Supporting Cops
We should support our local police, but that also means holding them accountable whether they kneel on necks or kneel in support of ideological movements and rioters.
Across history, nations that allow local control of community police forces are more free, stable, and liberty-driven than societies that have national or centralized systems of policing. Over the long, eventful history of the United States — a history that has routinely witnessed large, peaceful rallies and protests, turbulent and violent riots, and frequent urban disorder, including acts of well-funded and highly organized “anarchy” — independent, community-controlled police departments have been a key factor in preserving the peace and countering dangerous and anti-constitutional demands for a national police force. Never in our history has the concept of local policing been so under assault, from progressive politicians to socialist utopians, and from lawless movements such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
Statistics from the FBI and other watchdog groups demonstrate that the roughly 700,000 local police officers and almost 18,000 police agencies in this country are not rife with brutality, racism, and the wide-scale trampling of civil rights, especially the rights of African-American citizens. This false narrative of police persecution, driven by an intemperate, politicized, and frantically anti-Trump media, has nevertheless been embraced by academia, Hollywood, athletic elites, major corporations, activist groups, and even some churches, all of which are demanding a complete defunding of local police forces nationwide. Of course, bad apples exist in the ranks of America’s police forces — how could they not? And while a greater emphasis on training in arrest tactics and community relations might be beneficial, the idea of defunding police departments — moving instead to progressive models of “community safe-keeping” — is not just absurd, but deeply perilous to the survival of our constitutional republic. That many of these baseless attacks are coming from elected leaders at the federal level is altogether alarming. And while hardly anyone is talking about it, the replacement of locally controlled, independent police departments with community organized models of security would quickly give rise to a national police force, disconnected from the communities they police and taking orders from the federal government.
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