No More Police?

GETTING RID OF POLICE?- DEFUND OR ABOLISH THEM? BUT WAIT, WE DONE THIS BEFORE

By Brian Salkowski

It's called "defunding the police" Democrats in administration have been saying. Then opponents scratch their head because a call to "abolish the police" has been the real message we been seeing. Democrats have defensively postured that it’s really not a call to end police funding, but merely one to transfer a good chunk of our street protection funds over to noble social programs that will presumably eradicate crime and lift the destitute out of poverty.

But wait a minute. Haven’t we tried this all before? It was called the War on Poverty.

Liberals in the 1960s and ’70s attacked law enforcement by pulling trillions away from the police and into social agencies. The $22 trillion “invested“ in social programs would not only lift the poor out of poverty, they predicted, but it would eliminate the very need for police. Also they believed the shootings of unarmed black men would be resolved.

How did that work out?

The era between 1969 and1980 was among the most crime-ridden of any in U.S. history. Meanwhile, the economy suffered due to massive inflation and limited opportunity.

Program after expensive program was tried, and failed. The poverty rate at the end of the experiment was almost as high as it was when the well-meaning feel-good programs were initiated. Yet crime skyrocketed, leading to a flight of the taxpaying middle class to the safer suburbs. And less police made ironically more shootings of both white and black unarmed men. Why would we want to repeat that fiasco?

Billions invested in pre-k programs were supposed to give low-income, especially minority, children an opportunity to close the education gap between whites and blacks. Yet, a study by research psychologist David Elkind showed that by the third grade, any potential gains garnered from the program washed out.

The $1.2 billion invested in the federal 21st Century Community Learning (After School) Program in the 1990s “didn’t affect student outcomes,” according to the Brookings Institute.

A McKinsey Institute study concedes that despite $300 billion spent annually by the feds on job training, these programs “don’t work.“

It added, “Most training and workforce programs don’t achieve what they set out to. The World Bank estimates that only 30 percent of youth employment programs are successful — and many of those have limited positive effect.”

Data shows that it’s a job and a strong economy – the type we experienced in the last few years prior to the pandemic – that does more to lift poor minorities out of poverty than does any government program. Also the nuclear family plays a huge role. During the late 1960's and 1970's, single motherhood in poor and minority areas was a low 7%. The welfare act was passed in the late 60's as well and now the single motherhood rate for poor people and African-Americans/other minorities in poor areas are a soaring 74%. The reason? Government dependence. The welfare system pushed by Democratic policy kept the fathers out of the home and mothers dependent on check after check after child after child is born.

More recently, New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, wasted somewhere around a billion dollars (most of it pulled already from police) on contracted mental health programs run by his wife, with analysts still trying to figure out what the nonprofit program was doing, let alone what it achieved. Meanwhile, his $700 million Renewal school program was shuttered due to unsuccessful outcomes.

Over the past 30 years, states have increased spending on education by 375 percent in an effort to raise test scores and mitigate disparate racial outcomes. Yet, test scores remained relatively flat. From all the research & reading, the bottom line to help fix the poor and reform law enforcement is- good economy and the structured family. It's what analyst's, professor's and scientist's been pushing and saying for years. The push always thwarted by democratic resistance. So in the end, we know how to do this with the data and "receipts" backing it. We just need the right leaders to carry it out.

Research sources I used:

Rutgers

Brookings

Wikipedia

McKinsey

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