Defunding the Police – USA Gov Policy

The conclusion of Judge John Wilson’s (ret.) analysis of the bizarre concept of ending police protection of the American people.

Views on what defunding the police actually means range across the spectrum. According to CNN, “some supporters of divestment want to reallocate some, but not all, funds away from police departments to social services. Some want to strip all police funding and dissolve departments.” One of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, said that defunding the police “means that we are reducing the ability for law enforcement to have resources that harm our communities…It’s about reinvesting those dollars into black communities, communities that have been deeply divested from.”

There is no basis in reality for the claim that black communities have been “deeply divested from.” In fact, a review of the 2019 Minneapolis City budget reveals that of the $349.9 million in taxes collected in 2019, $20 million was budgeted for the “Minneapolis Homes program which provides affordable financial assistance to create homeownership opportunities; and a new Healthy Homes, Healthy Schools program which aims to provide housing stability for City of Minneapolis families with students enrolled in Minneapolis public schools”; provides for “major investments in Community Police Relations across multiple departments”; and includes this statement – “As we continue a near decade-long economic expansion, we know that the effects of the expansion are not being felt equally amongst all communities within our city. This budget invests in continuing to grow our economy through inclusion – rather than accepting disparate outcomes as given.”

Other cities have joined the “Defund the Police” bandwagon. In New York, Mayor Bill DeBlasio has vowed to cut the budget of the NYPD, and give the money to “Youth and Social Services,” while Los Angeles Mayor Gil Garcetti wants to cut up to $150 million from his budget as part of a broader effort to reinvest more dollars into the black community.

Meanwhile, on the federal level, “House and Senate Democrats…are expected to unveil the new ‘Justice in Policing Act of 2020,’ which includes major overhauls for how police officers around the country will do their jobs. (The bill) includes prohibiting the use of chokeholds, lowering legal standards to pursue criminal and civil penalties for police misconduct, and banning certain no-knock warrants.”

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All this talk of “reinvesting in black communities,” and “rebuilding a new model of public safety” begs several crucial questions. While funding is diverted to Youth and Social programs, who will address reports of burglaries, robberies, rapes and murders? Who will place suspects of violent crimes under arrest, and who will investigate these crimes? Who will Jeremiah Ellison and Patrisse Cullors call if their wallet is stolen, or their car broken into?

For a glimpse of what supporters of defunding the police have in mind, we can turn to the Occupy Wall Street protest of 2011. When women reported rape or sexual molestation, “Brendan Burke, 41, who help(ed) run the security team in Zuccotti Park…admitted there have been times when members of the community have taken it upon themselves to chase off men who exposed themselves in the park. “If there is a consensus that someone is bothering another person, the community will take care of it,” he said.”

How will the community take care of this issue? In 2011 the protest organizers released this statement; “As individuals and as a community, we have the responsibility and the opportunity to create an alternative to this culture of violence…We are working for…a world in which survivors are respected and supported unconditionally… We are redoubling our efforts to raise awareness about sexual violence. This includes taking preventative measures such as encouraging healthy relationship dynamics and consent practices that can help to limit harm.”

It remains to be seen how “encouraging healthy relationship dynamics” will lead to the arrest, prosecution and incarceration of a sex offender, or how additional funding for Youth and Social Programs will lead to the arrest of the man who pushes your Grandmother to the ground, breaking her hip, and stealing her purse.

Illustration: Pixabay

This article was contributed by the distinguished jurist, Judge John Wilson (ret.)

For a brief moment, the country stood united. No one of good will watched the video of Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd and believed that the officer’s actions were appropriate. No one has seriously argued that Officer Chauvin should not be charged with one degree or another of murder. No one can seriously argue that the authorities in Minneapolis did not handle this matter quickly and effectively.

And yet, despite this unity, there are those who found their opportunity to divide us once again, and put forth the most ludicrous and unreasonable methods of dealing with the alleged epidemic of police brutality.

In fact, there is no increase in police violence. According to John Hirschauer in National Review, “last year, according to the Washington Post’s database of police-involved shootings, nine unarmed black people were shot and killed by the police, compared to 19 unarmed white people. Assuming that the use of lethal force was unjustified in each of those nine cases — not always a safe assumption — the resulting deaths are no less tragic for being so statistically improbable.”

This is not to say that those who believe there is a disparity between the treatment of whites and blacks by police officers are utterly wrong. According to the National Violent Death Reporting System, “victims were majority white (52%) but disproportionately black (32%) with a fatality rate 2.8 times higher among blacks than whites. Most victims were reported to be armed (83%); however, black victims were more likely to be unarmed (14.8%) than white (9.4%) or Hispanic (5.8%) victims.”

On this statistical basis alone, people who wish to highlight this difference between the treatment of blacks and whites by law enforcement and seek redress are not unreasonable. However, reasonable discourse and practical solutions regarding this issue have been hijacked by extremism and its enablers among legislators.

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In response to the death of George Floyd, 9 of the 13 members of the Minneapolis City Council have decided to “defund” their police force. “‘We committed to dismantling policing as we know it in the city of Minneapolis and to rebuild with our community a new model of public safety that actually keeps our community safe,’ Council President Lisa Bender told CNN.” One of the leaders of the “defund the police” movement in the Minneapolis City Council is Jeremiah Ellison – the son of Minneapolis Attorney General Keith Ellison, who happens to be prosecuting Officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.

Both father and son have expressed extreme radical views in the past. Keith Ellison was associated with the Nation of Islam in his youth, and was a strong defender of its leader, Louis Farrakhan. According to CNN, “in one scathing column from 1990 unearthed by CNN’s KFile, Ellison accused the president (of the University of Minnesota) of chilling the free expression of black students by openly criticizing a controversial speaker invited to speak on campus by the Africana Student Cultural Center. That speaker, Kwame Ture (also known as Stokely Carmichael), had publicly claimed that Zionists had collaborated with the Nazis in World War II and has been quoted as saying ‘Zionism must be destroyed.'”

His son Jeremiah, has publicly expressed his support for ANTIFA, stating “Unless someone can prove to me ANTIFA is behind the burning of black and immigrant owned businesses in my ward, I’ll keep focusing on stopping the white power terrorist THE ARE ACTUALLY ATTACKING US!” His father, while deputy chief of the DNC, also expressed his own support for ANTIFA by endorsing a handbook for the group.

The Report concludes tomorrow

Illustration: Pixabay

Quick Analysis

“Innocent Explanations” for Biden’s Willful Retention of Classified Materials?

“Down is up, up is down. Good is Wicked, Wicked is Good. The times are changing. This is what Oz has come to.” Danielle Paige, Wicked As we have discussed, the Report issued by Special Counsel Robert Hur states “[o]ur investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” Nonetheless, Hur concludes that “the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” In our last article, we examined one of the grounds for Hur’s decision not to recommend prosecution of Joe Biden; his finding that “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him – by then a former president well into his eighties – of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.” Today, we analyze Hur’s decision to exonerate Biden despite the evidence for the President’s willful retention of classified materials while not in office. As described in Chapter 11 of the Report, “[i]n a recorded conversation on February 16, 2017, at Mr. Biden’s rental home in Virginia, Mr. Biden told Mark Zwonitzer (a writer working with Biden) that Mr. Biden had ‘just found all the classified stuff downstairs.’ According to what Mr. Biden told Zwonitzer, ‘all the classified stuff’ related to President Obama’s 2009 decision to surge American troops to Afghanistan, and to a pivotal moment when Mr. Biden sent President Obama his handwritten Thanksgiving memo opposing the troop surge. Photos of the Virginia home show that the lowest level ‘downstairs’-where Mr. Biden told Zwonitzer he had ‘just found all the classified stuff’-included rooms that Mr. Biden used as work and storage spaces.” (Citations omitted.) Hur goes on to claim that “Mr. Biden could have found the classified Afghanistan documents at the Virginia home in 2017 and then forgotten about them soon after.” Hur justifies this amazing assertion with his finding that “Mr. Biden’s memory…appeared to have significant limitations…[i]n his interview with our office, Mr. Biden…did not remember when he was vice president [and forgot]…when his son Beau died.” Hur admits that the “best case for charges would rely on Mr. Biden’s possession of the Afghanistan documents in his Virginia home in February 2017. when he was a private citizen and when he told his ghostwriter he had just found classified material.” However, in addition to the ludicrous “maybe he forgot” defense, Hur finds further reasons to decline to prosecute Biden for this allegation. According to Hur, “[w]hen Mr. Biden told his ghostwriter about finding ”all the classified stuff downstairs,’ his tone was matter-of-fact. For a person who had viewed classified documents nearly every day for eight years as vice president, including regularly in his home, finding classified documents at home less than a month after leaving office could have been an unremarkable and forgettable event.” Hur continues in this nonsensical vein; “Another viable defense is that Mr. Biden might not have retained the classified Afghanistan documents in his Virginia home at all. They could have been stored, by mistake and without his knowledge, at his Delaware home since the time he was vice president, as were other classified documents recovered during our investigation. This would rebut charges that he willfully retained the documents in Virginia.” But didn’t Biden himself say to Zwonitzer that he found the “classified stuff” in the basement of that same Virginia home? Hur has a preposterous answer for that question; “[J]urors may hesitate to place too much evidentiary weight on a single eight-word utterance to his ghostwriter about finding classified documents in Virginia, in the absence of other, more direct evidence…no witness, photo, email, text message, or any other evidence conclusively places the Afghanistan documents at the Virginia home in 2017.” As if this analysis wasn’t incredible enough, Hur adds that “[i]n addition to this shortage of evidence, there are other innocent explanations for the documents that we cannot refute. When Mr. Biden told his ghostwriter he ‘just found all the classified stuff downstairs,’ he could have been referring to something other than the Afghanistan documents.” The report concludes tomorrow Illustration: Pixabay

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