I was so proud of President Biden when he spoke yesterday to cops in New York City at Police Department headquarters and vigorously attacked the “defund the police” crowd. “The answer [to criminal violence] is not to defund the police,” Biden told them. “It’s to give you the tools, the training, the funding, to be partners, to be protectors.”
I couldn’t agree more!
The fiction is out there, spread by misinformed or perhaps deliberately provocative agitators, that the Democratic Party as a whole stands for defunding the police. Nothing could be further from the truth. Biden has been denouncing the “defund the police” insanity for a long time. Nearly a year ago, CNN reported that “In response to a question about how to avoid overly constraining police while addressing racial disparities, Biden replied, ‘By number one, not defunding the police.’" Even before that, former President Barack Obama famously observed, “I guess you can use a snappy slogan like 'Defund The Police,' but, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you're actually going to get the changes you want done.”
Here in California, our Governor, Gavin Newsom, similarly has taken a strong stand against “defund the police.” “Don't ever confuse me with the defund police movement,” he said in an August, 2021 news conference.
In other words, it’s a fiction that the Democratic Party stands for “defund the police.” We really have to fight against this slur. Yes, some extremists do want to wreck our police department, people like Carroll Fife, her friend Rebecca Kaplan and the notorious Cat Brooks. But I would argue that these people are not Democrats. I don’t know what to call them, but they have nothing to do with the Democratic Party I was raised in and know.
The truth is that most Democrats support their local police departments. The party, sadly, lost control of the public narrative over the last few years, as the defunders out-maneuvered them to catch media attention. But, as I’ve been pointing out for a long time, the defunders ought to have been careful what they wished for: with the erosion of police funding they brought about, crime in America soared, and the public response has been entirely predictable. Americans now realize that “police reform” is largely a meaningless phrase invented by people who really don’t want effective policing at all.
Look at the situation across the Bay in San Francisco. There, the District Attorney, Chesa Boudin (who is likely to be recalled) is engaged in a very public battle with SFPD Chief Bill Scott. Scott has essentially broken ranks with the DA, and he (Scott) did so because he knows that he has the support of a majority of San Franciscans who believe that Boudin is soft on crime, antagonistic toward cops, and is at least partly responsible for San Francisco’ rise in crime. Thus we’re seeing in that city the same thing we’re seeing here in Oakland and across the country: People have had it with “police reform.” They recognize it as little more than a bizarre attack on law enforcement. The enemy is not cops: the enemy is criminals. I hope voters will see that it is not the Democratic Party that’s trying to defund the police, but a small cadre of ideologues who, for their own nefarious purposes, are trying to destroy police departments. The good news is that they’re on the run: they lost their war, although they can’t admit it.
Steve Heimoff