In his State of the Union address earlier this month, President Biden declared, “The answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them.” This line conflicts with Biden’s radical posturing against the police after George Floyd’s death in 2020, but he’s back on the right track to talk about the necessity of adequately funding law enforcement.
Over the past two years, homicidal violence has become a national crisis, with little coverage in the mainstream media. The US homicide rate in 2020 soared to 7.8 deaths per 100,000 people, an increase of 30% over 2019, the largest yearly rise since records have been kept.
The mayhem continued to mount in 2021, as under-resourced and demoralized police departments across the country struggled to quell rising neighborhood violence. At least a dozen cities nationwide shattered historical homicide records last year, including Portland, Austin, Philadelphia and others.
Austin, Texas, where we live, saw one of the sharpest homicide spikes in the country in 2021, with murders skyrocketing 86%. The city has never witnessed a higher homicide toll in a single year. “Typically, in Austin, homicide detectives average 3-4 murder investigations per year. 2021 was different,” Austin police lieutenant Brett Bailey told KXAN TV. “Several of the detectives were nearing [investigation of] their 10th homicide for the year.”
As data from CDC and FBI crime reports released last fall demonstrate, 2020 saw the largest year-to-year increase in homicides ever recorded. Following the George Floyd protests, cities such as Minneapolis, Portland, New York City and others experienced an explosion in violence not seen in decades.
Activists, leading media and politicians continue to pin the homicide wave on economic disruptions caused by the pandemic, but a far more plausible factor is the increasingly dysfunctional criminal justice system that fails in its fundamental duty to protect the most vulnerable members of society.
Making matters worse, last year, police retirements were up nearly 50% and resignations by 18% across 200 police departments nationwide. Portland – which, since the summer of 2020, has seen sustained nightly violence in its downtown perpetrated by far-left radicals – now has fewer police officers on the force (789) than at any point in the past 30 years.
Mayor Ted Wheeler was previously sympathetic to the national “defund the police” movement but has recently admitted to the city’s police-staffing crisis: “There is such a thing as too few officers. . . . I can objectively say we are critically short staffed.”
In Philadelphia, which last year suffered more homicides than in 2014 and 2015 combined, the police department is short about 300 officers after mass departures in the aftermath of the local police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. last fall and the death of George Floyd. Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, says of the national staffing shortage, “It is an evolving crisis.”
Similar shortages of law enforcement staff are occurring in major cities all across the US, although the costs of inadequate policing are not equally distributed across the population. Black Americans, for example, accounted for 65.6% of the increase in homicide victims in 2020, though only representing about 13% of the population. This is unacceptable!
A 2021 USA Today poll of Detroit residents found that 24% of black residents viewed crime as the biggest issue facing the city, while only 3% named police reform. Among white residents, however, 12% were most concerned with police reform compared with 10% for crime.
Recent victims of surging gun violence in Detroit include a 12-year-old shot in an upstairs bedroom, a 15-year-old shot and killed on the street at night and a four-year-old child shot twice as a gunman allegedly tried to steal the mother’s purse. These tragedies took place over the span of just four days—January 7 through 11 last year.
Yet progressives continue to downplay the homicide carnage. Earlier this year, CNN’s Brian Stelter decried the “imagined drama” of soaring crime presented by Fox News. Residents of inner-city communities continue to suffer the toll of violence that is anything but imaginary, but liberal elites and the media remain silent.
The question is, why are police officers leaving the force in record numbers. While the reasons aren’t entirely clear, one thing is for sure: Morale is at a multiyear low, and many officers no longer feel they have the public’s trust or support. They are increasingly deciding it is no longer a profession which is worth putting their life on the line for.
It’s hard to blame them.
I recently spoke with our county sheriff. He told me one of his deputies pulled a “soccer mom” over for speeding and a broken tail light. She asked him, “Why are you stopping me you racist pig?” This and comments like it are unfortunately common place today. Too often the public paints the officers who are trying to keep us safe with a brush of disrespect because of the actions of a few bad cops.
There are thousands upon thousands of police officers in this country who respond to millions of incidents each year, many requiring a split second decision and well over 90% of the time they make the right decision. When one doesn’t, they find themselves on the nightly news for days on end. What other profession has that kind of track record? Next time you see a cop thank them for being on the job. It just might keep them on the job. Remember someone is going to need them tomorrow.