It’s now officially been a year since the death of George Floyd and elected officials in major cities all across America are beginning to backtrack on promises they made to the rioters and looters in Black Lives Matter to cut police funding, thanks in large part to massive spikes in violent crime.
Elected officials in cities like Los Angeles, New York City, and Minneapolis, where all of this “defund the police” nonsense started, have now start to push for increasing the funding to local law enforcement departments after their cities have been ravaged by violent crime.
Many of the departments in these areas have gutted police departments due to budget cuts and extremely low morale due to all the hatred spewed at officers by liberals in the streets and in the media.
All this is happening while violence erupts everywhere.
“The violence needs to stop, its unacceptable. People deserve to feel safe in their neighborhood, they deserve to be able to send their kids out to the sidewalk to play and to recreate without bullets flying by. That’s unacceptable. We should be holding these perpetrators accountable,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, went on to say during a press conference designed to tackle the issue of increased violent crime tearing through the city.
Frey put much of the blame of rising crime rates on activists’ calls to defund the police in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Floyd’s death last year kicked off massive riots and calls to redirect police funding toward social programs. Violent crime surged 21% in Minneapolis last year, and the trend is threatening to continue through 2021.
“When you make big, overarching statements that we’re going to defund or abolish and dismantle the police department and get rid of all the officers, there’s an impact to that,” Frey stated. During a news conference held earlier this week, Frey said he would be requesting federal and state help to try and get the explosion of crime in his city under control.
In Los Angeles, the spike in crime has been more pronounced. Last year, violent crime in the city rose 36% as elected officials stripped the local police department of $150 million, roughly 8% of the department’s funding. The number of murders across the city surged to a decade-high of 350.
Despite Democratic Mayor Eric Garcetti’s and the L.A. city council’s earlier commitment to cut back police funding, city leaders reversed course last week. The city council approved additional funding for the police department to hire 250 officers, essentially restoring the cuts that the city council approved last year, according to The New York Times.
In New York City, Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio announced earlier this month that the city is building a new police precinct in Southeast Queens to combat rising crime. The announcement of additional law enforcement comes after de Blasio pledged to cut $1 billion from the New York City Police Department’s budget. Very little of the promised cuts have actually materialized as de Blasio and the city council argue over what spending to cut amid the city’s crime wave, according to Politico.
From the months of January to April of this year, New York City has experienced a shocking 50 percent hike in the number of shootings over against the number that happened this same time last year. The spike comes after 2020 when the murders happening in the city jumped up by for 45 percent.
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