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Commentary By Heather Mac Donald

Minneapolis Voters Saw Life without Police — and Soundly Rejected a Defund Ballot Initiative

Public Safety Policing, Crime Control

Reality has caught up with the Defund the Police movement. Minneapolis voters, suffering through a bloody crime wave, resoundingly rejected a ballot initiative Tuesday that would have dismantled the city’s police department and replaced it with social workers. The vote has significance for public safety nationwide.

Defund advocacy began in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd during an arrest in May 2020. Mayor Jacob Frey immediately blamed police racism for Floyd’s demise: “Being black in America should not be a death sentence,” he announced. Presidential candidate Joe Biden picked up the refrain, denouncing American law enforcement as systemically biased. The Minneapolis City Council called for replacing the city’s police department with a “new transformative model for cultivating safety,” even as rioters burned and looted the city’s public buildings and businesses.

That council call resulted in Tuesday’s failed Charter Amendment 4. A new Department of Public Safety, tasked with taking a “comprehensive public health approach” to crime, would have superseded the Minneapolis Police Department. Police officers would be involved in crime-fighting only “if necessary.” Progressive money poured into the Yes campaign, including $500,000 from the George Soros-affiliated Open Society Policy Center.

Minneapolis voters didn’t need to imagine the results of Amendment 4’s utopian scheme; they have been living through a preview of police abolition. Demoralized and undefended, the city’s rank and file have been exiting the department in droves since rioters burned the Third Precinct to the ground on May 28, 2020.

Officers are still routinely punched, kicked and hit with projectiles, especially when trying to break up the anarchic crowds that engulf downtown clubs on weekend nights. Traffic and pedestrian stops dropped at least 75 percent following the George Floyd riots, in response to the charge that police were racist for investigating suspicious activity in high-crime neighborhoods.

The results of this de facto experiment in depolicing spoke for themselves. Through September 2021, the number of shots fired in Minneapolis was up 380 percent compared with the same period in 2019. The past 20 months account for almost a quarter of the city’s 70,000 reported gunshot incidents since 2008. Homicides are near record levels.

Children have been particularly victimized by the epidemic of drive-by shootings. Over one three-week period this year, a 10-year-old boy was shot in the head riding in his parents’ car, a 9-year-old girl was shot in the head while she was jumping on a trampoline at a friend’s house, and a 6-year-old girl was caught in a shootout between rival gangs while in her mother’s car. Both girls died; the boy may be brain dead for life.

On Aug. 25, a recent high-school grad and aspiring nurse was shot in the neck while leaving work at midnight. She may never speak again.

There have been no Black Lives Matter protests over these shootings of juveniles. Al Sharpton did not visit the hospital treating the 10-year-old boy and 9-year-old girl when he traveled to Minneapolis to commemorate George Floyd on the one-year anniversary of Floyd’s death.

And progressive politicians stood firm in their support of Amendment 4, even as the body count soared. Rep. Ilhan Omar, who represents Minneapolis, and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison defended the Defund amendment up to the bitter end, with the Democratic congresswoman denying that it was at all “radical.”

But the premise of Defund ideology was as wrong as its results were lethal. Police officers are not a threat to black lives; criminals are. A black Minneapolis resident is 480 times as likely to be shot by a criminal as by a cop, according to Police Chief Medaria Arradondo. More than four-fifths of Minneapolis homicide victims are black, though blacks aren’t even one-fifth of the city’s population. They are not being killed by the police; they are being killed by other black civilians.

That reality may be finally sinking in to voters, signaling acute danger to the progressive agenda. Homicides nationally rose 30 percent in 2020, the largest annual increase in US history.

There are still powerful pockets of anti-law-enforcement ideology, of course. New York City may have elected Eric Adams mayor in the hope he would reinvigorate proactive policing, but the borough of Manhattan elected a district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who pledged to end prosecutions for low-level misdemeanors, saying they have a disparate impact on minorities.

If the past 18 months have taught anything, however, it is that crime, not policing, has a disparate impact on minorities. And revalorizing the police is essential not just to saving black lives: Public safety is the prerequisite to saving America’s lockdown-blighted cities.

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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of the bestselling War on Cops and The Diversity Delusion. Follow her on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post