By Steve Pomper
What often happens when you try to fix something that ain’t broken? You break it. That’s happening in Washington and other states like Illinois. Leftist mythmakers are using their fantasy vision of police work to conjure an “experiment” in “police reforms.”
But, hang on… there may be some good news.
Thinking people know police officers are not “hunting and shooting minorities in the streets.” Neither statistics, nor commonsense, support this nonsense. They also know, defunding the police doesn’t protect but endangers communities.
However, with complicit politicians, legacy media, academia, Hollywood, professional sports, and billionaire Bond-villains, leftist legislators have passed anti-police reform “experiments” (laws) through several state legislatures.
Now, beakers are cracking, petri dishes are leaking, and crime-inducing viruses are escaping corrupt laboratories. These nutty professors are learning they must abort the experiment to halt the destructive crime pandemic they’ve released on communities.
Reports abound about the failure of these anti-police laws. Evidence of the leftist experiment’s colossal failure is they’re reluctantly shifting toward “fixing” these anti-police laws. Scrapping the laws should happen, and may eventually, but cops will take what they can get.
This drift toward sanity may be underway to some degree. But, sadly, in places like New York City, District Attorney Alvin Bragg is apparently persisting with Bill de Blasio’s decline and fall the Empire State’s largest city.
But, even in that nearly lost cause city, Mayor Adams wants to restore plain-clothed police units. Portland, OR is similarly trying to re-fund a defunded unit dedicated to addressing criminals using guns (if they can find officers to staff it). Recently, Portland initiated a program to rehire retired officers. Reportedly, only two showed any interest. Only two? I was shocked they got that many.
Minneapolis voters elected not to transform its police department into a social justice agency. And Seattle voters actually elected a Republican city attorney. So, the effort to change horrendous anti-police legislation in states like Washington may have a fighting chance.
Q13 FOX News in Seattle recently reported “Changes to police reform bills that passed last year and caused confusion at many [every] police agencies will be ‘tweaked,’ say, lawmakers. But, depending on which political party you talk to, the scale of the fix will be either big or small.”
A Big fix will require smaller changes later. Small fixes will require bigger changes later. With the current party in charge in Washington State, my bet is they’ll make smaller, less effective changes.
These laws make a cop’s job even more dangerous. It has increased confusion; and confusion causes hesitation; and hesitation kills—cops. ABC News reported, “Confusion besets new police reform laws in Washington state.”
Kent, WA. Police Chief Rafael Padilla said, “When you take the legislation and apply it, that’s when you really learn how effective it’s going to be. The challenge is — I’m going to be very frank — the laws were written very poorly, and the combination of them all at the same time has led to there being conflicts in clarity and in what was intended versus what was written.”
After the anti-police laws went into force, I wrote about a representative incident in a small town north of Seattle. Let’s do the long-story-short thing.
“I wrote about a police chief in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, who recently posted an account on Facebook, relating how Washington State’s new ‘police reform’ laws are working for cops on the streets.”
People reported to 911 that their neighbors were outside arguing with an ‘out of control’ drunk or high roommate. Two police responses, eight officers, even some social workers, and hours later, the new laws required police to leave the “roommates and neighbors to deal with the fallout.”
In July 2021, a similar situation occurred in SeaTac, WA. According to Jason Rantz, 770 KTTH radio host, the new laws may “have stopped King County Sheriff’s deputies from involuntarily committing a SeaTac male transient experiencing a mental health crisis.
“Hours later, that same man allegedly burned down an apartment complex, displacing 80 residents and seriously injuring four, including an infant.”
Mike Solan, president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, said he is “concerned about Seattle’s ‘activist class’ making the cops ineffective and ‘putting pubic safety at risk.” That’s what the new anti-police laws are doing, and what the legislature needs to fix.
It’s good the anti-police left is now forced to mitigate their damage. But there’s much more work to do. For example, recently, John Solomon’s Just the News (JTN) reported on the DOJ now granting money to far-leftist billionaire George Soros’ “groups backing anti-cop reforms linked to [the] crime explosion.”
The NPA covered Soros’ anti-police efforts in its recent book The Obama Gang. The DOJ using taxpayer dollars to fund these anti-police groups literally adds insult to injury.
JTN reports, Soros “urges ‘seismic shift in power away from police, police unions, and the justice system towards a transformative investment in community-led safety and health solutions.’” Soros doesn’t need taxpayer help to ruin American society.
Some sunshine may be breaking on the horizon, but cops continue to be hobbled by horrendous political policies disguised as “police reform.” For example, the Seattle community recently lost over 100 police officers (and civilian employees) when former mayor Jenny “Summer of Love” Durkan fired them for not letting someone stick a needle in their arms. Strange, how those lefties love people sticking needles in arms, right?
Ironically, Rantz also recently reported that the SPD had about 120 “vaccinated” officers “contracting COVID in just the first 21 days of January.” How many deployable officers did that leave?
Again, cops will take any good news they can get. And watching the reality of a predictable increase in crime come crashing down on those anti-cop legislators will have to do—for now.