You know we live in crazy times when it’s hard distinguishing real news from satire. A case in point is that the Left, not satisfied just advocating the abolition of ICE, now proposes eliminating police forces.
Yes, you read that right: not reforming police — not just having the feds assume control as was proposed under Obama in reference to Baltimore’s cops — but abolishing them. As the City Journal reports:
The latest call to action from some criminal-justice activists: “Abolish the police.” From the streets of Chicago to the city council of Seattle, and in the pages of academic journals ranging from the Cardozo Law Review to the Harvard Law Review and of mainstream publications from the Boston Review to Rolling Stone, advocates and activists are building a case not just to reform policing — viewed as an oppressive, violent, and racist institution — but to do away with it altogether. When I first heard this slogan, I assumed that it was a figure of speech, used to legitimize more expansive criminal-justice reform. But after reading the academic and activist literature, I realized that “abolish the police” is a concrete policy goal. The abolitionists want to dismantle municipal police departments and see “police officers disappearing from the streets.”
One might dismiss such proclamations as part of a fringe movement, but advocates of these radical views are gaining political momentum in numerous cities. In Seattle, socialist city council candidate Shaun Scott, who ran on a “police abolition” platform, came within 1,386 votes of winning elected office. During his campaign, he argued that the city must “[disinvest] from the police state” and “build towards a world where nobody is criminalized for being poor.” At a debate hosted by the Seattle Police Officers Guild, Scott blasted “so-called officers” for their “deep and entrenched institutional ties to racism” that produced an “apparatus of overaggressive and racist policing that has emerged to steer many black and brown bodies back into, in essence, a form of slavery.” Another Seattle police abolitionist, Kirsten Harris-Talley, served briefly in as an appointed city councilwoman. Both Scott and Harris-Talley enjoy broad support from the city’s progressive establishment.
Although explaining this idea’s folly is a bit like devoting ink to expounding upon how fire can burn and water make you wet, American Thinker points out that we long ago saw what transpires when police vanish: The 1919 Boston police strike led to “widespread looting and open criminality in the streets,” the site related. Why, even the recent years’ “de-policing” we’ve see in New York City and elsewhere is leading to crime’s proliferation.
American Thinker also examines what drives “sincere” police abolitionists, writing, “Progressivism is defined by the belief that wise governance (by progressives) can change human nature and bring about a social and political order that will overcome the selfishness, greed and other deadly sins that have been with us since the dawn of humanity.”
Quite true. In fact, the French Revolution, orchestrated by the first of the ideologues we call “leftists,” was known as history’s initial wide-scale attempt to actually change man’s nature. This has been a consistent leftist theme ever since, with Lysenkoism (the pseudo-scientific belief in the heritability of acquired traits) and the more recent notion of sex as social construct being just two examples.
And police abolition ideology is now another. The Nation’s Mychal Denzel Smith claims that cops can be rendered unnecessary by “full social, economic, and political equality,” City Journal points out, while the aforementioned Harris-Talley echoed him, fancying that “investing in community” will have this effect.
Yet this idea that poverty and inequality are crime’s sole drivers is belied by both reason and history. For example, during “the Great Depression, when unemployment hit 25 percent, the crime rate in many cities went down,” wrote the City Journal in 2011. Moreover, “the 1960s, a period of rising crime, had essentially the same unemployment rate as the late 1990s and early 2000s, a period when crime fell,” the site also informed.
(Note: The late ‘90s and early 2000s unemployment rate must actually have been higher because the Clinton administration changed the way the rate was calculated, artificially lowering it.)
In reality, the no poverty=no crime theory is a Marxist one. Under Marxist doctrine, “communism” is not a “government”; it’s the culmination of the socialist revolution, where government has melted away and everyone lives in peace, harmony, and bliss. How can this be achieved?
Through “economic equality,” claimed Karl Marx. There’d be no reason for crime or conflict of any kind, he averred, if everyone’s needs were met and all were equally wealthy.
Of course, this silly notion could only be entertained by passion-blinded, envious minds. Were it true, we wouldn’t see well-paid politicians — such as the recently exposed Movita Johnson-Harrell, whose “theft knew no bounds” — descending into greed-driven corruption. There wouldn’t be filthy rich businessmen such as Bernie Madoff risking prison time just to make off with even more money.
The mistake here is failure to grasp that man does not live on bread alone. People have moral and spiritual dimensions as well, and deadly sins such as greed, lust, sloth, envy, and wrath aren’t extinguished by economics. In fact, wealth can actually exacerbate certain problems, as attested to by the proverbs “Busy hands are happy hands,” “Work ennobles man,” and “An idle mind is the Devil’s playground.” Only a fool fancies cash a cure-all.
Yet some police abolitionists are simply trying to fool others. As the National Sentinel writes, “Utopian visions of ‘goodness’ and ‘fairness’ aside, it’s difficult to believe that advocates for abolishing police are not thinking things through. Sure, some of them are ideologues, but not all of them.”
“It doesn’t take a genius to understand how damaging police abolition would be to the social fabric of our nation. It would collapse — literally overnight — in many parts of the country,” the site continues. “So again, what’s the real goal of getting rid of police?”
“Remember Obama’s objective of ‘fundamentally transforming’ our country?” the Sentinel asks rhetorically.
Note here the second of the four defined stages for undermining a nation and effecting socialist revolution. Coming after “demoralization” and before “crisis” and “normalization,” it is destabilization. It’s precisely what it sounds like, and what could be more destabilizing than eliminating law enforcement officers?
Most police abolitionists are just delusional, emotion-blinded cranks. But insofar as there is a somewhat rational, well considered motivation driving them, what other than destabilization could it be?
Photo: Tero Vesalainen/iStock/Getty Images Plus
