Straight thinking on the calls to disband the police:
OK, I confess: back in my wild youth you would often hear me shouting, “Off the pigs!” I and my radical-left counter-culture friends hated all forms of authority, and the police were on the top of the list. Of course I have since then had a change of heart and mind. But we know that radical leftist groups still detest the police.
With the recent George Floyd episode, the calls are escalating for the police to be disbanded, or at least heavily defunded. The left is using this as their latest excuse to continue their war on the police. Anyone even remotely familiar with the left knows what a long-standing battle this is.
And it must be pointed out once again that yes, police sometimes go bad. No one I know has said there is no misuse or abuse of police powers. But in a fallen world, there are those who abuse their power in every single institution, be it the media, the courts, education, the churches, health care, and so on. Yet I am not hearing calls for all those institutions to be disbanded or shut down.
But more needs to be said. What are these calls really all about? The radical left has regularly made it clear just what they mean when they talk about scaling back the police or cutting back their funding. While some hardcore anarchists want no state and no police at all, most on the left do NOT envisage this. They do not intend that there be no powers in place.
The left is always about power and control. So they will have their own authorities in place, be they secret police, thought police, militias, or various forms of Statist forces who will enforce their hard left ideology. They love power, but they want it on their own terms.
They do not want neutral police forces respecting the rule of law that applies to everyone. They want ideological police forces that are enforcers of their coercive utopianism. The history of the left makes this clear. The Bolsheviks for example attacked existing police forces just prior to the revolution in Russia. And once in power they established their own secret police.
The Cheka was formed in 1917 and given powers to arrest suspects, conduct summary trials, lock up political prisoners, and execute ‘enemies of the State’. Although disbanded in 1922, it of course morphed into the OGPU, the NKVD, and the KGB.
Make no mistake: the radical leftists calling for an end to police or their defunding are not seeking a police-less State. They just want their police in power, to push their hard-left PC agendas, and keep all recalcitrants in check. That is their goal.
Indeed, we simply need to ask ourselves who is pushing all this. Al Perrotta has just penned an important piece looking at this in detail. He writes, in part:
So What is Behind the “Defund the Police” Movement?
So if defunding the police makes crime rise and police more likely to use excessive force, why be for it? It’s certainly not about valuing black lives. “Defund the Police” is history repeating itself. (Just like Antifa is a repeat of Hitler’s Brown Shirts.) The Marxist revolutionaries behind the Weather Underground similarly called for an end to police. Except for certain Black Lives Matter members in unscripted moments, we’re not hearing the police called “pigs,” but the idea is the same.
Former FBI deputy counterterror director Terry Turchie told Laura Ingraham Friday night that Antifa and the “Defund the Police” crowd are running the old radical playbook, the Weather Underground’s Prairie Fire. Prairie Fire listed six main points to bring down the U.S. government. One point was to push “police racism.” Said Turchie, “It is the issue that communist societies use to literally tear apart Americans and to be divisive.”
Counter-terrorism expert John Guandolo echoed this on The Kyle Olson Show.He exposed the “coordinated effort” behind the riots and the “Marxist-communist” origins of Black Lives Matter, Inc. But don’t believe them. Project Veritas has just released another Antifa undercover video. Straight from a soldier’s mouth: “We believe in the complete abolition of the system itself, including police.” https://stream.org/defund-the-police-or-destablize-america/
Less police, more crime
The simple truth is this: even if the regular police were allowed to stay, the cutbacks in funding and police powers would mean only one thing: crime would increase as the police decrease. This is empirically verifiable, as well as the stuff of common sense. Consider just one study on this: a 70-page Princeton University study from 2018 offered this clear conclusion: “More Cops, Less Crime.” http://www.princeton.edu/~smello/papers/cops.pdf
And we can look to other places to see how flawed this policy is. Mexico is in all sorts of strife after it disbanded police in many areas and replaced them with local self-defence militias. Crime and corruption certainly did not end. As John Daniel Davidson reports:
Despite the insistence of the protesters, getting rid of law enforcement won’t usher in a more just or equitable order. But it will invite new arrangements for security, as it did in Mexico. These arrangements, however well-intentioned, will fall prey to the same corruption and unaccountability as the forces they replace, especially if the underlying causes of societal decay are left to fester. https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/09/if-you-want-to-know-what-disbanding-the-police-looks-like-look-at-mexico/
Anyone with brains not turned to mush by leftist propaganda knows that this will not end well. Consider a meme currently making the rounds on the social media. A picture of a defunded police dispatch call centre is shown, with a distraught caller ringing the emergency number 911 to report a home invasion. The police at the other end of the line reply, “Stay calm, we are sending our thoughts and prayers.”
Or as the satire site Babylon Bee puts it:
Congressional Democrats have announced a proposal to abolish the police and replace them all with traveling bands of hippies singing John Lennon’s classic song “Imagine.” The police forces will arrive at the scene of a crime, pull out their djembes and guitars, and start singing beautiful lines like, “Imagine there’s no heaven / It’s easy if you try.”
Criminals are expected to begin weeping as soon as they see the peace, love, and tolerance displayed by the hippies. “Our early research has been very promising,” said Rayne Windflower, head of hippy research in the city of Minneapolis. “The science seems to indicate that as soon as you approach someone who is breaking the law and start singing ‘Imagine all the people living for today’ they drop their deadly weapon, return all the goods they have stolen, and join us in a dancing circle to smoke some weed.” https://babylonbee.com/news/democrats-propose-replacing-all-police-with-traveling-bands-of-hippies-singing-imagine
But in the meantime, all the celebs and politicians and elites calling for the end to, or reduction of, the police all happen to have their own small private security armies in place. Yes, they have armed guards, armed security, armed forces keeping them safe and secure inside their walled compounds. But they want you – the ordinary citizen – to have no such protections and no such safety.
As one American sheriff has put it:
Defunding police is yet another proposed solution based on a false narrative that will only make life worse for blacks in America, contends the former, four-time elected sheriff of multi-racial Milwaukee County. “The biggest losers in all this will be poor black people in crime-ridden ghettos. The police are the only thing standing between them and violent criminal predators,” said David Clarke in an interview Monday with WND.
“You’d have to loathe black people to do that to them.” Clarke, 63, said the proposal advocated by the Black Lives Matter movement, which has quickly gained traction among Democratic leaders in cities such as Los Angeles, New York and Minneapolis, “isn’t a serious public policy proposal, it’s buffoonery.” https://www.wnd.com/2020/06/sheriff-david-clarke-loathe-black-people-defund-police/
Or as Herman Cain has written:
In an op-ed for the Washington Post last week, writer Alyssa Rosenberg proposed that all TV cop shows be canceled. This is how far we’ve gone culturally toward the idea that police officers – by their very nature – are the enemy of civilized society.
Of course, police officers are essential to the preservation of civilized society. It’s astonishing that the same people who have been saying for years that the public doesn’t need guns, because the police will protect them from crime, now wants the police done away with. Anyone who doesn’t understand this should check out the 2013 film The Purge, which depicts a 24-hour period in which all crime – including murder – is legal. This is essentially what the disband-the-police people are asking for. https://hermancain.com/stop-affirming-idea-police-officers-enemy/
No thinking person, and certainly no biblical Christian, can go along with any of this madness. Should there be regular reviews of the police and their policies and practices, reforms where needed, and changes prudently brought about? Of course. All institutions need to be routinely assessed and monitored, in the hopes of continuous improvement.
But disbanding the police, or radically defunding the police, is a recipe for disaster. Yes, I know, that is just what the left wants. But most of us do not.
6 Replies to “The Radical Left and the War on Police”
Robert Peel founded the British police force. with his nine Peelian principles. Principal No 7 says, “Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence
Sadly the police have become remote from the general public and become the property of the the Marxists, or more strictly speaking the Bolshevik Trotskyites. I think Marxist is too broad a statement. Stalin (mass murderer though he proved to be ) was a Marxist but he believed in Russia and the the sovereign nation state. The Trotskyites tried to destroy Russia in the cause of creating a global, borderless world. This is why Stalin turned on them. The modern police are no longer interested in policing behaviour. Their task is now policing thought.
Thanks Bill, I’m hoping all this will blow over as defunding or replacing the police is an off-the-head solution that if the American Governors and Mayors think through is not a very good idea as you have portrayed.
I agree with you in your summary – all institutions need to be routinely assessed and monitored in the hopes of continuous improvement. I’m still pondering things and now am of the view that the long coronavirus shutdowns have contributed to the cauldron. The police had to do the draconian job of enforcing lockdown measures which was something new and I don’t think many of them enjoyed it. People have been locked up like animals and not liking those keeping them locked up so as soon as one terrible incident happens all hell breaks out with people bashing others and destroying neighbourhoods. They don’t care what they do because no one has cared about them, especially those in their way like business owners trying to protect their properties. Thus hopefully, time will heal all this but as you have portrayed, I’m not sure. We’ve had droughts, bushfires, coronavirus and now angry protests all in six months, I wonder what is going to happen next.
As with many professions unions are a big reason bad people, including cops, stay employed. Too many unions are full of Marxists. At one time unions were needed, employers were abusing and mistreating the employees because they could, now they have gotten to greedy and unwilling to hold their people accountable. The power pendulum has swung from the employer to the union. (Incidentally this is why you can’t get rid of bad teachers.) Yes reform IS necessary but as the saying goes you don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Even if 10 percent are bad, it is probably 1-3, that still means 90 percent are good. Should 9 of every 10 cops lose their job or the actions of the other 1???
Personally I think we should go back to having beat cops. Be a great way to increase police community relations. Clarke is right black communities will suffer the most without cops. Or under leftist secret police. Remember the KKK was founded by the left of the South.
The philosophies and ideologies of Trotskyites reduce our existence to impersonal energy, mathematics and mechanics. We are after all nothing special: we are merely bio/socio/economical systems of chemicals, which have evolved over an unimaginable time scale. All of life operates within a sealed box within which only the laws of chance and mathematical probability operate. Everything simply came by accident out of nothing. Categories disappear; boundaries and definitions that we have lived with suddenly seem to be totally artificial, probably created by our patriarchal ancestors to control society (taboos) and give some shape and form to existence. Hence the disappearance of distinctions between human and non – human, living and dead, male and female, married and unmarried, guilty and the innocent, victim and perpetrator, good and evil etc. Everything is a matter of individual and shifting perception. All views and preferences are of equal value and what may be true for me might not be true for you; what might be true for me in the morning may well not be in the afternoon. And if there is no ultimate, rational basis for belief in an absolute truth or beauty that exists over and above our understanding then the logical conclusion is that nothing has any value or meaning. Everything is essentially absurd.
Without any fixed point of reference, like a ship without compass or captain, society drifts in a sea of relativity and changes its attitudes and values according to the political climate, or zeitgeist. The only moral compass is a constantly changing political correctness- the average consensus at any particular moment. all guided by highly motivated, organised, vociferous and powerful, gay, black, feminist and Islamic minority groups.
What might be shocking and completely unacceptable behaviour can almost overnight become respectable and what was previously considered to be decent and responsible behaviour can become criminalised
Because our laws are changing and multiplying so rapidly there is increasing doubt as to what is legal and what is not. At a very profound level, this causes anxiety and the individual, fearful of being publicly humiliated, losing his or her livelihood, of being arrested, fined or even imprisoned, through breaking laws that are both unknown and unintelligible, is not prepared to go anywhere near the edge, The individual, thus paralysed, is easily controlled through fear and uncertainty
In the end justice will mean simply someone refereeing a meaningless game of existence, on the deck of the luxury liner. The passengers and crew do not mind where the ship is going, just so long as everything is running smoothly and everyone has the feel- good factor. The only crime is stopping the game or a machine to be kept running smoothly on the tracks. This is Pax Romana.
But perhaps the best way to control society is to dehumanise it entirely through eliminating all feelings of anxiety, phobia, antipathy or hatred. Drugs, brain surgery, genetic modifications, coupled with intensive indoctrination and blessing from an apostate Church, will all produce a perfect piece of evolutionary engineering.
Without any fixed, absolute point of reference, human nature has a way of accommodating and becoming comfortable over a period of time with a state of hell. It can gradually sleep walk into becoming hardened, desensitised to cruelty, barbarism and evil, until what was considered abnormal or deviant becomes the acceptable norm, as happened in Nazi Germany, Russia, China, Cambodia and now- even Britain. No doubt Germans today still cannot believe that they as a nation descended to such barbarism, just over eighty years ago.
Quoting Paul Wilson above, “Personally I think we should go back to having beat cops. Be a great way to increase police community relations.”
Why were crime rates so low in Newtown in inner-city Sydney in the 1950s & 1960s?
The station was headed by Inspector Frank “Bumper’ Farrell, a Newtown Rugby League legend.
When a teenager misbehaved, he would give them a “kick up the backside” (maybe not literally), return him to his parents, & he was very unlikely to reoffend. The beat policing worked!
These tactics worked, but today’s woke Left, & Lamestream Meeja Idjuts, would label it “abuse”, as it infringes their “rights”, & offends their thin-skinned sensibilities!
True Stephen parents used to spank misbehaving kids, sometimes even teachers did, but the the whole psychiatry and self esteem crowd made that impossible. they claim all kinds of negative effects will happen so spanking had to stop. well the greatest generation got a whooping when they needed it and they turned out just fine. were there outliers?? yes but you can’t build a case on outliers. nowadays it seems if ONE person abuses a right or privilege NO-ONE can have that right or privilege.
Parents biggest mistake was listening to EXPERTS tell them how to raise children (the baby boomers) who the raised children (snowflake millennials) according to more experts and now we have a mess. the only EXPERT we should listen to is the one who had been listening to prior to the 1950’s – GOD! He was good enough from before the founding till WWII. Then we decided we needed help. Mans wisdom will ALWAYS fail him!
Robert Peel founded the British police force. with his nine Peelian principles. Principal No 7 says, “Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence
https://www.durham.police.uk/About-Us/Documents/Peels_Principles_Of_Law_Enforcement.pdf
Sadly the police have become remote from the general public and become the property of the the Marxists, or more strictly speaking the Bolshevik Trotskyites. I think Marxist is too broad a statement. Stalin (mass murderer though he proved to be ) was a Marxist but he believed in Russia and the the sovereign nation state. The Trotskyites tried to destroy Russia in the cause of creating a global, borderless world. This is why Stalin turned on them. The modern police are no longer interested in policing behaviour. Their task is now policing thought.
The police bending the knee to the Trotskyites began perhaps at London gay pride in 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFLDUkbvamM
They also take off their uniform and ” mingle with the crowd” as in 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw9JcfTbHTY
Or even earlier in at Nottinghill Carnival in 2013 where their behaviour smashes the barriers of self restraint and decency. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT4IFP7xv_Y
Is this really what Robert Peel meant by “the police are the public and the public are the police”?
This is the message of all those who wish to remove a police force whose task used to be to maintain spiritual, moral and national boundaries. This is their message to all of us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sWaTGLmppg&list=LL_rVhLK3YL6P6lrzvrLAZnA&index=202
David Skinner UK
Thanks Bill, I’m hoping all this will blow over as defunding or replacing the police is an off-the-head solution that if the American Governors and Mayors think through is not a very good idea as you have portrayed.
I agree with you in your summary – all institutions need to be routinely assessed and monitored in the hopes of continuous improvement. I’m still pondering things and now am of the view that the long coronavirus shutdowns have contributed to the cauldron. The police had to do the draconian job of enforcing lockdown measures which was something new and I don’t think many of them enjoyed it. People have been locked up like animals and not liking those keeping them locked up so as soon as one terrible incident happens all hell breaks out with people bashing others and destroying neighbourhoods. They don’t care what they do because no one has cared about them, especially those in their way like business owners trying to protect their properties. Thus hopefully, time will heal all this but as you have portrayed, I’m not sure. We’ve had droughts, bushfires, coronavirus and now angry protests all in six months, I wonder what is going to happen next.
As with many professions unions are a big reason bad people, including cops, stay employed. Too many unions are full of Marxists. At one time unions were needed, employers were abusing and mistreating the employees because they could, now they have gotten to greedy and unwilling to hold their people accountable. The power pendulum has swung from the employer to the union. (Incidentally this is why you can’t get rid of bad teachers.) Yes reform IS necessary but as the saying goes you don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Even if 10 percent are bad, it is probably 1-3, that still means 90 percent are good. Should 9 of every 10 cops lose their job or the actions of the other 1???
Personally I think we should go back to having beat cops. Be a great way to increase police community relations. Clarke is right black communities will suffer the most without cops. Or under leftist secret police. Remember the KKK was founded by the left of the South.
The philosophies and ideologies of Trotskyites reduce our existence to impersonal energy, mathematics and mechanics. We are after all nothing special: we are merely bio/socio/economical systems of chemicals, which have evolved over an unimaginable time scale. All of life operates within a sealed box within which only the laws of chance and mathematical probability operate. Everything simply came by accident out of nothing. Categories disappear; boundaries and definitions that we have lived with suddenly seem to be totally artificial, probably created by our patriarchal ancestors to control society (taboos) and give some shape and form to existence. Hence the disappearance of distinctions between human and non – human, living and dead, male and female, married and unmarried, guilty and the innocent, victim and perpetrator, good and evil etc. Everything is a matter of individual and shifting perception. All views and preferences are of equal value and what may be true for me might not be true for you; what might be true for me in the morning may well not be in the afternoon. And if there is no ultimate, rational basis for belief in an absolute truth or beauty that exists over and above our understanding then the logical conclusion is that nothing has any value or meaning. Everything is essentially absurd.
Without any fixed point of reference, like a ship without compass or captain, society drifts in a sea of relativity and changes its attitudes and values according to the political climate, or zeitgeist. The only moral compass is a constantly changing political correctness- the average consensus at any particular moment. all guided by highly motivated, organised, vociferous and powerful, gay, black, feminist and Islamic minority groups.
What might be shocking and completely unacceptable behaviour can almost overnight become respectable and what was previously considered to be decent and responsible behaviour can become criminalised
Because our laws are changing and multiplying so rapidly there is increasing doubt as to what is legal and what is not. At a very profound level, this causes anxiety and the individual, fearful of being publicly humiliated, losing his or her livelihood, of being arrested, fined or even imprisoned, through breaking laws that are both unknown and unintelligible, is not prepared to go anywhere near the edge, The individual, thus paralysed, is easily controlled through fear and uncertainty
In the end justice will mean simply someone refereeing a meaningless game of existence, on the deck of the luxury liner. The passengers and crew do not mind where the ship is going, just so long as everything is running smoothly and everyone has the feel- good factor. The only crime is stopping the game or a machine to be kept running smoothly on the tracks. This is Pax Romana.
But perhaps the best way to control society is to dehumanise it entirely through eliminating all feelings of anxiety, phobia, antipathy or hatred. Drugs, brain surgery, genetic modifications, coupled with intensive indoctrination and blessing from an apostate Church, will all produce a perfect piece of evolutionary engineering.
Without any fixed, absolute point of reference, human nature has a way of accommodating and becoming comfortable over a period of time with a state of hell. It can gradually sleep walk into becoming hardened, desensitised to cruelty, barbarism and evil, until what was considered abnormal or deviant becomes the acceptable norm, as happened in Nazi Germany, Russia, China, Cambodia and now- even Britain. No doubt Germans today still cannot believe that they as a nation descended to such barbarism, just over eighty years ago.
http://thefederalist.com/2015/06/08/how-to-escape-the-age-of-mass-delusion/
David Skinner UK
Quoting Paul Wilson above, “Personally I think we should go back to having beat cops. Be a great way to increase police community relations.”
Why were crime rates so low in Newtown in inner-city Sydney in the 1950s & 1960s?
The station was headed by Inspector Frank “Bumper’ Farrell, a Newtown Rugby League legend.
When a teenager misbehaved, he would give them a “kick up the backside” (maybe not literally), return him to his parents, & he was very unlikely to reoffend. The beat policing worked!
These tactics worked, but today’s woke Left, & Lamestream Meeja Idjuts, would label it “abuse”, as it infringes their “rights”, & offends their thin-skinned sensibilities!
True Stephen parents used to spank misbehaving kids, sometimes even teachers did, but the the whole psychiatry and self esteem crowd made that impossible. they claim all kinds of negative effects will happen so spanking had to stop. well the greatest generation got a whooping when they needed it and they turned out just fine. were there outliers?? yes but you can’t build a case on outliers. nowadays it seems if ONE person abuses a right or privilege NO-ONE can have that right or privilege.
Parents biggest mistake was listening to EXPERTS tell them how to raise children (the baby boomers) who the raised children (snowflake millennials) according to more experts and now we have a mess. the only EXPERT we should listen to is the one who had been listening to prior to the 1950’s – GOD! He was good enough from before the founding till WWII. Then we decided we needed help. Mans wisdom will ALWAYS fail him!