Major Cities Across The Nation Backtracking On Promise To Cut Police Funds After Spike In Violent Crime
Michael Cantrell
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Just a year after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, many elected officials all across the United States have decided that it’s not really a good idea to cut funding to the police as they are now experiencing a spike in violent crime.
Hate to be the kind of guy who says, “I told you so,” but guess what? I told you so. And so did millions of other conservatives and folks with common sense.
Elected leaders in big cities like New York City, Los Angeles, and the place where this all started, Minneapolis, are now pushing for increased funding for law enforcement departments after months of dealing with low morale and cuts that have shrunk police ranks. This is all happening as these cities and others are now experiencing dramatic increases in violent crime.
“The violence needs to stop, its unacceptable. People deserve to feel safe in their neighborhood, they deserve to be able to send their kids out to the sidewalk to play and to recreate without bullets flying by. That’s unacceptable. We should be holding these perpetrators accountable,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, stated during a May 7 news conference called to address the outbreak of violence that tore through his city.
Frey put much of the blame of rising crime rates on activists’ calls to defund the police in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Floyd’s death last year kicked off massive riots and calls to redirect police funding toward social programs. Violent crime surged 21% in Minneapolis last year, and the trend is threatening to continue through 2021.
“When you make big, overarching statements that we’re going to defund or abolish and dismantle the police department and get rid of all the officers, there’s an impact to that,” Frey went on to say. At a news conference held earlier in the week, Frey stated he is requesting federal and state to lend a hand in curbing crime in the city.
In Los Angeles, the spike in crime has been more pronounced. Last year, violent crime in the city rose 36% as elected officials stripped the local police department of $150 million, roughly 8% of the department’s funding. The number of murders across the city surged to a decade-high of 350.
Despite Democratic Mayor Eric Garcetti’s and the L.A. city council’s earlier commitment to cut back police funding, city leaders reversed course last week. The city council approved additional funding for the police department to hire 250 officers, essentially restoring the cuts that the city council approved last year, according to The New York Times.
Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced earlier in the month of May that the city will be building a new police precinct in Southeast Queens to help quell the rise in crime happening in that area. This comes after de Blasio promised to cut $1 billion from the NYPD’s budget.
It’s important to note that many of these promised cuts never actually happened.
This proves that police are a much needed institution that we cannot afford to get rid of. Hopefully this will kill this particular movement.
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