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We’re off to the Twilight Zone, everyone. The Minneapolis City Council now has a veto-proof majority, and says they will “defund and dismantle” the Minneapolis Police Department.
After all, what could possibly go wrong?
“We committed to dismantling policing as we know it in the city of Minneapolis and to rebuild with our community a new model of public safety that actually keeps our community safe,” Council President Lisa Bender told CNN.”
With nine votes the city council would have a veto-proof supermajority of the council’s 13 members, Bender said.”
Sunday’s pledge was an acknowledgment that the current system is not working, Bender said.”
“(We need) to listen, especially to our black leaders, to our communities of color, for whom policing is not working and to really let the solutions lie in our community,” she said.”
Pressed for details on what the dismantling might look like, Bender told CNN she was looking to shift police funding toward community-based strategies and that the city council would
discuss how to replace the current police department.”“The idea of having no police department is certainly not in the short term,” she added.”
Is this just a game of semantics? The Minneapolis Police Department certainly has problems, from Derek Chauvin to Mohamed Noor (remember him? He’s now serving time after being convicted for the second-degree murder of Justine Damond, who he shot and killed while sitting in his police car). There is an argument to be made that the Minneapolis Police Department certainly needs a shake-up, better training, and maybe, on a broader scale, the end of “qualified immunity” and the breaking up of police unions so that bad officers will not be protected by their unions. (Applied broadly, breaking up police unions could also lead to the breakup of other public sector unions.) These are all reasonable discussions to have, and it could definitely lead to bipartisan agreement and actual change.
But no, that isn’t what the Minneapolis City Council have in mind. They are appeasing the crowd. Now, whether that appeasement looks like Camden, New Jersey (where they fired all the police officers, and then essentially re-hired them all to be non-union police, which has since re-unionized and signed off on a specific policy regarding use of force), or like anarchy, we don’t yet know. Reform like Camden’s might be workable in Minneapolis. But as of this moment, the city is a wreck, the mayor has lost all authority, and reasonable people in Minneapolis and nationwide are making their own risk assessments.
Defunding the police means America's big cities are about to be mugged by reality.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) June 8, 2020
Everyone who can afford to leave Minneapolis proper is making plans to do so, and people all across the country, fresh off of a pandemic and riots, are now realizing that the police are in no position to defend and protect them. One side effect of this entire situation: gun control legislation is effectively dead on arrival for the immediate future. As Charles C. W. Cooke so brilliantly put it:
“Only the cops need guns” simply could not live forever alongside, “The cops are racist and will kill you.” And so, at long last, the two circles of the Venn Diagram have filed for an amicable divorce. In the end, the differences proved irreconcilable.”
So, Minneapolis will continue to be a chaos show because what the protestors THINK they are getting is likely not what will actually happen. And what the city council has done is embolden other groups around the country to demand the same. America, be prepared. The only person that you can rely on for your protection is yourself.
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George V says: I was surprised to read in our local paper that similar moves to dismantle and rebuild police departments have occurred in other smaller cities. One in California, near Sacramento I think, was mentioned. I guess it’s sort of like some commentary has said about the FBI in the wake of the “Russia!!!!” scandal – blow it up and start over.
In Minneapolis’s case, I’d suggest establishing the “Department of Basic Safety”. Nothing sounds better for representing gov’t than the Dept. of BS.
GWB says: community-based strategies
That is commie-speak for “paying a bunch of grifters who will spend their time promoting grievances and trying to justify the actions of criminals.
The idea of having no police department is certainly not in the short term
Of course not! You don’t achieve the marxist goal of no government immediately! In the interim, you need some black shirts to bust the head of all the kulaks, reactionaries, and counter-revolutionaries!
It’s only extreme radicals like AntiFa who want to abolish all gov’t immediately.
The only person that you can rely on for your protection is yourself.
That’s always been true. But, a free citizen needs to actually realize that. The more people we can bring to that point the easier it will be to actually reform government – including the police dept.
Taylor says: “Start a conversation” – New Age Crapola Speak.
Taylor says: Miss Bender is a University of California at Bekeley Graduate. Somehow that figures.
Sadie McQueen says: Minneapolis has a boatload of Fortune 500 companies. Money talks. They should be banding together to shoot down this ridiculous idea.
GWB says: Or just moving out, with their jobs and their tax base.
nomen nescio says: As they say at 4chan, ha ha ha oh wow.
This idea has been tried before, in the 1970s. The results were predictable. The results were predicted. The results were instantaneous. It was a decade-long bloodbath of chaos, murder, and ethnic cleansing in every major city in the US that didn’t end until Americans, disgusted and revolted, elected Ronald Reagan and the Republicans in 1980 in the hopes it could be rolled back. A tiny bit of order got restored, at the end of the day, which is more, I guess, than some politicians accomplish. Of course the pendulum didn’t swing to the right very far, or very long.
Look at pictures of American cities from the 1950s, or 1920s, and weep for what has been lost. Just look at Los Angeles or San Francisco in the 1950s.
More to the point, all the people pushing these ideas are even using all the exact same catchphrases and slogans. These slogans have mostly been borrowed from “urban activists” straight out of 1972. This is coordinated. This was planned well in advance. And you can bet your bottom dollar that they know EXACTLY what they are doing. This is malice, not stupidity.
Read up on the Cloward-Piven Strategy some time: deliberate misrule intended to destroy the US as a nation, as a culture, as a world power, because the US in general and HUHWITE people in particular have been an obstacle to the achievement of Scientific Marxist-Leninism. We used to call this kind of thing “sedition” and “treason.” We used to hang people for it.
As for “the business community” in places like Minnedishu, something very important has changed since 1972, that’s not necessarily readily visible to someone standing outside the skyscraper and looking at the mirrorglass windows. Too many of them are fully “converged.” By that I mean they’ve been infiltrated and taken over by too many SJWs in positions of real power, who are to these organizations what the Deep State is to the US Government. The “business community” is all aboard with whatever the wokescolds want this afternoon. The “business community” is tripping over its own enormous clown shoes running to demonstrate their commitment to “the movement.” The “business community” is run–not really at the CEO level for the most part, but that gets more common yearly, I mean the people who run the HR department, the people who run the marketing department, the people who make every significant day-to-day decision–by people who, if they must choose between responsible management of resources to make a profit for stockholders, or virtue-signaling to get good-boy points on Twitter from the other SJWs, will always choose the latter. It’s been this way for twenty-five years. The entryism, infiltration, and rot have been going on since the 1960s. Oh, yes. The “business community” is standing by to “make a statement,” whatever the SJWs want to day’s “statement” to be, like maybe just opening all the doors of all the stores and having all the staff just walk away and leave everything unlocked, so that “communities of cover” can loot the stores and burn them down without breaking the glass doors, which could result in some poor misunderstood young future brain surgeon getting a cut on the broken glass as he staggers out with a stack of boxes of Air Jordans. Believe it.
It’s just another day in Clown World. Say, do you hear circus music? HONK HONK
NTSOG says: Perhaps the noble members of the council will review previous attempts to manage the ‘welfare’ and safety of the people while they consider ‘defunding’ the local Police?
The French instituted one such model: the Committee of Public Safety in 1793. It formed the de facto executive government in France during the Reign of Terror. I suspect that such a Committee would appeal to the sharing, caring socialist left whose members are known for both their maturity, reason and tolerance. Anyone could simply make an allegation in relation to gender, feminism or race and heads would roll.
Ted says: The new Minneapolis Committee for Public Safety will be led by Madeline Malpense Robespierre, fondly known as “Miz Guillotine.”
[…] Hell: Marine Corps Bans Confederate Imagery, also, A Letter From Larry Correia Victory Girls: Minneapolis City Council Goes For Woke Volokh Conspiracy: Is The Future Of Free Speech In Jeopardy? Weasel Zippers: White #BLM Protesters […]
Lance says: You meatbags had your chance. Now kiss my shiny metal ass!
James Oswald says: This is the genius of our Federal System. An individual State can experiment, without imposing the theory on all 50 States. Go for it, Minnesota. Let us know how it works out. But, don ‘t come cryin’ when it doesn’t.
Clean Willie says: After Freddy Gray, Baltimore effectively experimented with significantly reducing the police presence in crime ridden neighborhoods. This was not a conscious decision by what passes for leadership there, but a decision made by the cops themselves to stay out of potentially violent situations. Much less contentious to drink your coffee in the squad car and show up later to take the reports. Not surprisingly, serious crime, including homicides, in largely black areas shot up.
Michael Giles says: Question? Is it better to be killed by a misbehaving police officer or to be murdered by some around the way thug?
[…] Deanna Fisher on The Victory Girls: Minneapolis City Council Goes For Woke, Will Defund Police […]
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