Will Defund The Police Lead To Federal And National Guard Patrols In Big Cities? By Chuck DeVore for The Federalist
GNN Note – We have said from the moment we heard the phrase “defund the police” the whole point is to institute a national police force. If there are no local police, and especially a local Sheriff, a national police force would give the federal government unprecedented power and control. Local communities will cease to exist. /END
The Defund the Police movement will inevitably collide with the reality of rising crime in elections through 2022. Results at the local level will be uneven.
Violent crime is mounting in America. Many reasons—excuses, mostly—have been proffered for this: COVID-19 lockdowns, unemployment, the Defund the Police movement and its budgetary fruits, largely tolerated urban looting and rioting, police reluctance to enforce the law in high-crime areas for fear of being accused of civil rights violations, and soft-on-crime leftist prosecutors.
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The ramifications of this rise in crime are being felt largely by the urban poor and may yet generate political fallout for the largely leftist elite who run most of America’s major cities today. Let’s examine the conditions giving rise to that possibility.
First, some background on crime in America. The FBI reports crime in two major buckets: violent crime and property crime. Violent crimes involve force or threat of force, including murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Property crimes are defined as burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson—with no force or threat of force against the victims.
The violent crime rate peaked in 1992 at 758 crimes per 100,000 people. It moved down fairly consistently until 2014, when the violent crime rate bottomed out at 362, less than half of the level of violent crime 22 years earlier. Violent crime crept back up to 387 in 2016, and then moved down for the first three years of the Trump presidency to 367 in 2019. Final 2020 numbers have not been released.
The most recent violent crime victimization surveys indicate that for every 1,000 people aged 12 and older, there were 21.0 reported violent crimes in 2019. By race and ethnicity, this broke down to a rate of 21.0 for non-Hispanic whites, 18.7 for non-Hispanic blacks, 21.3 for Hispanics, and 7.5 for Asian, and 66.3 for other (Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders, American Indians and Alaska Natives, and persons of two or more races).
Property crimes are sometimes referred to as quality-of-life crimes. In 1992, the national property crime rate was 4,904 offenses per 100,000 people. By 2019, the property crime rate had declined to 2,110.
