Tag: Defund the Police

In the Wake of Looting, San Francisco a “Ghost Town”

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The NY Post reports that in the wake of smash and grab looting of some of the most expensive stores in San Francisco the store owners have boarded up their store and hired security guards to protect their businesses and employees from the threat.

The end quote encapsulates the situation.

“Being soft on criminals has its consequences. For San Francisco, the result is a ghost town. For decades, this Bay Area destination has held conferences where it held itself up to the world as a model of a “livable, walkable” city.

Not any more.

“People are scared to go downtown,” native resident Tandler told me.

“This is the destruction of a city.””

 

 

 

 

The New Third World Normal

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People on the dissident right talk about the difference between high trust and low trust societies.  In a high trust society, you have communities where doors and cars aren’t locked, people can walk in cities at night without fear of being mugged and children can play outside without their mothers fearing for their lives.

This week Waukesha, Wisconsin found out that a Christmas Parade is something you don’t attend in a low trust society.  I’ve lived in small towns and large cities.  But the size of the community isn’t the defining parameter for how safe a place it is.  The difference is whether the community tolerates lawlessness.  The classic urban example is New York City.  Back in the 1970s and 1980s New York City degenerated into a high-crime environment where assault and robbery were at epidemic levels.  Very expensive neighborhoods in Manhattan were deserted at night because muggers would emerge out of Central Park at night and prey on the affluent inhabitants.  And a million inhabitants exited the city to escape the dangerous environment.  When Rudy Giuliani became mayor there in 1992, he used the police department to shut down the violent crime but he also took a zero-tolerance approach toward quality-of-life violations like squeegee men harassing drivers and deranged homeless people engaging in depravity on the city streets.  So even though New York City is an enormous impersonal place, for twenty years it was one of the safest large cities in the country.  The program was so successful that it allowed a new generation of progressives to take over the city.  And this new generation had no fear of violence.  And this same generation is running all the cities of America.  And they are now learning exactly why a police force with zero tolerance for lawlessness is the only way to have a city as large as New York safe.

But now look at a place like Waukesha.  It has a population of 70,000 people.  It has been fairly crime free and well ordered for its whole history and the people there probably think of their home as a big town rather than a city.  It has local sports teams and small companies as employers and community activities centered on schools and churches.  It has a relatively small black population and no major inner-city crime problem.  But then last year in neighboring Minnesota the George Floyd riots began and black criminals became convinced that they could no longer be arrested.  And so, for the last year black criminals have behaved as though there is no brake on their activities.  If they commit a crime and the police show up, they do not surrender.  They bolt and often the police just let them go.  None of the police want to end up on trial for shooting a black suspect.  They remember Derek Chauvin and his fate.  None of them want that so they’ll let these perpetrators escape.  And that’s how you get to a place like Waukesha today where people think they’re living in a safe place when they’re really not.

The only question left to answer is where will pushback finally happen?  New York voted in a black former NYPD officer as mayor.  This is a change from the anti-police, anti-white mayor Bill DeBlasio they currently suffer under.  But it’s not clear whether the will is there yet to meaningfully correct the weakening of the police there.  I believe things will have to get a lot worse before anything effective will be done.

In the meantime, people living in cities, large and small, need to realize what their new environment means for their safety.  Being mistaken about what kind of a place they now live in could cost them a lot, maybe all.

Atlanta Discovers That Police Prevent Crime

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I find this one hilarious.  The two major Democrat candidates for Atlanta mayor are outbidding each for how many more police they will hire.  One says 250 the other triples that.  By gum, they’ll fix this whole Mad Max, Road Warrior thing by putting an ad in the paper for more cops.

I just love it.  They charge cops with murder if they defend themselves against armed thugs and then they expect to get actual police deterrence.  These guys will do the same thing the old guys are doing.  Lean on the side of their squad cars and play games on their phones.  I hope to watch on cable news as the gangs burn the CNN headquarters just for laughs and the police stand aside and let nature take its course.

The only thing that will bring the cities back is hiring a mayor, city council, district attorney and police chief who codify the right of police officers to use deadly force when it’s necessary.  Until then the gangs will burn, loot and murder to their hearts’ content.

When all the Fortune 500 flee the cities and the city coffers are empty these cities will be Detroit.  Maybe new cities will be built in the Red States with walls and gates and there won’t be any space for the gangsters.  Can’t think of another way to deal with a lawless country.

Philadelphia Regains Lead in Race to the Bottom

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Chicago has been giving Baltimore and Atlanta a real run for their money as the most dangerous American city.  What with their seemingly endless shootings and the antics of their mayor and state’s attorney they seemed a shoo in.

But suddenly Philadelphia comes from out of nowhere and proves that they’re devolving to the subhuman level at hyperspeed.  Where else can a man rape a woman on a crowded subway car for forty minutes without a single passenger attempting to stop him or even call 911?

I guess it’s a marker.  I would say that level of callous inhumanity must bring Philadelphia even with either Genghis Khan’s Mongols or Attila’s Huns.  But the exact level is unimportant.  The important metric is the acceleration of the dehumanizing process.  Based on the way that the copycat process proceeds I’m guessing that cannibalism should appear in The Bronx by Christmas.  Of course I’m not taking into account inflation and meat shortages.  That might speed things up to Thanksgiving.

Seriously though, it does give you pause to think of just how violent the larger cities have become.  The way the violence is increasing I confess I’m unable to decide whether people will be shocked into demanding the return of real law and order or will they just give up and flee from the urban areas altogether.  My gut reaction is that it’s too late and these areas will not be revived.  I know it’s hard to believe that New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore and St. Louis are hopelessly broken and won’t ever be safe for law-abiding people again but when you see and hear what’s going on it’s pretty hard to see how these things can be fixed under the new rules the police have to adhere to.  Maybe when these cities have all-black police forces it will be possible for real policing to occur without screeches of racism from every idiot who has a cell phone.  But that seems like something that won’t happen for decades and by then these places will be so poor and unattractive that it won’t matter to the majority of Americans what happens there.

Well, anyway, this is another marker as I say and another warning to anyone stupid enough to think of living in these places.  Remember these cities have the strictest gun laws and the most anti-white district attorneys in the country.  If you were attacked and attempted to defend yourself with a gun you would be treated the way murderers used to be treated.  You’d get forty years and probably wish it was the chair.  So make sure when you’re looking at where you’ll settle down to check the crime statistics and the voting record.  If it’s a democrat enclave full of crime look somewhere else.  Maybe the salaries are higher in some of these places but it’s just not worth your life or the life of someone you care about.

Brilliant Leftist Journalists Reveal What’s Wrong with Dying Leftist Cities – Too Many Police!

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In this pair of articles,

Minneapolis Is About to Vote on Whether to Dismantle the Police

The Past 2 Years Have Left Portland Reeling. What Kind of Recovery Comes Next?

written by leftist loons, we are educated by the authors on how it’s not the fifteen months of riots, murder, arson and robbery that have made their cities hellholes that tourists avoid and residents flee for safer places.  It’s actually the police that are the problem.  And remember these two cities, Portland and Minneapolis are governed by the most anti-police city governments in America.  Both cities are actively working to dismantle their police departments.  So effectively there is no policing going on in either city.  The police, such as they are, barely make their presence known.  They wait until the crimes have occurred and show up to record the details for police reports that can be used by the victims for insurance purposes and to direct the ambulance or morgue truck to the bodies, living or dead.  But the articles are clear that it is systemic racism that is killing these cities.  Although the Portland article is clear in telling us that Portland is safe and vibrant.  It’s only prejudice and racism that is spreading the false impression that the city is a dirty, abandoned shell of its former self, filled with homeless encampments and homicidal drug addicts.

These articles are very long so you might want to skim them.  Better advice is just skip them.  I’ve done the public service of reading this crap for you.  I think the take away I got from these articles is that even in the leftist bastions of Portland and Minneapolis it is getting difficult to sell people on the “defund the police” narrative.  They try, they really try.  We get thousands of words about policing being slave control and Jim Crow and blah, blah, blah.  But I think they’re trying to sell all this to people who just want their lives to go back to normal.  And not just white people.  Minneapolis has become very dangerous.  And that has been noticed by the black neighborhoods.  The change impacts everyone.  The white neighborhoods have seen an enormous increase in property crime but also things like carjackings.  But it’s in the black neighborhoods where things have gotten out of hand.  So, it will take a lot of talking in circles to convince the black population in Minnesota that they really want to get rid of the police.

Portland is one of the whitest big cities in America.  Their problem is the enormous homeless population.  Druggies come from far and wide to live in a place that reflects their values.  When there was a working police force, it could be kept under control.  Now that’s gone.  So, you have antifa and BLM rioting, the homeless defecating in the streets and addicts robbing you at knifepoint but Portland wants people to think it’s a “vibrant” and safe place to visit and live.  It turns out that’s a hard sell.

It will be interesting to me to see if these two cities are able to convince their residents to get rid of their police.  Maybe they can.  Leftists are very good at ignoring reality.  Maybe they can make it happen.  But if they do, I’d guess that the size of these cities will shrink way down.  Most people want to live in a place where they are safe.  And this goes double for families.  It takes a really hard-core leftist to be willing to let her kids be victims of street crime to prove a point.  But the writers of these articles sound like they just might be crazy enough to try.  It does indeed take all kinds.

So good luck to you folks in Portland, Minneapolis and of course Chicago and New York.  You’ve made your bed and now you get to sleep in it.  Enjoy.

Greetings to September Thirtieth, Anno Domini MMXXI

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Another beautiful, if chilly morning here in the land of Wokish Puritans.  I have done my due diligence and looked over the headlines.  What I see is that both the Left and the Right see Joe Biden as a disaster, but for different reasons.  The Left sees him as a doddering idiot who keeps tripping over his own feet and fouling up the beautiful set-up he was handed by the Deep State and friends.  The Right sees him as a doddering idiot who keeps tripping over his own feet as he presides over the dismantling of what is left of the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”

Joe’s approval rating is under water but so what?  Will that change anything?  I guess the hope is that if Biden is construed as a failed president, then maybe Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema will refuse to sign onto the 3.5 trillion Dollar reconciliation bill and we might be spared the illegal alien amnesty bill and whatever other atrocities Pelosi and Schumer have teed up for us.  I guess we’re about to find out.  I seriously doubt we’re going to get lucky.  The Dems sense they have a short window before the 2022 primary season and will be going for broke this fall.  But who knows?  Miracles have happened.

But I guess it’s at least amusing to watch the consensus grow across Left and Right that Dementia Joe is a creepy loser who’s in way over his head.  I suspect history will be particularly cruel to Biden and Harris.  But I need to remind myself that history is written by the winners and even without an effective White House the Left has an overwhelmingly strong hand to play.

In other news there were a bunch of in-depth reports discovering again that if you remove the police from a city like Minneapolis then the black neighborhoods will descend into crime, drug addiction and murder.  Children will be killed during gun play between the gang bangers, white people will flee the city in droves and the loss of revenues will cause the problem to spiral out of control.  The only differences in these reports depend on the ideological stripe of the writer.  The lefties decry the violence but claim that the police cannot use the tactics previously available to them.  In other words, they want magical police.  The writers on the right notice that nobody is lining up to take the vacant police jobs currently available and conclude that runaway crime in Minneapolis will be an ongoing phenomenon for the foreseeable future.

Well, my answer to all this is, don’t complain when you get what you say you wanted.  The progressives and their followers in Minneapolis put the city in the hands of ideologues that allowed and even encouraged a mob of antifa and BLM rioters to burn down a police precinct while looting and burning their neighbors’ businesses and assaulting and even killing some of these same people.  I take no pleasure in seeing poor people living in a hellscape where law and order have been eliminated.  But there is no other way for these imbeciles to learn just how delusional their viewpoint on urban policing really is.  Once all the affluent white progressives move away from their dangerous Minneapolis homes the people who are left can begin to figure out how to deal with reality.  The only shame is that these progressives won’t have a chance to see their own homes and businesses looted and burned.  That would be too much to ask.

I saw a couple of reports about the upcoming Supreme Court docket.  There are a bunch of important cases that have impact on our sorely mistreated constitutional rights.  And for once I’m slightly optimistic that some good things may happen in this session.  And if the decisions occur late enough in the year it may be too late for the Democrats to pack the Court.  It’s assumed they will lose the House in 2022 and that would curtail at least temporarily their ability to change the Court’s size.  If the new justices continue to buck John Robert’s liberal agenda, we could see some honest judicial decisions that would have a positive effect on our lives.  It’s at least worth watching and I’ll be interested to see which way they go.  I don’t want to be too much of a pessimist.  Even I get bored of that.

So that’s what’s in the news.  In my own world I’ve been busy with writing and repairing all the stuff that breaks down around here.  Carpentry, plumbing, auto repairs and landscaping are high on the list of stuff that needs doing.  Luckily the auto repair is covered by an insurance policy so I’ll leave that to the professionals.  I guess I’ll take a first stab at the others but something tells me the plumber will be getting a call soon.  Ah, who am I kidding?  I better get a carpenter too.

But it’s a good day and I feel cheerful.  Camera Girl is making delicious soups and I’m dedicated to watching the world collapse into a heap of stress fractured fragments.  There is an ancient legacy in my family around bartering in rubble and scraps.  I think my ancestors in the Fifth Century probably sold off the marble that originally covered the Colosseum to Visigoth chieftains to adorn their medieval castles.  It’s a cinch I’ll flourish amid the ruins of Biden’s America.  There will be plenty of rubble to barter.

08AUG2021 – OCF Update – This’N’That

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So the big news is I’ll be busy testing out my A-Mount lenses on the LA-EA5 adapter.  But I’ll keep up with what’s going on in the world.

The two headlines that caught my eye this morning are:

2 Chicago police officers shot, 1 killed in West Englewood shooting

I watched the clip and listened to pop-eyed Lori Lightfoot emoting for the shot cops.  Really kind of hard to believe she has the best interests of the police officers or the wider public in mind.  I will say she seems burnt out.  I doubt she runs for re-election.  Not that anyone would elect her at this point.  She is the poster child for a law and order rebound in Chicago’s future.  But maybe I’m wrong.  The numbers at this point may be for the gangs to run Chicago.  And I say let them have it.  Anyone who stays in the big cities has a death wish.

NBC sees ‘worst case scenario’ as Olympics ratings plunge amid ‘woke’ protests

I was reading the comments and the overwhelming majority opinion is that NBC and the sponsors got exactly what they deserved.  Whoever is still watching the “Hate America” Olympics is the woke sports viewer.  Apparently they’re not a big enough crowd for money to be made by sponsors and advertisers.  Good.  Come back when you can make believe you love America.  But at that point the number of suckers will be a pretty small number.  They’ve killed the goose that lays the golden eggs.  Now they can pound sand.

Well, the COVID harpies are pushing for vaccine passports and masks again.  They’ll be torturing small children going to school this year.  So far they haven’t forced the grocery stores and retail stores to force their patrons to either prove they’re vaccinated and/or wear a mask but it’s probably in the cards.

But I just attended a family get together yesterday and despite the nervousness of certain folks we didn’t have any mask nonsense or even waste any time talking about it.  Hopefully we’re past all that at this point.

Well, off to do some camera work.  Stay tuned.

How Much of a Factor Will the Crime Epidemic Be?

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I’m not completely sure how important an issue rampant crime will be in the political situation in America.  It’s already fueling an enormous flight from the major cities and that is having a major impact on everything from used car prices to the pricing and availability of houses in the suburbs to the supply and demand of seats in private schools.  But as much as the big cities are and will remain the uncontested domain of Democrat politicians you have to wonder what will happen as the unchecked crime in theses areas becomes a permanent condition.

Already it has had some impact on the politics in some of the biggest cities.  New York has selected the closest thing to a law-and-order Democrat to be their next mayor.  And the pop-eyed lesbian mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, has hinted that she might not run for re-election in two years.  What she doesn’t mention is that she may be ridden out of town on a rail long before that if the current rate of murders in Chicago continues unabated.

What this is leading up to in my thought here is the question of whether there will be a turning point where the cities pull back from the madness or each just spirals down into a dysfunctional no-man’s land like Detroit or Baltimore.  I think it might not be a uniform decision.  As we see New York is starting to reverse course.  But places like Portland and Minneapolis will probably stay the course and ride this wave right into the ground.  A recent report stated that Minneapolis has seen a 60% increase in murder last year and just yesterday a woman’s headless body was found in a car on the street in one of the neighborhoods of Minneapolis indicating that we are well on the way to abject savagery.

My guess is that the crime epidemic will go a long way to consolidate the Republicans in the red states as fear of the blue city crime will favor no-nonsense candidates who take a pro-police stance and promise to protect the people living in the suburbs and rural areas from the roving gangs of urban thugs that have been unleashed by the cities.  One thing that will be interesting to see is whether states like Georgia and Missouri decide to step in and clean up Atlanta and St. Louis.  If things really spin out of control in those places I wonder if the state will take control of the police in those jurisdictions and override the local control.  It would seem that it would be warranted on a civil rights basis if the people in these cities were shown to be suffering from criminal mismanagement.

I have no illusions about the blue states doing anything similar about their cities.  They will convince themselves that this is all the result of white supremacists selling illegal guns to poor innocent gangbangers who just want to keep up with the fentanyl arms race that free enterprise necessitates.  They can get their constituents to believe anything they tell them so they’ll just let the degeneration of their cities proceed and the elites will move to secured suburbs and everyone else will pay a price.  But no price is too much to pay for equity, diversity and inclusion.

But what about the supposed purple states?  Are there any states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, maybe Virginia that could see what’s going on and learn something about what’s wrong with the Left’s vision of the world?  Could watching Philadelphia or Kenosha burned and looted and seeing their fellow citizens without police to protect them from merciless thugs in their own neighborhoods convince the “moderates” that backing the Left is a terrible mistake.  The answer is no, I don’t believe it will.  I think the sorting between the Left and Right has already occurred and those places are lost.  But I could be wrong about that.  I hope I am.

So that’s my take.  The Antifa-BLM riots and the elimination of the urban police departments may very well serve as the object lesson that the red states need to formulate a strategy to protect themselves from the Obama insurrection.  In fact, if it doesn’t then there really isn’t any hope for this country.  Seeing the fate of our greatest cities and then witnessing the daily spectacle of old men and women being brutally beaten and sometimes killed while the police stand down and let it happen is all the warning we’ll ever get.  We’ll soon enough know.

14JUL2021 – City Journal – Why Cops Are Quitting by Charles Fain Lehman

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Here’s an article where the writer interviewed policemen who had either just resigned or were preparing to.  He gets their read on why policing the blue cities is no longer worth the personal risk.

A newly retired Minneapolis officer said, “And the fundamental conclusion that I reached was that following Derek Chauvin, it no longer matters if what you were doing was legal, trained, the morally right thing to do, reasonable under the circumstances, the best effort of a reasonable human being in a marginal circumstance, which is basically what cops do. None of that matters. What matters is the outcome, and if you become the next spark in a viral firestorm.”

Basically the officers know the mayors and the police commissioners don’t have their backs, “There’s not a single leader that steps up for the regular cop, the regular street cop,” a now-resigned Chicago officer said. “They have the power, they have the ability to get up there and say why this was justified, and then they can sit there and explain it if they want, but they don’t know how to, or they don’t want to, or they don’t care.”

Reading the comments I found several readers who have my opinion.  Let the voters of Minneapolis and Portland and Chicago stay in their cities and defend themselves once the police are no longer there to protect them from the mob they’ve created.

 

 

 

 

Oakland Police Chief: Crime Out of Control

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When the Black Chief of Police tells you that defunding the police is what’s killing people at a frightening rate you might want to reconsider defunding.

Of course he doesn’t mention that when you delegitimize and demonize the police as white criminals they probably aren’t going to go out of their way to prevent crime.  They’ll just sweep up the bodies afterward and fill out the paperwork.

But don’t worry it’s California, they won’t listen to him.