by Leighton Woodhouse and Michael Shellenberger
After the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed in the summer and fall of 2020, the news media, schools, universities, and much of corporate America pledged themselves to the goal of defending black lives.
“This time is different,” editorialized The New York Times on June 5, 2022. “The urgency and validity of the movement” to protect black people “had finally been recognized” and reached “its boiling point.” We would end, once and for all, the editorial proclaimed triumphantly, “unchecked state violence against black people.”
That didn’t happen. The number of black people killed by police in 2022 reached a record high, while the number of black lives lost to homicide rose dramatically, from 7,777 in 2019 to 9,941 in 2020 to 8,534 in 2021. In 2022, US law enforcement killed 1,176 people, making it the deadliest year since 2013.
There’s also some good news: homicides declined in 2022. But by a mere 5%, a fraction of the nearly 30% rise from 2019 to 2020. The drop didn’t even make up for the 6% rise in 2021.
In over one-third of the cities studied, the murder rate rose. In the Bay Area, criminal homicides increased from 295 in 2021 to 309 in 2022 — 50% higher than 2019. Oakland had 120 homicides in 2022, a 60% increase over 2019.
And the share of murder victims who were black rose from 53% in 2019 to 58% in 2021.
In other words, in the two years after millions of Americans promised through their checkbooks, their lawn signs, and their social media updates to do everything in their power to protect black lives, the killing of African Americans skyrocketed. Why is that?
Anti-Policing As A White Privilege
Brian Lande is a 40-something-year-old police sergeant in Kensington, an unincorporated community of 5,000 people near the Berkeley Hills. Kensington is filled with California craftsman-style bungalows, mid-century ranch houses, and Spanish-style villas with gorgeous views of the San Francisco Bay. Per capita income is $95,000. Black Lives Matter signs are everywhere.
Lande’s education reflects that of his highly-educated neighbors. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from UC Berkeley. He has published academic papers on how to train the police to interact more effectively with the public and has consulted multiple cities on police reform. Shortly after getting his Ph.D., Lande worked as a program officer with the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, developing tools for improved police-community relations.
“As an academic sociologist, I learned quickly that my ability to make a difference was pretty limited,” he told us. So he became a police officer. As a cop, “I could make a difference in people’s lives,” he said. “And I wasn’t bad at it.”
But today, much of Lande’s time is spent not saving lives but doing administrative work at the station. When he goes out on patrol, he mostly writes parking tickets.
That’s quite a change from when he was a police officer in the poorer city of Richmond, California, a few miles away. Richmond is 18% African American and has a per capita income of $72,000. In Richmond, Lande once had to draw his gun to stop two drunk men from clobbering each other to death with metal rods. Another time he had to do so to stop a fight between a man armed with a hatchet and the other with a wrench. Neither was particularly out of the ordinary for that jurisdiction.
Lande is a particularly good fit for Richmond. His specialty is dealing with 911 calls involving mental illness. He knows how to de-escalate situations involving some of the most unpredictable people alive and how to navigate the bureaucracies of the courts and hospitals. Richmond has no shortage of mental health emergencies. The community needs people with his training and experience.
But after the Black Lives Matter protests, the Richmond City Council cut the police budget in solidarity with the new national mood. They forced hiring freezes. Council members also threatened to slash officers’ salaries by 20 percent.
Richmond wasn’t alone. Around the country, cities promised to cut the funding of, restrict the actions of, and even abolish police departments. In Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, the city council resolved to “begin the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department.”
Left-leaning politicians felt free to lambast the police in the most offensive ways imaginable. In New York, after winning the Democratic congressional primary, now-Rep. Jamaal Bowman tweeted: “Police officers have sworn to protect and serve the institution of white supremacy.” In Seattle, Council member Teresa Mosqueda, a police abolitionist, stood directly in front of a protester who was yelling at police through a bullhorn, “Take your guns, put them under your chins, and pull the trigger. I need you to kill yourselves.” Mosqueda said in response, “The anger that you hear is justified.”
In Portland, Kristina Narayan—the legislative director for Tina Kotek, who was then Oregon’s Speaker of the House and is now the governor—was arrested while participating in anti-police protests at which Molotov cocktails were thrown at the cops.
Elected officials tripped over each other to pass laws restricting what police officers could do and threatening punishments for abuses and honest mistakes alike. Portland, Oregon and Columbus, Ohio set up police review boards with the power to subpoena police records and oversee day-to-day policing. States including Illinois, Minnesota, and Oregon tightened use-of-force standards. New Mexico and Minnesota required officers to intervene if another officer was using what might later be deemed unreasonable physical force.
“The rules of the game changed,” said Lande. He pointed specifically to a California law that further limits when the police can use force.
“Let’s say you see a guy, he’s just robbed a bank, he’s got a gun, he’s running now into the preschool,” said Lande. Once upon a time, that would have been enough to justify using force. Now you’ve got to be confident that a crime is “imminent”—and sometimes you’ve only got milliseconds to figure that out.
If you get it wrong, and if the skin color of the cop and the victim suit the narrative that cops are propping up the institution of white supremacy and wantonly snuffing out black bodies, you could be prosecuted as a murderer.
“It’s not tenable for my family,” Lande said.
In response, cops started quitting their jobs. A 2021 survey showed that police departments nationwide saw resignations jump by 18 percent—and retirements by 45 percent—over the previous year, with hiring decreasing by five percent. The Los Angeles Police Department has been losing 50 officers a month to retirement, more than the city can replace with recruits. Oakland lost about seven per month in 2021, with the number of officers sinking below the city’s legally mandated minimum.
Chicago has lost more cops than it has in two decades. New Orleans is backfilling its shortfall of officers with civilians. New York is losing more police officers than it has since such figures began being recorded. Minneapolis and Baltimore have similar stories. St. Louis—one of the most dangerous cities in America—has lost so many cops that there’s a seven-foot-tall, 10-foot-wide pile of uniforms from outgoing officers at police headquarters called “Mount Exodus.”
Many officers who didn’t retire or change careers left newly hostile big cities to join forces in small, typically more affluent towns with low crime rates — exactly the communities that don’t need them.
In San Francisco, the police department has seen 50 officers out of a force of fewer than 2,000 take off for smaller, suburban departments, according to Lieutenant Tracy McCray, the head of the city’s police union. “That was a lot of talent for us,” McCray said. “They were great, bright new cops. A couple of them were born and raised in the city. All of their roots they had here. They just up and left.”
Richmond started losing so many officers that those who remained were forced to work 40 to 60 hours per month overtime. That requirement came on top of being forced to work back-to-back shifts when unexpected vacancies opened up. Investigations and traffic enforcement more or less stopped. Burnt-out officers were just doing patrols—driving around passively, waiting for something to happen. When Lande tried to recruit new officers, they told him they preferred to go somewhere with a friendlier local government. Many went to Napa and Sonoma Counties—wine country.
In September, Lande followed suit. “I felt very conflicted about it,” he said. “Residents of Richmond are disproportionately poorer, disproportionately victims of violent crimes.”
A big part of what’s prompting police to leave America’s big cities is the perception the public has turned against them. A 2020 poll showed that only seven percent of police officers would advise their kids to go into law enforcement. Eighty-three percent of those who wouldn’t recommend it cited “lack of respect for the profession.”
“Suddenly, everyone is telling us how to do our jobs. They’re saying we’re biased, racist, only want to hurt black and brown communities,” said McCray, who is black. “These officers worked in these communities, were invested in these communities. Suddenly, people who don’t know us are saying you’re this, you’re that.”
Nearly every city that promised to defund the police reversed course after crime surged, but cities and states passed a raft of new policies constricting what police could do. “An enormous amount of damage has been done,” Lande told me. “Instead of seeing real investment in policing, like what we see in Europe, we’ve seen a massive disinvestment.”
Trying to turn George Floyd and Trayvon Martin into big name celeberties they were career Crinimals and the M.S. media is hiding that fact from the American People
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Or even if it doesn’t. The left is still looking for an explanation that suits their race-based victim culture in the Tyree Nichols wrongful death. 5 black officers who work for a black police chief beat a black suspect to death. Where do they go? Of course, the protests commenced while they figure out what, exactly, is pissing them off.
Could it be that they chased Nichols acting dangerously in his car? Could it be whatever call they just came from? Could it be that black officers are inherently homicidal? We don’t know those answers and, as events spiral out of control, I doubt anyone cares. But one thing is for sure, and some of us has tried (usually unsuccessfully) to point out that when cops do stupid things or make fatal mistakes, it is NOT always (or possibly even ever) motivated by racism.
Their motivation is to destroy local police and replace it with a federal police force. This another tenet of the totalitarian police state; a police force that serves the political party, not the people.