'Defund the Police' Backfires as Cities Left with Only One Option to Fight Crime Surge
Multiple United States cities that defunded their police departments in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death have begun reallocating funds to their law enforcement agencies in an attempt to fight growing crime rates a year after slashing critical police spending money, the New York Times reported.
According to the New York Times, local policymakers in cities from New York to Los Angeles voted to boost spending on law enforcement.
The New York Police Department received an additional $200 million in funding.
The Los Angeles Police Department got a 3 percent hike in their budget allotment, according to the Times.
Burlington, Vermont, is reportedly handing out $10,000 bonuses to police officers to remain in their jobs.
Burlington is the city where Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders served as mayor before embarking on a congressional career.
The Times report pointed to “rising levels of crime in major cities last year, the exodus of officers from departments large and small and political pressures” as the reasons for these cities’ change of mind.
As previously reported by The Western Journal, ever since the May 2020 demise of George Floyd, the ensuing defunding of police departments in several cities across the country resulted in skyrocketing rates of murder and other violent crimes.
Democratic leaders, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of New York, dismissed the peoples’ concerns over such criminal activity as products of “media hype.”
Anti-police propaganda touted by Black Lives Matter and several Democratic leaders led to manpower shortages in many police departments as officers either quit their jobs or moved to police-friendly communities.
The growing crime rates also raised calls for action, giving rise to political pressure that eventually made many cities overturn their politically motivated police-defunding plans.
Among the many cities reconsidering their police defunding plans, the most significant change came from Dallas, according to the Times.
After protests last year, the City Council decided to slash some funding from the city’s police department, the Times reported.
But this year, Dallas’ Democratic Mayor Eric Johnson, in addition to advocating the restoration of police funding, has called for increasing the number of police officers on the city’s streets.
Johnson even wrote a blog post this summer saying that “Dallas needs more police officers.”
“Dallas needs a more robust community policing effort to fight violent crime and strengthen neighborhoods,” Johnson wrote.
“And to get there, the city needs to hire more police officers. There is no question about it.”
“A police force that once had roughly 3,500 officers in its ranks just five years ago has hovered for years around 3,000 or so after a mass exodus caused largely by the pension crisis. Violent crime has increased during those years. Response times have slowed. The police department has been strained, blowing through overtime money just to keep up with residents’ needs for their services.”
“Dallas stands out for the amount of investment that the local government is putting into the department,” Executive Director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association Laura Cooper told the Times.
“As an African American male who came of age in the 1990s, I remember a lot of people whose lives were devastated by violence,” continued Johnson.
“I don’t want to go back there.”
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