A fter an editorial appeared here this past week about the troubles in Portland, Ore.--where the mayor had been trying to disband an autonomous zone set up by protesters--we got an email from a friend on the left coast. She said, if we may paraphrase: Brother, you aren't kidding.
She notes that businesses in California are hiring their own security guards to patrol in front of their stores to ward off criminals who see a police pullback in many cities as an invitation to steal. Neighborhoods are pooling money to hire their own armed forces. In the recent past, police duties would have been handled by police.
But with the defund-the-police movement, cuts to departments, officers walking away from the job en masse, folks out west are having to take steps to protect themselves. And not just out west.
Before the ink was dry, or the electrons settled, on the editorial, another story came across the wire:
Minneapolis, the one in Minnesota, is suffering under a crime wave. According to The Washington Post--not Fox News--crimes are being reported at a new record rate: "Homicides in Minneapolis are up more than 50 percent, with nearly 80 people killed across the city so far this year.
"Nearly 530 people have been shot, the highest number in more than a decade and twice as many as in 2019. And there have been more than 4,600 violent crimes--including hundreds of carjackings and robberies--a five-year high."
The city council has decided, unanimously, to fight this crime wave by cutting millions from its police department budget.
Minneapolis, you'll remember, is where a police officer knelt on George Floyd's neck for nine minutes while the man pleaded for a breath of air. That police officer has been charged with murder, and several fellow officers await trial on aiding and abetting charges.
Now, in the face of increasing crime and in the middle of a pandemic, the Minneapolis City Council has cut $8 million from the police budget. How that's going to help citizens in Minneapolis is anybody's guess.
The new plan with the lesser of a police force is called the Safety For All plan.
But it sounds more like exactly the opposite.