Commentary: Refund Police: Major Cities Backtrack on Defund Police After Violent Crime Skyrockets

The “defund the police” hysteria ignited by Black Lives Matter activists following the death of George Floyd one year ago has resulted in catastrophic crime waves in Democrat-run cities.

Ironically, the “social justice” movement that was supposed to help black communities has made them — and everyone else — less safe.

During the past 12 months, liberal cities that slashed police budgets in response to left-wing protests and riots suffered unprecedented spikes in violent crime — so much so that many are now calling to “refund the police.”

“A year after the death of George Floyd, elected officials of major cities are walking back commitments to cut police funding amid spiking crime rates,” The Daily Wire’s Tim Pearce wrote Tuesday.

“Elected leaders in places such a Minneapolis, New York City, and Los Angeles are now pushing to increase funding to police departments after months of budget cuts and low morale have gutted 🚓Law Enforcement ranks.”

Notably, this reversal includes Minneapolis, where Floyd died in police custody on May 25, 2020. A day later, the city also was the site of the first major riot in protest of his death.

This month, Democratic Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey decried the rampant lawlessness infesting his city and said the skyrocketing crime rates suggest that defunding the police was a bad idea.

“The violence needs to stop. It’s unacceptable,”  Frey said at a May 7 news conference. “People deserve to feel safe in their neighborhood. They deserve to be able to send their kids out to the sidewalk to play and to recreate without bullets flying by. That’s unacceptable. We should be holding these perpetrators accountable.”

The left-wing simpletons who shrieked incessantly about “defunding the police” obviously never thought about the fallout of their reckless rhetoric and the anti-cop policies they fueled.

Dale Hume, a Minneapolis pastor, blamed police pullbacks for the terrifying crime spikes in his city over the past year.

“To people who think that the easy solution to this is defund the police, when you live here and something like this happens, you can obviously see that is not the solution,” Hume said, according to WCCO-TV.

The mayor agreed.

“When you make big, overarching statements that we’re going to defund or abolish and dismantle the police department and get rid of all the officers, there’s an impact to that,” Frey said.

The crime epidemic has gotten so out of control that even the left-wing New York Times is reporting on the abject failure of the “defund the police” movement to curb crime or help minorities.

In 2020, violent crime in Los Angeles rocketed 36 percent as officials slashed the local police budget by $150 million, or 8 percent. That was quickly followed by a record surge in murders, which soared to a 10-year high, The Times reported.

Last week, city leaders in Los Angeles agreed to increase police budgets and hire 250 more officers, returning the police department to roughly the same size it was before the Black Lives Matter protests.

In April, Democratic New York Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged to spend $105 million to build a new police precinct in the liberal borough of Queens, according to Politico.

This was a reversal of his anti-police stance from the previous year, when he agreed to slash $1.5 billion from the NYPD’s budget in response to relentless pressure from Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

Of course, the catalyst for this sudden change of heart was the chilling crime waves that have besieged New York over the past year.

Ironically, even some pro-BLM black Democrats applauded de Blasio’s move to refund the police.

“I am absolutely ecstatic,” Democratic state Rep. Greg Meeks, who has repeatedly slammed the police, said, according to Politico.

Selvena Brooks-Powers, a New York City Council member, agreed that police should be refunded to keep her constituents safe. “There has been a lot of frustration with the loss of funding,” she said.

During the past 12 months, murders, assaults and shootings have climbed to unprecedented highs in New York, which once billed itself as the “safest big city in America” thanks to the crime-fighting efforts of former Republican Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg.

That started to change after de Blasio took office in 2014, and things have careened downhill ever since he began bending the knee to left-wing mobs.

While the good news is that de Blasio’s term ends in December, he’ll likely be replaced by another clueless Democrat who will continue to run New York City into the ground.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.