Despite broad popular support for legislation to curtail police violence, Congress got nothing done. Democrats, despite controlling both the House and Senate in 2021 and 2022, slow-walked the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, insisting on bipartisan support that never materialized. Ending qualified immunity, the legal standard that prevents police officers from being sued for wrongdoing even when they knowingly break the law, was deemed not urgent by Jim Clyburn, then the highest-ranking Black member of the Democratic House majority, despite that being a core demand of the protest movement. Once that slipped away, it opened the door to even smaller reforms floating out of reach.
In the end, despite the embarrassing photo op in which Democratic leaders donned matching kente-cloth stoles and knelt on the floor of the Capitol building, no reforms were passed into law. After much hand-wringing over activists’ use of the slogan “Defund the Police,” no major efforts to defund large police departments were ever implemented. Police killings continued to increase: Officers killed at least 1,232 people in 2023, the deadliest year in a decade.
Now not even a single representative who swept into Congress on the heels of the popular mandate of police reform remains.
It’s a stark outcome. Consider, for example, Georgia Rep. John Lewis, an activist during the Civil Rights Movement and the leader of the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, Alabama. Lewis continued his activist work for years afterward, arriving in Congress only in the 1980s, but he served 17 terms as a celebrated member of the Democratic House caucus until his death in 2020.
Worth noting, this opinion piece came out before Ilhan Omar’s primary took place, which she ended up winning
e; wrong archive link
Good. The whole “defund the police” movement was just stupid. Crime will ALWAYS be an issue in a country like the US, where there’s millions of people with different types of background, cultures, and beliefs. No other country on the planet has this same type of society. We need tough law enforcement, and we need to be able to enforce those laws. Go to any ghetto or run down neighborhood in America and ask them if they want “less cops” on the streets…
Oh boy, THAT is a can of worms. Poor/minority neighborhoods are DOUBLE victims. I realize this is counter intuitive, but they end up simultaneously under-policed AND over-policed.
“How the hell does that work?” you ask… WELL…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/underpolicing-cities-violent-crime/2020/06/12/b5d1fd26-ac0c-11ea-9063-e69bd6520940_story.html
tl;dr - Redidents of high crime neighborhoods can’t rely on the police when they call for help (under policing) while at the same time, are continually hassled by cops for doing nothing (over policing).
So if you can’t trust the cops to show up when you need them, and are continually hassled by them when you don’t need them, how would that make you feel about police funding?
Have you ever actually LIVED an a bad area in an inner city? I have, in Southern California and Central California. The neighborhoods are victims to drugs, gangs, and violence. The only thing stopping an all out war happening in these areas is law enforcement. I’d rather risk the chance of “being harassed” by cops, over being killed by gang violence any day.