instead of “throwing people in prison.”

Thanks to Kaba’s clarification, it seems even many of the leftist readers of The New York Times reject the call to “defund the police” once they grasp its true meaning. One comment at NYTimes.com that accrued more than 2,600 “likes” said: “This is a fantasy. You can fund all the social programs you want, you won’t eliminate crime or disorder. I appreciate law and order.”

Another one with more than 1,300 “likes” wrote: “This is a non-starter for me. Serious reform is needed. But you might as well call for abolishing hospitals or grocery stores.” A man who says he lived in the Bronx during the 1970s exclaimed he knew from firsthand experience that abolishing police is “a terrible idea.”

These readers who disagree with Kaba are not in the minority. An ABC News/Ipsos poll finds 64 percent of Americans oppose the “defund the police” movement and reject many of its goals, such as reallocating police department funding to mental health, housing, and education programs. Even 43 percent of Democrats oppose both defunding the police and reallocating funding to other causes. The poll reveals that the majority of Americans do believe that police keep them safe and a society without police is unthinkable and dangerous.

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