Dems smell the coffee when it comes to crime

Pardon me while I chuckle about the amazing, sudden, unexpected proliferation of pro-cop Democrats.

Here’s me chuckling. ☺️

Most of these Democrats happen to be candidates and their awakening (not Awokening) intersects with their attempts to be elected or re-elected, most especially in big cities that have been under the Democrats thumb for generations. And specifically in the Philadelphia mayor’s race. 

Here, in 2020, all five City Council members running for mayor (in alphabetic order) — Allan Domb, Derek Green, Helen Gym, Cherelle Parker, Maria Quinones Sanchez — voted to cancel a $33 million increase to the police department’s $800 million budget.

In other words, they voted to keep funding at the same level, which is not a cut, except to their critics. (The canceled funding included money for body cams, implicit bias training, and an “equity manager,” all babies thrown out with the bath water.)

It was an ill-considered slap at police officers in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, which sparked nation-wide protests  riots, which were “mostly peaceful” according to much of the mainstream media.

While that is technically true, the riots cost $1 billion, according to reporting done by Axios.

Across the nation, led by Democrats, politicians took an ax to police budgets, slashing willy-nilly to show their solidarity with rioters, never thinking about the unintended consequences.

Those were (as any damn fool could have predicted) an increase in some crime (for instance, homicides in Philadelphia jumped from 353 in 2019 to 516 in 2022), and massive exits from police work, either by retirement or simply quitting.

The attack on all police for the crimes of a few is tantamount to treating all Italians as Mafia members. It is, yes, bigotry.  The mayoral candidates want you to forget that ever happened.

I’ve had Democratic friends tell me it wasn’t all Dems who were shouting “defund the police.”

True, but just about the only ones shouting it were Democrats and prominent Democrats had the loudest voices. Here I am thinking of The Squad, and Congresswoman Corie Bush is still screaming about defunding the police. Bush describes herself as a BLM activist and she thinks that gives her authority to speak for all Black people. 

The odd reality is that Black neighborhoods want more police, not fewer, according to Gallup, reporting the desire of 61%. White progressives who live in safe neighborhoods don’t see the need for more police. They don’t need more police, but the poor, nonwhite neighborhoods do.

So when some white social justice warrior is screaming against the cops, I see that as the worst kind of paternalism — a white savior complex telling Black people how they should think and what they should feel about their safety.

So a rising crime rate — it is Philadelphians’ No. 1 concern, according to polling — has caused Dems running for office to rethink what they have been saying.

Example: Former Councilwoman Cherelle Parker three years ago drafted a resolution to ban police use of stop and frisk. [Stop and frisk is constitutional, and Philly police say that is a misuse of the term. They can and do stop and question, which may lead to a body search.] 

That was then. Last year, Parker did a U-turn and said “We are in the middle of a crisis and we have to use every tool that we have to get illegals guns off the street.”

Do you like how the coffee smells, Cherelle?

Not complaining too hard. Better late than never to realize the actual safety of citizens is more important than fealty to some strange Woke notions that are divorced from reality.