A contributor for super liberal MSNBC and former Obama-era task force member, says that the current spike in crime our nation is experience is the fault of law enforcement everywhere, not the “defund the police” movement.
“The police haven’t been defunded. You actually look at the 50 largest cities, law enforcement spending as a share of the general expenditure in each of those cities actually rose slightly from 13.6% to 13.7%, and many of the cities that have talked about removing that money, like Minneapolis and Seattle, they’ve actually paused or slowed how they weren’t thinking about moving that money,” Brittany Packnett Cunningham stated during a segment on her network on Tuesday.
“So this rising crime is not the fault of the movement, it’s actually the fault of the police,” Packnett Cunningham went on to say.
She is a co-founder of Campaign Zero, which provides policy proposals to reduce police violence, and served on former President Barack Obama’s 21st Century Policing and the Ferguson Commission.
Defund the Police activist & MSNBC contributor @MsPackyetti: Rising crime in NYC isn’t the fault of the #DefundThePolie movement; "it’s actually the fault of the police" pic.twitter.com/3ki9EX1Q1R
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 21, 2021
Cities nationwide implemented policies aimed at defunding the police as protests about police violence spread following the murder of George Floyd. The Minneapolis City Council, for example, voted to cut $8 million from the police budget in December, and the city is still working on a plan for how to police the city.
Last August, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a $1 billion cut to the police budget, however, New York only cut around $500 million. The nation’s 50 largest cities reduced their police budgets by 5.2% in total, however, police spending rose by 0.1%, evidence Packnett Cunningham points to as indicative that the police are to blame for the rise in crime.
Preliminary data coming out of the FBI indicates that the murder rate in the U.S. climbed by 25 percent last year following the death of George Floyd and the increase in looting carried out by others. The director of the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice, Thomas Abt, stated that there were likely other factors contributing to the surge in violent crimes.
“It likely takes more than one factor to create a spike of this size,” Abt said during his interview with the Intercept. “That means it wasn’t just the pandemic, or police violence, or more guns, it was all of these things happening simultaneously and perhaps more.”
The violence in the streets has been due to the fact that the “defund the police” movement has found a way to convince leadership across the nation that it is okay to take away funding from cops and thus shrink the resources they have available to keep people safe.
This madness has to stop.
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