Make no mistake about it: When people on the City Council talk about defunding the police (or “reimagining public safety,” which is the same thing), they’re not being honest about their real goal: Abolishing the police.
As fantastic and unlikely as that sounds, it’s true. There’s a growing belief among high public officials in Oakland that the Oakland Police Department should be abolished. Included among these public officials are not only City Council members, but Police Commission members and other powerful city figures. (I exempt Mayor Libby Schaaf from this indictment. She’s lately shown an admirable courage in standing up for cops.)
You have to ask yourself why any sane person would want to abolish the police department. Part of the reason is because some of these people come from criminal backgrounds themselves. They’ve had run-ins with cops, and developed an intense phobia, bordering on prejudice, against them.
Bob Dylan sang, “To live outside the law you must be honest,” but that’s not true. You have to be dishonest to rob, assault, vandalize, kill. There’s nothing romantic about thieves or carjackers or shoplifters or arsonists. They’re leeches on society, sociopaths with no moral compass and thus no empathy for others’ rights or feelings. They feel entitled to commit their crimes, and so when they run up against cops (whose sworn duty is to protect the public), they resent them and develop deep-seated feelings of antipathy toward law enforcement. In a supreme act of rationalization, they convince themselves, and each other, that cops are “the problem.” Cops aren’t the problem, of course; the problem is the dysfunctional thinking and behavior of criminals, and the institutionalization of criminal culture. The problem is criminals who believe they have the right to prey on others. This is why every society throughout history has developed ways and means of creating laws, and of enforcing those laws against those who would violate them.
And now we have a bunch of woke politicians who claim to believe we’re at some sort of tipping point in the history of humankind. Through their “social justice” movements and other experimental interventions, they say they’ll create a thoroughly just, equitable society. It sounds good, doesn’t it? An Eden or Utopia, right here in Oakland! There’s only one problem: In the midst of this Eden envisioned by the City Council are truly bad people, conscience-less individuals who live by pillaging and looting. And the City Council has nothing to say about them, no solutions for stopping them, nothing except their neurotic fury and dislike of the police, whom they wish to abolish. Try this little thought experiment: close your eyes for 15 seconds and imagine Oakland with no Police Department, no Sheriffs’ Department, no California Highway Patrol, no law enforcement of any kind. Nothing and no one to help you when they come for you. If that’s what you want, keep re-electing the same defunders, and don’t complain when your car is broken into or you’re mugged on the street.
Steve Heimoff