Woops! Minneapolis Re-Funds Police

Calls to “defund police” are displays of utter stupidity which should call into question the universal right of every person to vote.

Such profound ignorance, if popular, would result in governments which were incapable of fulfilling their duty of care to society.

It would take the illustration that two lions and a goat voting on dinner would still be technically a “democracy” (although completely lacking in necessary virtues of a government conducive to liberty, peace and justice) from humorous metaphor to dystopian reality.

Minneapolis – the city where the lawless, murderous, looting & rioting mobs which plagued America for most of 2020 started – responded to the demands to “defund police” by cutting $8 million from the city’s police department budget. They redirected the funds to other programs such as violence prevention and mental health teams.

The city’s authorised police force is 888. The council had originally attempted to reduce this by more than 15%, a move the Mayor sensibly condemned as “irresponsible”, and which narrowly failed a council vote.

Following the “mostly peaceful” riots of 2020 which saw a police building burned to the ground, the city’s police force has been reduced by 28% to just 638 officers currently available. Many have resigned, retired or gone on PTSD-related extended leave.

But the Minneapolis City Council agreed on Friday last week to re-fund a boost to recruitment of police officers with $6.4 million.

Some have argued the slogan “defund police” isn’t really just about taking money from police, but also adding funds to other supportive services as detailed above.

The argument asserts trained counselors are better first responders to mental health sufferers disturbing the peace than officers who aren’t appropriately trained showing up and arresting or even shooting them.

But here’s the problem with that argument.

It’s dishonest propaganda designed to camouflage broken thinking with a respectable but thin veneer of compassion. Defunding police to any extent is either pathological stupidity or some neo-Marxist revolutionary kind of political anarchism.

If the argument was, as some claim, about the best use of police resources – preventing and fighting crime and protecting the innocent, instead of being mental health crisis first responders – that would be a valid, worthy argument; with the worst possible slogan being “defund police”.

Better recruitment standards and accountability for corruption and actual incidents of brutality, and diluting the police unions’ culture of protecting bad cops would also be applaudable campaigns; again: terribly summised by “defund police”.

If the argument was about police responses being an invariably unjustified, brutal exploitation of power oppressing powerless minorities and the alleged “injustice” of funding said “oppression” instead of woke “progressive” programs – the best slogan would be “defund police”.

This is just another abundantly transparent attack on every established, trusted and proven institution by Marxist agendas such as BLM corp’ that was always going to end badly.

Minneapolis residents are complaining of longer police response times and increases in violent crimes after the council creatively and recklessly attempted to reinvent public safety.

When someone is violent and irrational for any pathological or chemical reason and presenting an immediate risk to those around them, a super-qualified counselor is not the only person I want turning up to serve and protect people I care about, whether family or strangers. That is not caring; that is reckless endangerment.

Comments that the Council “has blood on its hands” preceded it backtracking the push to defund the city’s police department. Local business owner Jay Ettinger said over 550 people were shot and over 80 people murdered last year – mostly black people – as a result of the political move to take down a whole system.

Any right-thinking person could see actually defunding already underfunded police, even partially, ending very badly very quickly for the very neighbourhoods and communities where police are called to respond the most often.

The problem is too many folks are only feeling instead of also thinking about facile slogans and perverse agendas. That we can fix.

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