Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Last year, the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the ensuing riots and unrest lead cities all across the country to cut police funding. It seems local police were to blame for the error of a single officer in a completely different community. It never made sense to me, but it happened nonetheless. One of those cities was Chicago.
As with so many other cities, Mayor Lori Lightfoot used the opportunity to grandstand by cutting funding to the police. It…did not go well.
It seems that when police resources are cut, they’re less able to do their jobs. It was a complete disaster that absolutely no one could have predicted…except everyone who wasn’t a complete Black Lives Matters shill. Even many on the left saw this as a trainwreck in the making.
Now, the Windy City is having to rethink this whole fiasco.
Democratic Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot appears to have reversed course on her failed “defund the police” efforts as soaring violent crime continues to rock the city.
According to the Chicago Tribune, “Lightfoot unveiled a $16.7 billion spending plan Monday that boosts funding for police, relies on federal money to help fill the city’s budget hole and funds a host of new community programs as she seeks to move Chicago past the ongoing pandemic and to address rampant gun violence.”
The proposal suggests lifting the Chicago Police Department’s annual budget to $1.9 billion, up from $1.7 billion in 2021, the news outlet reported.
Fox News added that the proposal followed “a bloody weekend that saw nine homicides across the city, 56 people shot, and an alderman attacked.”
The shocking violence is more of the same for Chicago. Since the start of 2020, the prominent Midwestern city has experienced violent crime at levels not seen in decades. And despite the city’s attempts to combat crime through alternative measures, so far in 2021, things have only gotten worse.
So now, Lightfoot wants to increase funding for the police department.
For once, it’s the right thing to do.
It shouldn’t be necessary, mind you, because defunding law enforcement shouldn’t have happened in the first place, but it did. Now, the only valid option moving forward is to reverse the previous decision.
There’s nothing wrong with looking for alternatives that seek to intervene prior to police involvement. I applaud the effort. But those programs can take years to really start showing results. You don’t cut police funding now in the hopes that these programs will create results now. It doesn’t work that way.
For proof, just look at Chicago’s crime statistics. They defunded the police and that damn sure didn’t help, now did it.
The truth is that the whole “defund the police” movement was a Utopian pipe dream from the very beginning. The idea that you could just take that money and put it somewhere else and get the same results sound great, but it has no relationship with reality. If these programs were that effective, we’d have already done just that.
After all, preventing people from becoming criminals has real ramifications across society as a whole. Fewer criminals mean less funding needed for jails, which means more funding for any number of other projects or, preferably, just lower taxes all around so people can spend more and stimulate the economy.
If they’d have done the job, we’d have used them.
The problem is that we’re still trying to feel our way on intervention programs like those proposed. Chicago, with all the resources of one of our nation’s largest cities, couldn’t make it work. Crime soared and now even Lightfoot has to acknowledge that the effort just didn’t work.
Too many so many people had to die before she’d get the message.