I had to laugh out loud when I read an op-ed piece in Newsweek by a progressive social justice warrior named Toella Pliakas, an academic in the Washington, D.C. area.
Pliakas’s piece begins with what should be obvious to everyone by now: “It looks like the end for Defund the Police.” She explains that, in recent elections “across the country…voters [have] rejected candidates and policies identified with the post-George Floyd Defund movement.” Well, it took her long enough. You and I know that; we’ve seen the same thing for years here in Oakland, where the City Council’s defunders have metaphorically been run out of town on a rail, after being crushed by a wave of voter anger at them.
And yet Pliakas rolls out the tired trope that “while the slogan ‘Defund the Police’ was rejected, polling that phrases the proposal to redirect public funding to support investing in communities with the same money currently being spent on policing are popular.” Based on this assumption, Pliakas concludes that “the Left doesn't need a new platform on policing; we need a new communications strategy.”
Let me explain why this conclusion is so wrong. Whenever a political movement talks about needing “a new communications strategy,” you know they’re in trouble. The old saying “lipstick on a pig” applies here: making a cosmetic change to a product (defunding the police) in a futile effort to disguise its fundamental failings. Let there be no doubt, the “defund the police” movement’s “fundamental failings” are huge, undeniable, irreversible, uncorrectable, and have been readily perceived as such by the American people, who in recent polls have shown they do not want reductions—any reductions at all—in the size of their police forces.
Pliakas, who admits “defund the police…was a political disaster,” fails to learn the basic lesson of common sense: when you’re on the edge of the cliff, back off. Sadly, as a social activist with an emphasis on race issues, she can’t quite let go of a losing strategy. Maybe the phrase “defund the police” is a disaster, she admits, but Pliakas still insists that removing money from police budgets and spending it instead on “better welfare services” is the solution to crime.
But the same Americans who want to strengthen their police departments also tend to have negative attitudes toward “welfare.” Numerous articles and studies for years have shown this to be true.
President Biden’s “Build Back Better” campaign has run squarely into the perception that, as the New York Times put it, “…Democrats are trying to do too much.” The article continues, “Enthusiasm [for Biden’s plan] has fallen short of the party’s expectations,” leading to “a gut-check moment” for Democrats: “The Biden administration is struggling to win the unified support of Senate Democrats for an expansion of social welfare programs.” The problem is that lots of Americans no longer believe that “social welfare programs” do anything but spend the taxpayers’ money.
I think the American people are not mean or hateful. Democrats in particular are generous and desire, somewhat naively, to help the poor. But Americans are rightly suspicious of yet more programs to pour money into social-welfare schemes. After the trillions spent on welfare since LBJ’s Great Society and War on Poverty and subsequent programs over the last 50 years, we still have a country in which poverty is rampant in places like Oakland, with all the attendant horrors of crime and physical degradation. Voters would be foolish not to conclude that money alone is not the answer.
I would ask people like Pliakas to reconsider their basic assumptions. Something isn’t working in America, particularly in the cities, and it’s not because we need more welfare. Until and unless we can ask honest questions and not be afraid to talk about the actual causes of generational poverty, throwing money at our social problems will not work—especially if that money comes from police departments.
P.S. Don’t forget to Zoom in with us tomorrow (Wed. Feb. 2 at 6 p.m.) when we present Vincent Williams with the Coalition for a Better Oakland’s first annual Person of the Year Award. Here’s the Zoom link.
Steve Heimoff