The Wall Street Journal:

One feature of our current politics is how quickly bad events trigger a rush to bad policies. So it is that the response to the killing of George Floyd has sprinted past police reform to “defund the police.” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti wants to redirect $150 million from public safety to social programs, and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey was hooted from a protest on the weekend because he admitted he didn’t want to defund the police. City Council members now pledge to dismantle the force whether he wants to or not.

There’s a case for police reforms, in particular more public transparency about offenses by individual officers. Union rules negotiated under collective bargaining make it hard to punish offending officers, much as unions do for bad public school teachers. By all means let’s debate other policies and accountability in using force.

But a political drive to defund police risks a return to the high-crime era of the 1960s and 1970s that damaged so many American cities. Millennials and minorities in big cities have benefited tremendously from the hard work of Democratic mayors and police chiefs 20-30 years ago to reduce crime. Yet the progressives who now run most big cities have pushed relaxed enforcement of “victimless” crimes, and now they want to go further.

Even before the recent riots, crime had been surging this year in many of America’s big cities. In Minneapolis, car-jackings were up 45%, homicides 60%, arson 58% and burglaries 28% from January through May 30 compared to the same period last year. Violent crime overall was 16% higher and property crime 20% higher than recent low points in 2018.

In New York City, shootings had increased 18%, burglaries 31% and car-jackings 64%. There were about 1,279 more burglaries, 1,078 more cars stolen and 57 more shooting victims during the first five months of this year than during the same period last year. Almost all of these were outside of Manhattan’s business district.

In San Francisco, homicides before the riots this year had increased by 19%, burglaries by 23% and arson by 39% over last. Philadelphia reported a 28% increase in commercial burglaries, 51% in shootings, 22% in auto theft and 28% in retail theft from last year. Residential burglaries and larceny have fallen in many places, but that’s no doubt because people were at home.

Some of the increase in lawlessness may be due to states and counties releasing criminals from jails to stem coronavirus infections, but the surge in most places preceded the pandemic releases. In Minneapolis, property and violent crime had increased by 33% and 29%, respectively, through mid-March when Hennepin County reduced its jail population by 40%.

It’s impossible to prove cause and effect, but the line between liberal law enforcement policies and the crime spike is hard to ignore. Take New York City’s new bail law that gives nonviolent offenders a get-out-of-jail-free card. In January a man who stuck up six banks in two weeks was repeatedly released after each arrest. “I can’t believe they let me out,” he told a detective.

An arsonist who set a fire in front of the Columbia University Computer Music Center in March had 39 prior arrests dating to 1987. Democratic lawmakers gave judges more discretion to set cash bail for some offenders who present a public-safety risk. Yet Chief Terence Monahan said last week that, while police made 650 arrests, almost all will be released without bail.

“We had some arrests in Brooklyn where they had guns, [and] hopefully [Brooklyn district attorney] Eric Gonzalez will keep them in, [but] I can’t guarantee that’ll happen,” Mr. Monahan told the New York Post. “But when it comes to a burglary [at] a commercial store, which is looting, they’re back out. . . . Because of bail reform, you’re back out on the street the next day.”

San Francisco’s new District Attorney Chesa Boudin this year eliminated cash bail, stopped prosecuting “victimless” crimes and suspended the city’s practice of upgrading charges against repeat offenders. Crime in Minneapolis has been climbing since Mayor Frey entered office in 2018 and started pushing more relaxed law enforcement.

As police have eased up, violent crime has increased nearly twice as much in the minority third precinct in Minneapolis as city-wide since 2018. In New York’s Harlem neighborhood, which benefitted enormously from anti-crime mayors, murders have soared 160% this year over last while burglaries are up 56% and car-jackings have more than doubled.

Joe Biden said Monday he opposes defunding the police, and good for him. But law enforcement is mainly a state and local obligation, and in many cities now the defunders have power. Poor communities will be the victims if they succeed.

Will Lloyd:

Thanks to the nature of digital media, the last 10 days can be seen in entirely different ways. On one feed rioters turn urban centers into scenes from a Purge movie, indiscriminately attacking people and property, advancing the cause of racial justice by burning down immigrant-run businesses and murdering a retired black police captain.

On another feed, it is the cops who are running amok. Festooned with tactical gear and high-tech weaponry (or old-fashioned clubs), the police appear to attack people indiscriminately — from old men to young women out buying groceries to homeless guys in wheelchairs— apparently for the crime of being in their way.

If the protests have a message besides ‘Black Lives Matter’, one that is heard by everyone, regardless of how they interact with the media, it is that the police must be defunded or abolished entirely.

Abolishing the police has become a rallying cry for protesters in the street and their backers online. The instinct of many conservatives has been to scoff at the notion, or laugh at its preposterousness, as Megyn Kelly did when she was confronted with the idea at a Fox News town hall four years ago.

Many Americans, let alone conservatives, would probably have scoffed at Mariame Kaba until a few weeks ago. An activist and organizer, Kaba is representative of the theorists who have been laying the groundwork for police abolition for years. In Chicago, where she arrived for graduate school in 1995, Kaba was the leading voice of the abolition movement there for over two decades. She told an interviewer that when she first arrived ‘there were no abolitionist organizations in the city’. By the early 2000s, Incite! an activist group founded by Kaba, began to host national conferences that brought together intellectuals and organizers — including Angela Davis — to work out what abolitionist ideas would mean in practice. Kaba wants both police and prisons abolished. ‘Abolition is not about changing one thing,’ she says. ‘It’s about changing everything, together.’

Why focus on Kaba, who appears to have walked, fully-formed, out of the pages of a Tom Wolfe novel? It’s because ideas that activists like her have been producing are the ones being picked up by the Atlantic, the New York Times, Vox and TIME magazine, in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. What would Kaba’s post-prison, post-cop world look like? Kaba advocates restorative justice. She explained the idea to Chris Hayes last year:

‘It’s a very different model than the adversarial system that we currently have where harms occur and the state intervenes. In this case, the idea is that you have a community of people who will intervene and so they ask usually a set of questions… Because the idea of restorative justice is that harms engenders needs and that those needs should be met. And the issue is who’s going to meet the needs and how will people meet those needs?’

Clear now? Restorative justice draws on pre modern conceptions of conflict resolution — such as peace circles — as an alternative to police and prisons. Kaba argues that the latter are not only corrupted by systemic racism, but that they are actually unnatural, a kind of historical accident. Indigenous people didn’t need police, Kaba says, so why do we?

These ideas have been taken up rapidly during the protests. Under the headline ‘No More Money For the Police’, two writers in the Times envision the replacement of cops with ‘health care workers or emergency response teams’, ‘rapid response social workers’, ‘conflict interrupters and restorative justice teams’ and ‘community organizers’. Writing for TIME, Minneapolis City Council member Steve Fletcher believes that the police must be disbanded. ‘We can invest in cultural competency and mental health training, de-escalation and conflict resolution.’ Fellow council member Jeremiah Ellison tweeted: ‘We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. And when we’re done, we’re not simply going to glue it back together. We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response.’ In New York and LA, cuts to policing budgets have already been announced.

Meanwhile memes proliferate that show police abolition as the newest frontier in the struggle that rid the world of slavery, then segregation. The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards peace circles.

Like Kaba, nobody writing these op-eds wonders whether a cop-less world would leave the poor with the Mafia and the rich with Blackwater, as Michael Brendan Dougherty put it. They think that without police, America will enthusiastically take up community justice along ancient indigenous lines, rather than slide back to the communal vigilantism.

Advocates of abolition, like advocates of the Green New Deal, are not interested in incremental change. Abolition is more dramatic than that. Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing told Mother Jonesthat abolition ‘goes hand in hand with decriminalizing sex work, drugs, homelessness, mental illness. We don’t really need a vice unit, we need a system of legalized sex work that’s regulated just like any other business.’

The abolitionist focus is always on systems. Bad cops are not bad apples, they are the rotten fruit of a blight-ridden orchard. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in 2015: ‘A reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It’s avoidance. It’s a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems.’ The abolition of the police is merely one demand on the laundry list. The Minneapolis abolition group MPD150 is typical in this respect. After abolition comes everything else:

‘Dismantling the police will require reallocating their budget and assets to support real solutions to community desperation: good, well-paying jobs, affordable housing, healthy food, empowering education, accessible health care, removal of toxins, etc. Ending the brutal police system is, by necessity, a program for a more just and resilient city.’

It is worth giving abolitionists a hearing. It is also worth asking them questions, getting them to be specific and detailed about their stated goals. Exactly how will restorative justice work in practice? How would it solve a homicide? How would it deal with gangs and human traffickers and drug dealers? Why would this be an improvement on current policing methods? Who will pay for the full suite of reforms? How could they fail? Is the system really so corrupt that it must be burned down before anything else can happen? How can you guarantee that there wouldn’t be a nationwide version of the Ferguson or Baltimore effect if the police were disbanded?

In an election year the most salient question of all is: who would vote for this? A slogan like ‘Abolish The Police’ seems guaranteed to inspire revulsion among the public, even if sections of the media push it from now until November. Most Americans want some measure of police reform — less violence, more body cameras — but they do not support reducing police budgets, let alone abolishing the police altogether. Voters who backed Obama in 2012 who then switched to Trump in 2016 want to see more police officers hired, as do African Americans.

Every top-ranking Democrat is shortly going to find themselves in the position of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Attending a rally yesterday, Frey gave a short speech about systemic racism. He muttered some other Obama-era talking points. Nobody was satisfied. Asked by protesters if he supported defunding the police department, Frey bravely said he did not. He walked away as a crowd of thousands booed, pursued by chants of SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!

Joe Biden is going to face that question sooner rather than later. If he does what Frey did he’s going to anger a lot of people he needs to turn out in November. If he says yes — defund, then abolish the police, replace them with peace circles — he’s going to hand Donald Trump far more votes than he deserves after the madness of this year.

Matt Mayer:

It is completely understandable for African Americans to be outraged at yet another death of a black man by overly aggressive police officers. That outrage, when channeled into legitimate protests and marches, could become a force for good. Ultimately, protests and marches, like those in the 1960s led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., could increase the awareness among non-African Americans of the constant sense of trepidation and fear felt by African Americans. This could help spur the urgent reforms needed to push America towards that ‘more perfect Union’.

Unfortunately, it appears there were as many violent riots as peaceful protests in city after city. Most Americans have seen images of buildings burning, looting at stores, and beatings of Americans trying to protect their businesses and communities. 

Roughly a dozen people have been killed during the riots, including a retired African American police officer guarding his friend’s pawn shop. How will those deaths fix America? 

More troubling, the image of the storeowner being savagely beaten and left lying awkwardly strewn on the ground with blood around him in Dallas is now just as searing as the image of Floyd begging for air under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. A Black Lives Matter video shows an alleged employee telling a clearly frightened woman she needed to kneel before him and apologize for her ‘white privilege’. Kneeling in solidarity with others is one thing, but such demanding such actions from random people is simply un-American. 

Within hours of Floyd’s death, cowardly Democratic politicians who were failing to protect the public tried to blame Donald Trump, out-of-town white supremacist, and (eye-roll) Russians for the violence. Some of those politicians walked back their comments as news organizations analyzed arrest records that clearly showed the perpetrators were largely residents of Minnesota, with the left-wing group, antifa, playing its predictable role in agitating for violence. Ironically, Trump served as an almost moderating voice: he acknowledged the travesty of what happened to Floyd and the right of people to protest, but also called for an end to the rioting. 

It was hard to find instances of true courage over the past week. Instead, we witnessed a further degradation of our language in which courage has been defined downward.

For example, in a LinkedIn post by Mike Roman, the Chairman and CEO of Minneapolis-based 3M, wrote:

‘Like all 3Mers, I am heartbroken and appalled at the senseless death of George Floyd earlier this week, and I offer my condolences to his family and friends, the entire Twin Cities community, and especially the African American community. We are looking to our leaders for swift and thorough justice. Watching the video of the incident was both dispiriting and infuriating, and is made even more real knowing it occurred in the community that has been 3M’s home for decades. This tragedy has taken the life of one of our neighbors and is another sobering reminder that this is a daily reality for many in our communities. We have so much more to do to build a safe America for all people.

‘Our community is grieving and angry, and we join in condemning police brutality and demanding better. We also fully support the peaceful expression of political and other personal opinions, including by our employees if they choose to do so.

‘The solution is bigger than any single law or the efforts of any single organization, yet businesses have a responsibility to help lead. 3M is proud of our long record of supporting our communities, but this is a sobering reminder that there is so much more to do. As CEO I commit that we will do even more going forward. We will invest more time and energy into lifting up all people. And we will continue to step up our commitment to our values, and strive to create a more inclusive, diverse and empathetic culture – both inside and outside 3M.’

This represented Roman’s full statement. Comment after comment posted by his followers applauded Roman’s statement and thanked him for his ‘courage’ in issuing the statement. Courage for stating the obvious? Roman said what everyone who watched the video would say except white supremacists. His statement was little more than the virtue-signaling we’ve heard too often in the past few years. 

Noticeably absent from Roman’s statement or any statement thereafter as the weekend unfolded was any condemnation of the rioters and the violence that ravaged the city just a stone’s throw from 3M’s headquarters. Roman would have showed true courage had he included such a condemnation in his statement or at any time thereafter. It is highly likely 3M employees who live in the area of the riots were impacted far more by the rioting than Floyd’s death.

What will Roman and 3M do for African American Minneapolis firefighter Korboi Balla who watched his life’s savings go up in flames as rioters torched his sports bar Scores? Or the residents of the low-income housing development that was burned to the ground? Or the Dallas small business owner who clings to life in the hospital? NFL commissioner Roger Goodell issued a similarly feckless statement that failed to condemn the rioting and violence. After New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees made a fairly even-handed statement why he would never disrespect the American flag or National Anthem, he was soon pressured to issue an apology and reassure the world he wasn’t a racist. 

Even worse, it took Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden two days to issue a second statement condemning the violence. He didn’t lose any time on Friday attacking Trump in his first statement on the events in Minneapolis. Meanwhile, Biden staffers and America’s entertainment elite raised funds to cover the bail of those arrested rioting. Biden and the Democrats spent more time attacking Trump hoping to gain an electoral advantage than speaking out against the rioting and violence. They would do well to remember who won the 1968 presidential election after rioting. For those with short memories, it was Republican Richard Nixon in a landslide.

This episode is reminiscent of the NBA’s cowardice when dealing with China over a Houston Rockets executive’s pro-Hong Kong tweet back in October. Ironically, that tweet was in support of peaceful pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong against the massively repressive communist Chinese government. Even LeBron James decided his pocketbook was more important than backing the protesters in Hong Kong. Not surprisingly, James found his ‘courage’ to comment on Floyd’s death and blame Trump. When James wore an ‘I can’t breathe’ shirt in protest of Eric Garner’s death at the hands of police six years ago, he didn’t blame Barack Obama.

Courage is not doing what is easy or following the crowd. It certainly isn’t issuing a cookie-cutter statement from the comfy confines of an executive C-Suite office or a multi-million-dollar mansion tucked quietly far away from where the rioting is occurring. 

Lest we forget what courage really is, just look at the video of the handful of protesters in Louisville protecting a police officer who got separated from his squad from a mob of rioters. Or the unknown Chinese citizen who stood in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square this week in 1989 before the mass killing of protesters by the Chinese military began. Or Dr King putting his life on the line march-after-march in a hostile and violent Democrat-led American South in the 1960s.

Our words must mean something, as too often these days our words are corrupted, watered-down, or misappropriated. Courage is doing or saying what is unpopular or putting your life on the line because it is the right thing to do. In times like this, America needs more courage, not platitudinal politically correct milquetoast.