“Everybody says that sort of stuff until they have to call 911,” said city councilman Michael Bond recently in reference to “defund-the-police” agitation.
Leftists might assume Bond was a “white supremacist,” except that Bond is a black politician in the mostly black city of Atlanta, Georgia.
Bond also perhaps knows that most black Americans want a robust police presence in their neighborhoods, and that a majority are satisfied with their local cops. That’s called reality — also known as where leftist narratives go to die.
Bond is one of many Atlanta supporters of a new 85-acre, $90 million public-safety training center for cops, a project evoking howls of protest from defund-the-police activists.
Reporting on the story, the far-left Daily Beast opens with a line about Rayshard Brooks, describing him as “a 27-year-old Black man” who “was shot and killed by police last summer after being woken up in the parking lot of an Atlanta Wendy’s” and stating that Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms declared “that Brooks ‘could have been any one of us.’”
Well, yes, if any one of us happens to be a criminal who’d fight with two police officers, grab one of their tasers, try to shoot one of the cops with it — and who has a rap sheet as long as Andrew Cuomo’s nursing-home COVID kill list.
But it was in this criminal’s name that activists wanted to “defund” the police, and they and others are upset it’s not happening. The Beast is apparently among them, writing:
For a while there, it looked like the Democratic establishment in the mostly Black city might be determined to change the game. That July, the City Council went so far as to debate moving $70 million from its police budget and holding onto it to be used for policies intended to help reimagine policing.
In essence, the plan was an olive branch to the Defund the Police set. But the ordinance, dubbed by many in the community as the Rayshard Brooks Bill, failed.
Activists failing to get their way is not exactly a new tale in American municipal politics.
Actually, activists getting their way — contrary to the people’s will — is too common a tale. But it’s not happening in Atlanta, at least not this time. City officials have already increased the police budget seven percent and are close to approving the aforementioned training center. Dubbed “Cop City” by naysayers, it “will include state of the art explosive testing areas, firing ranges, and a mock city,” relates the Beast.
It also has powerful backers. “Chief among them: The Atlanta Police Foundation, an advocacy group with funding from local business and lots of political sway that has suggested the city’s ‘violent crime surge’ underscores the ‘urgency’ of the investment in the training center,” the site continues. “In a June overview of the proposed project, the Police Foundation also suggested the center would increase morale and halt the exodus of officers.”
The Beast quotes various activists who are aghast that the city would choose to finance a major police project over defunding the cops, even though the latter agenda is based wholly on lies.
Did you ever wonder why, when the mainstream media report on supposed “systemic police racism” and an alleged war on blacks, they only present emotion-stoking anecdotes (e.g., the George Floyd incident) and never actual illuminative statistics? It would be easy enough, after all, to point out that “______ (this number) of unarmed black Americans are killed by police every year.” The problem?
That blank would be filled in with a number between 12 and 28 — that’s all it is in this country of 330 million — and that would completely destroy the narrative.
So with the average person believing the figure is higher, and the average liberal supposing it’s much higher, you just don’t say anything. You let the propaganda-buttressing misconception ride.
Moreover, as The New American has often pointed out, police shoot more white than black suspects every year, are more likely to shoot white suspects relative to the races’ different homicide rates and the rates at which they feloniously shoot police, and are more willing to shoot whites in general, according to studies. What’s more, statistics show that police shootings of black suspects have declined 75 percent over the last several decades.
Returning to propaganda, the Beast reports on “critics” of the training center who say that, aside from the police foundation, its chief backers are “rich people scared of high crime.”
Whether true or not, this is a diversion. Fact: Wealthy people are always less affected by police defunding because they can afford private security. Most hurt are poor people, who are largely black — especially so in Atlanta.
This is no doubt why a Gallup poll found last year that 81 percent of blacks “support either the same amount or an increased police presence in their communities,” as the Federalist put it. Furthermore, a June 2020 Monmouth survey showed that an equal percentage of whites and blacks — 72 percent — are satisfied with their local police.
Don’t be shocked: Black Americans know that the police aren’t the ones mostly likely to shoot their kids; black criminals living in their neighborhoods are.
This is also likely why, despite activist caterwauling, Councilman Bond and other politicians support the training center. Citing Minneapolis’s defunding disaster as a cautionary tale, Bond “said that activists like [anti-police Kamau] Franklin who are calling for the entire project to be scrapped — and for a move back toward defunding cops — are dreaming,” writes the Beast.
“‘Everybody says that sort of stuff until they have to call 911,’” the site quotes Bond as stating.
This said, whether the matter is policing, schooling, or something else, it’s not new buildings or new ideas that are usually needed, but eternal truths (e.g., cultivate virtue in police forces). Also, the training center is apparently a reaction to the anti-police movement, an establishment effort to appear as if they’re “doing something” to “improve” law enforcement without capitulating to the defund loons. And a lot more could probably be achieved with a lot less than the project’s $90 million price tag.
But the bottom line is that there is no characteristic problem with American policing (aside, perhaps, from the political correctness infecting many departments). This doesn’t mean cops are perfect — not any more than teachers, mechanics, accountants, restaurateurs, or parents are. Perfection is not a thing of this world.
The characteristic flaws lie with American left-wing activists who, like criminals, too often hate the police.
